SOS Forests

A Pyne Trifecta

Stephen Pyne, World’s Foremost Expert on fire and author of over 20 books on the subject, has written three “fire journalism” essays on modern anthropogenic fire in the Midwest. They are now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences.

Missouri Compromise was posted last December [here]. Patch Burning is [here]. People of the Prairie, People of the Fire is [here].

“Fire journalism” is Pyne’s label. I see them more as non-fiction literary essays. Pyne further demurs:

Anyone familiar with the pyric geography of these sites will appreciate that I add nothing to data or concepts. Instead, I have sought only to establish a different perspective and narrative for their understanding.

which is too humble, in my opinion. In truth, Pyne once again plows new ground with insight and wit.

This collection of three essays is group-titled Middle Ground and surveys fire in Oklahoma, the Missouri Ozarks, and prairie remnants in Illinois. The set has also been posted at the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center [here]. A photo montage entitled Middle Ground: Image Slideshow accompanies the essays at the WFLLC site [here].

As usual with his writing, there are numerous quotable quotes, or Pynisms. From Patch Burning:

Especially as the proneness of landscapes to propagate fires splintered to the eastward, as land roughened, watercourses multiplied, and humidity thickened, only people could have set enough fires. Remove any part of this prairie fire triangle and the fire would go out.

The upshot is that those prairie patches were not only pyric landscapes: they were cultural landscapes. They remain so today. …

And from People of the Prairie, People of the Fire:

The indigenes at the time of European contact, the Potawatomi, were known variously as the people of the place of the fire, or the keepers of the fire, because they maintained the great council fire around which the regional confederation of tribes gathered. But that fire did not stay within the council circle: it spread throughout the landscape, a constant among the diversity of grasses, trees, shrubs, ungulates, small mammals, birds, and insects that congregated around the informing prairie. In time the Potawatomi became known equally as the people of the prairie since the one meant the other. Remove fire, and the prairie disappeared. Remove prairie, and free-ranging fire lost its habitat. Remove the keepers of the fire and both prairie and fire vanish into overgrown scrub, weedy lots, or feral flame. …

Yet there is a second narrative of fire restoration at work as well, in which fire is returned not only to the land but to the hand. The reconstruction of Nachusa reinstates fire to ordinary people. The volunteers, who do much of the hard work of gathering and disseminating seeds, clearing invasive shrubs and weeding new acres, also do the burning. As much as reinstating big bluestem and lady fern, Nachusa has returned the torch to folk practitioners, the kind of fire wielders who sustained the prairie peninsula through millennia. The people of the new prairie have become people of the new fire. …

Please study and enjoy these works. This post is the proper place to make comments about Pyne’s Midwest trifecta — generally speaking, comments are not allowed in the Colloquia subsites to avoid littering them with extraneous dialog.