This episode first aired in June.
Stephen Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen 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. He has written more than thirty books, and his two most recent books are "Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico" (2024) and "Pyrocene Park" (2023).
Stephen Pyne’s recent article in Scientific American is titled "We Are Living in the Pyrocene — At Our Peril." He says, “Today we live in a fire age in which ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed and renewed by fire have become contemporary realities, even for people living in modern cities. In the summer of 2023 millions of residents of New York City and other metropolises saw dark-orange daytime skies thick with smoke palls from Canadian wildfires— and breathed in the effluent. Mythology has morphed into ecology.”
