The University of Arizona Press
September 30, 2024
Stephen J. Pyne, author of Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico and more than 40 other books about fire, gave the keynote address at a fire-themed session at the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting on September 23, 2024. GSA previewed his address in this Youtube interview with him, “How Our Relationship with Fire Has Changed Through Time with Dr. Stephen Pyne.”
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.
During the interview, Dr. Rachel Phillips, a GSA Science Communication Fellow, asked Pyne to explain more about the evolution of fire. He replied: “Fire is a shape shifter, I mean, fire is a reaction. It’s not a substance like earth, air, or water. It can assume many forms but it’s fundamentally a substance. Fire takes its character from its context so it synthesizes, it integrates its surroundings and as those surroundings change, fire changes. So, as oxygen levels on Earth change, fire changes. As plants and animals evolve and rearrange and organize terrestrial landscapes, fire assumes forms appropriate to those landscapes and those conditions.”
About Five Suns:
Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country. Creatively deploying the Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the “five suns” that it birthed, Pyne addresses the question, “Why does fire appear in Mexico the way it does?” Five Suns tells the saga through a pyric prism.
Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world today through its fire suppression capabilities, fire research, and industrial combustion, but also by those continuing customary practices that have become increasingly significant to a world that suffers too much combustion and too little fire.
