As reports tally up the 2025 fires, here's a long view back. I've updated and abridged Vestal Fire - now 40% as long, with half the new text completely rewritten, reorganized, and reconceptualized. The narrative still includes Russia. Should be published in spring, 2026.

New paper: The role of fire on Earth doi.org/10.1093/bios... BioScience @aibsbiology.bsky.social Fire affects all major components of the Earth system: atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, anthroposphere, & biosphere. Fire is an intrinsic factor on our planet. 🧪🌍🔥🌳🌿🌐 wildfire

Thread: August 20, the anniversary of the Big Blowup, a catalyst for the American way of wildland fire. (top) Post-season map of the 1910 season, with the Blowup circled in red. (bottom) Photo of the mine adit where ranger Ed Pulaski held his crew at gunpoint.

Shouldn't be a surprise - the fire practices of indigenous peoples in the highly fire-prone SW could locally override even climate signals. But that is what received understanding claimed. Here's the data to bring the Ndee into alignment with other premodern peoples. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thread. Yet another avatar for Dragon Bravo - burning an isolated mesa in the Canyon, this time The Dragon itself (one of the Canyon's most apt placenames).

Dragon Bravo keeps reincarnating - now it's a Canyon fire, sending a giant talon eastward from the Walhalla Plateau across the Canyon at its widest. Always had a Canyon fire or two each season, but - really?

In grad school I studied history of science, geomorphology, American West, and intellectual-cultural history, all aligning with the history of exploration, of which Great Ages makes a conceptual capstone. When I decided to write fire, my exploration stuff was my quasi-model. Just released in pb

Quite a summer for European fire. I'm reminded of a passage from A.C.Clarke's 2001: "Beyond the reaches of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire.." Not a bad account of the maturing Pyrocene. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Thread on Dragon Bravo, which continues its serial reincarnations. Began as lightning fire in confine and contain mode (escaped). Morphed into urban fire (incinerated park's developed area). Swelled into proto-megafire (blew over major containment line). Now a free-burning megafire.

Dragon Bravo fire - blowing, going, gone. The Kaibab Plateau as microcosm of Earth, consumed in a slow-motion Ragnarok. This is where my life as a scholar on fire began. There is no way I cannot not take on this fire as a project and try to give it context - would be professional malfeasance.

A fire that seemed to begin as a demo of how not to do confine-and-contain, complete with urban conflagration, is evolving into a master class on big-box-and-burn. Interesting cameo of the American wildland fire scene. inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-inf...

The Turkeyfeather Fire in the Gila Wilderness, NM has burned as a low-severity fire over about 24,000 acres (so far). This is a continuation of a fire regime that existed for millennia before the 20th century. This 🧵reviews the fire history of the Gila, as my colleagues and I have studied it. 1/18

Wondering what I might say about the WU scene now that it has gotten so technical (a good development, actually). Maybe contribute to its redefinition? How about - Owning the WUI: HIZ, HERZ, ITZ [https://www.stephenpyne.com/blog]

Another round with poop in the coop - another free-associating parody....

Amazing how the mind free associates when cleaning up chicken and sheep poop ...

Amid wildfires and political arson - a memento from a gentler fire era. A smokechaser lamp (yes, it works). What happens when a crew sits around the fire cache during a season-ending storm.

For those who would prefer to hear rather than read the fire history of Mexico, Five Suns audio is 50% off. Same great narrative. www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p...

Fennimore Cooper's 1830s social novels center on Aristabulus Bragg, who thinks everything can be bought and sold and he should have most of it, and Steadfast Dodge, who does "not know his own meaning, except as he felt envy of all above him.” Brag and Doge - with us still.

On rebuilding after urban fires - here's Baudette MN , before and after the fire of Oct 7, 1910 (the other Great Fire of that year). Reconstruction was rapid for both humanitarian and economic reasons - winter was imminent and property values were threatened.

This bears an uncanny likeness to the story of Little Smokey climbing a tree to escape a forest fire. Hmm. Barry the Bruin - Smokey the Bear for the WU? (Can figurines and comic books be far behind? Maybe an AI-generated Eddy Arnold singing a revised ballad?) www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/u...

The Conversation asked for an update of my 2019 article on the Pyrocene. As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful. Here's a thumbnail of my understanding of this metaphor-model. (I had no hand in the title.) theconversation.com/human-use-of...

The Hollywood Reporter asked for 700 words for a special section on the fires they have just published. Something looking at the fire itself.So I repurposed some sentences on 'fire as biology' and gave the notion a long leash. Alas, the title is *not* mine. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/local-n...

Disaster fires invite photo ops from politicians. One of my favorites: Richard Nixon, then between jobs, in shirt and tie, standing on a shake-shingle roof, holding a garden hose, staring vapidly - somewhere, while smoke rises in the background from the Bel Air-Brentwood conflagration in 1961.

A thoughtful meditation and reminder of the scale of the reforms needed.It's not just that people are moving into fire-prone lands; in Mediterranean Europe the problem is people moving out of fire-prone lands.It's not where you live but how you live on the land. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/o...

Ok, an anecdotal image - but this is what structure protection looked like in the 1935 Malibu fires. What a change in scale and character - of fire, of the built environment, of firefighting capacity (CCC boys then). Only the inevitability of fire in some form is constant.

A little historical context as Eaton fire moves toward Mt Wilson - photo shows the observatory watching fires from the 1924 season, which was considered monstrous at the time, and might be taken as the first of a century-long cycle of historic conflagrations.

Bauwelt, a German architecture magazine, is doing an issue on Los Angeles - City on the Edge and asked for a commentary on fire. My hard copy arrived just in time for the Palisades fire.

On 20 Dec 1977 the Honda Canyon fire on Vandenberg AFB killed 4 men - the base commander, the fire chief, the asst fire chief, and a dozer operator.The main outcome was that the base got a hotshot crew.A self-published book appeared in 2004, and a documentary in 2022.Why so little post-fire impact?

A couple of colleagues suggested I organize my scattered comments of this year's fires in the Northeast into a short (!) narrative. History News Network has graciously published it: www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-...

Quick post script (I should learn how to do threads). For those who would like to know more about his remarkable career, Dante contributed his autobiography to Seis Vidas en Fuego. I relied on it for my biographical profile of him for Five Suns. www.stephenpyne.com/attachments/...

Tengo el más profundo respeto por este hombre y sus contribuciones a la ciencia del fuego. Su influencia es enorme. I have the deepest respect for this man and his contributions to the science of fire. His influence is enormous. May he rest in peace @sjpyne.bsky.social

Very sad news. Dante Arturo Rodriguez Trejo has passed away. Indefatigable, ardent, encyclopedic in his fire knowledge, one of the founders of modern fire management in Mexico, and for me a friend as well as a colleague - Dante will be missed. Photo from 2011 Coahuila fires.

Good introduction to prescribed fire associations. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/o...

Northeast fires (last post). Even artists like Albert Bierstadt, best known for his operatic western paintings, painted several fire scenes from the White Mountains (below). Thomas Cole - yes, that Thomas Cole - included fire in his allegorical 'Four Elements' canvas - set in the Catskills (?!).

Gifford Pinchot (second from left) surveyed the NJ fire scene in 1898. A reminder that fire policy in the West was created by people from the east.The 1903 and 1908 fires were in the face of policymakers in ways the 1902 and 1910 fires weren't. The Adirondacks were more influential than Yellowstone.

You don't need multi-year droughts to have big fires in the Northeast, just dry spells, wind, and fuel. Here's New Hampshire in 1908. Biggest change is land use, especially the end of wanton logging.

Sent by a colleague in New Jersey. NJ's Pinelands are long recognized as among US's most volatile firescapes. But historic blowups have come in spring with strong winds from passing cold fronts, not in mid-November. Better hope for a wet winter...

For fire wonks - Esterelle forest in Var was the paragon of fire protection for Med Europe. Below is a description by an American, publ. 1917. Only assured control was to remove understory, which was so costly it exceeded forest's revenue. Might have considered some controlled grazing and burning?

Faked fires #2 San Francisco, 1906. Unhappy with its actual newsreel of the fire, an American film company created a wooden model of the city which it burned, filmed, and pawned off as the original [: video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/san-fr... Thanks to Benjamin Mehigan for the reference.

Faked fires in history. #1 Porcupine fire, first of a series of horrific fires that swept northern Ontario from 1911-1922. The sinister plume is phony - superimposed to make a more compelling image and promote relief efforts. Helps explain why people on wooden streets seem oblivious.

Found this among my old research collections. Earliest reference I know of for the term WUI fire (previously called wildland-rural). I regard Bel Air-Brentwood (1961) as WUI One. Took a while, and more fires elsewhere, to give us this overly geeky term for the problem.

The Little Spacecraft That Could - Voyager 1 still going. Launched in 1977 the Voyager mission has lasted 70% of the space age. Nothing like it, now and possibly ever. www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/s...

Maybe it just took a bewitched night, but Wikipedia finally accepted an entry on the Pyrocene. Thanks to Heather Mulliner, librarian-archivist at Montana State for crafting an a passable text. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrocene

Halloween is often associated with incidental fires from mischief or malice. But its origins mark it as one of Europe's great fire ceremonies, paired with Beltane in a pastoral almanac. In the Celtic calendar it serves as a 'new fire' for a new year. Here's a passage from J.G. Frazer's Golden Bough:

New wildfire paper in Science by Jennifer Batch and colleagues! Here's the press release. 🧪🌏🔥

So what was Prometheus thinking of? Aeschylus says the Titan's intention was "to cause mortals to cease foreseeing doom." So he gave two gifts - fire, which made possible "all the arts of man," and hope, which gave purpose to that power. Still a great tag-team.

This is so nutty (cubed) it's creepy. Yep, a patent for artillery shells that explode and spray retardant. Maybe Boeing should concentrate on building planes that don't fall apart and spacecraft that don't maroon passengers.

Smoke obscured the view, but not the insights - delightful tour of the Tobacco Root Mountains with Mark Fiege and Michael Reidy. Will deliver the Stegner Lecture at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman tomorrow evening - appropriately on fire.

Another way to think about the #Pyrocene. It's geology's version of Jurassic Park. We take something from tens of millions of years ago, release it in the present, and find a lot of unexpected consequences.