Reviewing Stephen J. Pyne’s To the Last Smoke series: putting the people in the pyrocene

Four decades ago, Dr Stephen J. Pyne published Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982). He has since published some thirty books about fire – in America and around the globe – earning a richly deserved place as wildland fire’s preeminent historian. Through this body of work, Pyne has helped a generation of fire managers, researchers, and publics understand wildfire’s deep roots, long histories, and human stories.

Amidst this incredible corpus of work, his recently completed To the Last Smoke series would stand out as a magnum opus. Clocking in at 2,328 pages across nine regional volumes, it is a treasure trove of stories – some big, some small – about the places, people, and fires that have shaped the United States of America. The nine core volumes consist of seven regional books (Florida; California; The Northern Rockies; the Southwest; The Great Plains; The Interior West; and The Northeast), followed by two broader volumes (Slopovers, addressing the Mid-American Oak Woodlands, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska; and Here and There, which includes a mix of scattered locales, non-geographic essays, and global vignettes). A tenth volume serves as an anthology (To the Last Smoke: An Anthology), collecting a handful of essays from each of the nine volumes, plus a new chapter on California.

This format showcases Pyne at his best. Each book is made up of a series of short, focused essays, offering a very accessible format for readers. The vignettes feature compelling characters, concise analyses, and clever anecdotes, and their constrained length makes it easy to enjoy a few chapters, put the book down, and resume without losing the thread. It also yields a set of books that serves as an incredible resource for the fire community, from managers to researchers to casual observers alike. By preserving such a range of local stories while exploring the broader, important themes that emerge across them – barriers to embracing good fire; pressures facing future management; or the irony of internal combustion driving climate change’s uncontrolled conflagration – Pyne has done a huge service to both current and future students of fire.

The scale does, however, make it impossible to offer an exhaustive review of all the content within. Instead, in this review, I try to do two things. First, I offer a very brief summary of the volumes to help potential readers identify where they might wish to begin. Then, I turn to identifying themes that emerge from reading the collection as a whole: Pyne’s fundamental project of ensuring the rightful place of people in the stories we tell about fire; his ongoing work to grapple with what natural means; fire’s shape-shifting presence in internal combustion and climate change; and the need for a new approach to wildland fire science in the pyrocene.

As Pyne describes in the series preface found in each volume, To the Last Smoke was originally conceived as a “colour commentator” that would “poke around in the pixels and polygons of particular practices, places, and purposes.” This commitment to the “particular” is evident throughout the books: their chapters are grounded in the specific, from wildfire at the Kennedy Space Center and on Staten Island, to the influence of particular individuals like Bill Patterson (in the Northeast), Harold Weaver (in the Northwest), and Cliff White (in Canada). This arrangement offers a smattering of widely varied topics for the reader, presents the stories in digestible portions, and forces specific characters and places to the foreground.

The “self-organization” of the series, as Pyne describes, into geographically defined volumes (excluding Here and There) powerfully shapes the perspectives of the landscapes he presents. In the first three volumes, this results in very clear motivating themes. The Floridian volume, for instance, is driven by the central question ‘why has Florida been such an outlier in its willingness to burn?’ Pyne offers convincing answers here in the inevitability of its fires and the ways that fire is infused in the state ethos, culture, and heritage:

What they all shared was a folklore of burning, an appreciation that fire was good for them all… Everyone burned because they had always burned. They burned because if they didn’t burn their land, someone else would. (p. 17)

At the same time, he also challenges that very analysis in the prologue and epilogue by pointing out the ways that Floridan fire is more invisible and less all-consuming than elsewhere. Perhaps that is the key lesson from the Sunshine State: that fire must be in the proverbial lifeblood of those who see it, yet peripheral enough for the rest of the population to be willing to allow leeway for it to continue.

Likewise, the Californian volume confronts the central challenge of extensive wilderness urban interfaces (or “intermixes,” as Pyne insightfully corrects). Here, the reader encounters not just the suppressive might of CalFire, but also the dualities that define the state. Pyne calls these out as the twos of California: two fires (suppressed and welcomed), two worlds (north and south), two cultures (parks and urban), two halves (divided by the transecting mountains), and so on. While the Californian volume is tilted more towards broader questions than the specific case studies that define the Florida volume, it still offers some hints about why this monolith of suppression has evolved the way it did: the emergence of invented fire cultures (as opposed to Florida’s longstanding, rooted fire culture), the pressures exerted by urban institutions and urbanised imperatives, and basins that are much less tolerant of smoke, among others.

The third volume – The Northern Rockies – offers a strong, driving theme as well. Indeed, this volume could just as easily have been entitled ‘Nature, Wilderness, and Fire’ for the way that it reveals a region grappling with the question of what fire ought to be allowed and how it should be tolerated. This book offers some sharp critiques, particularly of Boise’s National Interagency Fire Center, which Pyne charges with being a bastion of the suppression-centric approach to firefighting, with a pointed urging that “if you want to know the fire story, look elsewhere” (p. 20). Perhaps the most significant contribution of this volume, however – beside its grappling with the ‘paradox of wilderness fire’ – is its argument that the way we tell stories matters. The chapter on Mann Gulch provides, unsurprisingly, a great investigation of the literature of fire and how tragedy becomes mythology becomes policy, but it also highlights ‘fire imaginaries’ as a dominant factor in understanding how we navigate the question of what fire means and what we ought to do with it.

Another volume is also particularly worthy of recognition: The Interior West. Pyne does a masterful job of making the case for seeing this region as one. Through its biotic foundation (including cheatgrass and beetles), its unique cultural and institutional identities, and its particular mixings of arid and forested, he reveals a region that has much more to teach fire management than it is often given credit for. His accounting of the way that, “like the WUI [Wildland Urban Interface], fire institutions ‘just growed’ without planning” (p. 23) – and how this region has remixed approaches like CalFire into a Colorado adaptation – provides incredibly useful insight into the pressure of changing settlement patterns, of complex political landscapes, and of stressed ecologies.

Many of the best chapters of the series, such as Pyne’s own experiences in influencing fire policy in ‘The Second Big Blowup’ (The Northern Rockies), the challenges of wildland use fire in ‘The Kaibab’ (The Southwest), and the fire:archeologial interface presented in ‘Outlier: Mesa Negra’ (The Interior West), find ways to link local vignettes to broader themes, using the detailed cases not just as historical anecdote, but as a way of explaining the forms of fire practice and fire management we see today. This ability to “transcend its local setting,” says Pyne, is what defines truly important fires amidst the many conflagrations (The Northern Rockies, p. 91). In ‘The Second Big Blowup,’ for instance, Pyne’s firsthand experience offers a poignant account of the ways that an obsession with the wrong questions (‘should fire be here?’ when, of course, the obvious answer is ‘yes’) and siloed self-obsession could lead to mismanagement. And, in ‘Mesa Negra,’ Pyne highlights the way that both fire and suppression can barrel over artifacts and ancient sites as a way of grappling with the complexity of appropriate response.

While the series’ scale and quality defy quick summary, the regional scheme means that readers would be well served to select either a local volume or one of the thematic issues described above. Indeed, because of the stand-alone nature of the essays, readers do not need to follow the text from beginning to end: the volumes would function well in any order. Another alternative would be to head directly to the anthology, which contains some forty-four selected chapters from across the series (including a new California chapter that is frustratingly not included in newly printed versions of that regional edition). Reading the full series alongside the table of contents from the anthology, however, was a reminder of the idiosyncrasies of curating such a selection: the choices do an excellent job of capturing a good variety of the subjects explored throughout the series, but are perhaps less effective at synthesising the essential underlying arguments, messages, and learnings from each region.

While these seven regional volumes – plus one volume collecting geographic “slopovers” that did not fit the first seven and another volume collecting broader essays less tied to a specific geography (or outside of the United States) – are interesting in their own right, my aim in the remainder of this review is to call attention to themes that emerge most strongly when bringing the volumes together as a whole: Pyne’s efforts to centre people in our studies of fire; challenges in grappling with the definition of nature and wilderness; the ironies internal combustion unleashing wild combustion; and a way forward in rethinking what should be considered within wildland fire science.

Perhaps Stephen Pyne’s most significant contribution to the study of wildland fire – both in this series and in his illustrious career – is his effort to foreground the role of humans in the study of fire. While fire ecology, technology, modelling, and other hard science dimensions have occupied the lion’s share of work in fire research, Pyne’s standpoint as a historian offers a unique vantage and motivation for revealing the ways that people shape pyric landscapes. Indeed, since completing this project, Pyne has gone on to write an entire volume on what he dubs “the pyrocene,” his label to highlight the pyric within the anthropogenic in defining our current era (Pyne, The Pyrocene How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, 2022, The University of California Press).

Throughout all of the volumes of To the Last Smoke, Pyne reminds the reader that the history of fire cannot be captured through dendrochronology or fire regimes alone, but instead is located in understanding why and how our institutions, cultures, and practices came to be. For instance, he describes how pyric landscapes have “…people at their core: people set fires, people determine how fire behaves, people decide what species fire will promote or contain, people carry fire across the political roughness of land ownership and the historical roughness of a new era” (Slopovers, p. 24). In the first volume, he highlights the influence of people over fire regimes by pointing out how, in Florida, “a culture of burning endured… because cultural landscapes endured” (p. 17) – cultural landscapes distinct from those in, say, the culture of “fire in the wilderness” of the Northern Rockies (p. 18), or the culture of “fire suppression… on steroids” in California (p. 18). And, he reminds us that our institutions – such as the suppression industrial complex – are born of our fears, fables, and funding decisions (such Smokey Bear’s Second World War upstream origins, California, p. 11). Fires burn “in a moral universal no less than in the mountains” (The Northern Rockies, p. 105), shaped by – and shaping – our values, priorities, and ethics.

In other words, Pyne reminds us that fire shapes who we are as people, but also that people shape the character and manifestations of fire. But, Pyne goes beyond simply suggesting that people (as a whole) are central to fire history by demonstrating the ways that history is incredibly individualised and contingent. The stories that Pyne offers throughout the volumes frequently illustrate that it is only because of certain people, in a certain place, at a certain time, that we get the institutions, practices, and outcomes that we see today. For example, as he points out in the Slopovers volume when discussing the “pyropolitics” of Alaska, “In retrospect, it seems what evolved was the only thing that could have evolved. It wasn’t. Any number of events or personalities or grievances would have derailed the project. But they didn’t…” (p. 172). This tendency towards the hyper-local, individual stories is both revealing (in the sense that these specific stories are interesting and help to explain why things are the way they are, at least locally) and, at times, frustrating (in that it can be hard to draw out general lessons that can be applied to other contexts).

In this sense, Pyne is a historian’s historian. The action within To the Last Smoke’s storytelling is frequently found within individuals – heroes and villains, fighters and fallen, politicians and publics. While the outcomes can be shaped by geographic imperatives, regional identities, and political tides, the general approach creates a focus on looking to the people involved for the primary explanation of what happened.

Of course, like any good critical scholar, Pyne himself challenges this at times, pointing to systematic and collective influences as an antidote to the contingent and local. For instance, we are reminded at various points that “…fires did not vanish because of voluntary associations and insurance markets. They went away because laws were passed and enforced to change the character of cities and make them less combustible” (Slopovers, p. 111). But, the focus on the particular – be it people or contingent situations – can, therefore, be a challenge for someone trying to read with a pragmatic eye, seeking to learn not just who and what and when, but more broadly how successes can be replicated. Pyne’s vignettes underscore that relationships matter and that programs must be suitable to their local context, but is less consistent in offering lessons learned for how successes might be scaled up, communities mobilised, or failures overcome.

Pyne's first lesson is that people are powerful in shaping wildfire. This power, however, is not only exerted through direct action like fire suppression. Instead, ideas can be just as powerful, such as the ways that varying definitions of wilderness or natural can influence our management regimes. Across the volumes, Pyne reminds us of the ways that romanticising the natural is inaccurate and problematic, from the erasure of Indigenous and agricultural fire in our understanding of flames, to the very belief that there is a single natural landscape that ought to be defended and protected. For instance, in the Northern Rockies, Pyne talks about how

The Northern Rockies [demonstrate] a poetry to match the mountains. …Montanans see their big burns as a valued part of their heritage. For the early fire community they were a defining feature of a vast backcountry; more recently, they are manifestations of a valued wild. (p. 13)

Here, the fact that fire is seen to be natural creates acceptance and facilitates room for managing wilderness burns. But, simplistic conceptions of, or appeals to, the natural are highly problematic when our landscapes and climate are indelibly shaped by human forces. As Pyne poignantly summarises in his chapter ‘Vignettes of Primitive America’ within the California volume,

It seemed so simple. Stop doing bad things, and good things would happen. Where you had to intervene, mimic nature. The way to get burning back into the biota was to burn. But of course nothing was simple. Between now and presettlement times when fires had free-ranged, when indigenes had burned in and around the groves and meadows almost annually, both land and society had changed in ways that made fire’s reintroduction tricky. (p. 170).

Or, put another way, it has become impossible to separate humans and nature, and a simple effort to return to a more natural state is no longer sufficient to guide our de-escalation of catastrophic fire. Humanity’s perpetual reshaping of landscapes, for example – from excessive suppression to the build-up of communities and infrastructure in the intermix – means that fire is forever changed. In the Southwest, for instance, he describes how “the Wallow fire could no more behave as it would have in presettlement times than could a wolf pack dropped into a former hunting site now remade into a Phoenix shopping mall” (p. 123). And, in Florida,

What was the ‘natural’ fire regime? Should it include the anthropogenic fires that had coexisted with the emergence of the Glades over the past 5,000 years? And what did ‘natural’ mean when the hydrology had been utterly replumbed, when the rhythm of fires had become atonal… when there was always a Cape Sable seaside sparrow, a Florida panther, or an indigo snake that was endangered depending on how a place burned. (p. 139)

Again, though, Pyne offers counterexamples to these critiques. He frequently shows us that natural is a socially constructed concept, much like “fire regimes, too, are cultural constructions, an always-awkward negotiation between what a society imagines its ideal nature to be and what material nature will allow” (Great Plains, p. 62). But, while highlighting that this is a problematic philosophical foundation for policy, he also reveals cases where wild landscapes have significant practical impacts on decision-making. In Alaska and the Northern Rockies, for example, his case studies reveal that wilderness space has significant managerial implications. The presence of physical room can enable fire; its absence demands all the more contingent and precarious arrangements to deal with the high stakes. As Pyne highlights in the Northern Rockies volume, natural fire “works best in remote, self-contained landscapes – places with abundant natural ignition; landscapes with lots of room to maneuver, both for flame and smoke; and a local culture that favours the wild and is willing to make concessions to accommodate it” (p. 30). We see this in particular with the chapter on Glacier National Park, where a journey from suppression to burning must be accompanied by grappling with how to deal with melting glaciers and increasing tourism.

Indeed, if Pyne’s central contribution is to bring people back to the heart of our understanding of fire, it also comes with an all-important caution: we cannot let big conflagrations distract us from the growing impact of the combustion we have tried to hide away and contain. Pyne’s rhetorical flourish for this is “ICE” (for the Internal Combustion Engine, while also evoking an elemental duality), but the insight is significant. Not only has the ability to burn fossil fuels overhauled the way we tackle fire – though the mechanisation of firefighting seen in California to the immense role of aviation described in Alaska – but it has fundamentally opened a new kind of combustion that, now, is remaking the world.

As Pyne points out in the Northeast volume, as part of an excellent chapter on the ongoing coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania,

The story might stand for that larger fire regimen created by burning coal whose emissions threaten to unhinge the Earth’s climate and make former habitats unusable, but are not easily contained because control can only succeed by extinguishing the source combustion… each passing year only embeds the issues more intractably until the problem becomes everyone’s and no one’s, and it catalyzes a new era of bad burns… (p. 52).

Indeed, in the pyrocene, our fire power as a species goes beyond lighting the fires we want or suppressing those we do not. Instead, our powers to remake the world through fire might ultimately result in the melting of glaciers, the remaking of forests, and the creation of conflagrations that exceed the power of our institutions to address them. In attempting to capture fire for our personal gain, we have created a pyric landscape that is beyond our control.

In the face of these challenges – recognising the human roles in fire; grappling with what is good or natural in our approaches to managing flames; and confronting the fires we have unleashed because of our obsession with fossil fuel combustion – how are we to move forward? If Pyne offers a path forward in the final volume, it is the need to reshape the world of fire science.

Spend enough time with Stephen Pyne and you will inevitably hear a reflection upon his experience in the world of academia: that while universities have departments for biology, physics, and sociology, the only fire department is the one with the red trucks. This observation, of course, speaks to the need for a more concerted and well-supported study of fire. But, Pyne’s conception of what a research-based fire department should do is much broader than simply an increase in current fire science. As he argues in ‘Here and There,’ “besides science we need poetry and in addition to policy we need politics (p. 18). Or, put more explicitly,

What the Forest Service needed was not a scientific breakthrough or a problem disrupting technology but a clarity of mission, a legitimacy before the many American publics and their representatives, an intellectual civility and a cultural humility. It didn’t need to upgrade its science-informed policy. It needed a poet. (p. 23)

Indeed, Pyne goes so far as to compare the state of current fire science to the parable of a drunk who searches for their keys “under the streetlight because ‘that’s where the light is’” arguing that “fire research continues to elaborate a physical paradigm because that’s where the funded science is. But the keys to understanding may lie elsewhere” (p. 82). He elaborates in several volumes about how fire science must become more well-rounded to address the value-based questions of managing today’s complex fires, ranging from the need for more work on the institutions, policy, and politics of fire (“the science of fire ecology does not always include the study of institutions, but it should,” Northeast, p. 166) to appeals for fellow historians to follow in his path (“history can help convey an appreciation that the landscapes they confront are not the result of abstract principles randomly stirred together like ingredients for pancake batter,” Here and There, p. 65).

Indeed, Pyne’s central contribution to our understanding of wildland fire is to push us to break free from strictly physical paradigms and to take seriously the biological, cultural, historical, sociological, and anthropological ways of viewing this phenomenon. In To the Last Smoke, he has singlehandedly done an incredible amount to flesh out that historical perspective in an unparalleled archive of American fire history. The volumes are likely to be just as useful to the future historian, by preserving stories of key people and places, as they are to the reader today, with engaging vignettes that help to unravel the complex challenges of living in the pyrocene.

This wide utility does, at times, reflect an inconsistent intended audience for the series. The volumes seem marketed for accessibility (in their length, design, and short essay format) and geared towards public readership or, at least, a non-historian audience of policy makers and fire buffs. Despite this audience, though, the deep-dive style vignettes often assume a fair bit of background knowledge on local geography, events, policies, technologies, and people that’s likely beyond the casual reader. For instance, ‘The Huachucas’ in the Southwest volume turns on FireScape, but without ever really providing sufficient introduction or contextualisation for an unfamiliar reader. At the same time, for the historian or well-versed reader of fire, some of the analyses want you leaving more. For example, the chapter on Yarnell in the same volume reads as a light (and somewhat dated, by the time the series was published) op ed, rather than a rich historical critique or contextualisation drawing on the investigations since the event.

In the big picture, however, this mosaic of stories and many layers of writing also increases the value of the series as an archive. A massive undertaking, To the Last Smoke represents an incredible resource for the fire community. It is engaging, interesting, and approachable history, and provides so much more than a colour commentary alone: it situates the discipline as a whole, it links the individual players to broader patterns, and it offers insight into ways of grappling with the challenge of wildfire in the pyrocene.

Stephen Pyne served on Eric Kennedy’s dissertation committee for his PhD (completed in 2018).