The University of Arizona Press

April 29, 2024

Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras—pre-human, Indigenous, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015)—Stephen J. Pyne’s newest work Five Suns offers a comprehensive fire history of Mexico. Today, the author answers five questions about this work.

What do the five suns of the title stand for?
Every 52 years the Aztecs celebrated the ceremony of the New Fire to ensure that a new sun would arrive to replace the extinction of the old. All fires everywhere would be extinguished, and at midnight a new fire would be kindled on a sacrificial victim atop the Cerro de Estrella, then distributed throughout the countryside. In Aztec history, five New Fires had birthed five new suns. I use the ceremony to organize the five eras of Mexican fire history, each of which had a characteristic fire that diffused throughout the land.

Almost everywhere in Mexico fire is possible, and most everywhere inevitable. What makes Mexico so combustible?
Mexico has plenty to burn—the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons guarantees that stuff can grow and then be readied to combust. It has ample ignition—lightning is abundant, and humans use fire deliberately and accidentally with hardly a pause. All this makes fire a constant in most of the country, though the regimes of burning change with land use, the ebb and flow of climate, the coming and going of species and peoples, and the reorganizations of the countryside. Over the last century, Mexico has used its vast reservoirs of oil to convert a significant fraction of that burning into the combustion of fossil fuels, with both national and global consequences.

Why do you write that Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world?
Since colonial times, officials distrusted and condemned burning, even though most Mexican agriculture, which was the basis for the bulk of Mexican societies, required fire at some point, and though the authorities were mostly incapable of ending the fires they loathed and criminalized. In the 1980s, links developed to the United States fire community that helped to revolutionize Mexico’s capacity to manage fire, to study it scientifically, and to upgrade policies to embrace a more ecological and holistic conception of fire’s management. By 2020 Mexico’s capabilities ranked it among the ten most robust nations on the planet for engaging with fire.

What makes Mexico’s approach to fire management so unique?
Mexico’s history is not unique. Its colonial experience was pretty much typical throughout the European imperium. By the 1970s, however, led by the U.S. and Australia, a vision of fire exclusion—which was a bad idea and never successfully implemented for long—was replaced by a conception of integrated fire management, which sought to move fire protection beyond emergency responses and to promote fire’s active management, not least through the use of deliberate burning. Mexico’s long heritage of fire and the persistence of traditional uses, once they were recognized as potentially good practices, has given it a strength that countries without that kind of inheritance lack. Instead of dragging Mexico backwards, much of its traditional fire lore could help it leap into the future.

What are you working on now?
Pyrocene Park, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2023, narrated a fire history of Yosemite National Park, which can be imagined as a story of good fire lost and partially restored. I wanted a complementary book that would look at the problems with bad fire, that is, trying to manage damaging fires with very little environmental or social space to maneuver. The Tonto National Forest—two of whose signature peaks I can see outside my window—offers a marvelous study in the complexity of contemporary fire programs. I’m using the 2021 Telegraph fire as an organizing device.
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Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth. From that career, Pyne has developed the notion of a Pyrocene, a human-driven fire age.