{"title":"Books by Stephen J. Pyne","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780295746180","title":"Fire","description":"\u003cp\u003eOver vast expanses of time, fire and humanity have interacted to expand the domain of each, transforming the earth and what it means to be human. In this concise yet wide-ranging book, Stephen J. Pyne—named by \u003ci\u003eScience\u003c\/i\u003e magazine as “the world’s leading authority on the history of fire”—explores the surprising dynamics of fire before humans, fire and human origins, aboriginal economies of hunting and foraging, agricultural and pastoral uses of fire, fire ceremonies, fire as an idea and a technology, and industrial fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this revised and expanded edition, Pyne looks to the future of fire as a constant, defining presence on Earth. A new chapter explores the importance of fire in the twenty-first century, with special attention to its role in the Anthropocene, or what he posits might equally be called the Pyrocene.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56232676131189,"sku":"9780295746180","price":24.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780295746180_62e7ac20-fd58-4e6d-864d-512b7cb682de.jpg?v=1786032822"},{"product_id":"9780520391635","title":"The Pyrocene – How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next","description":"A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.?The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.    Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene.    Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56291702702453,"sku":"9780520391635","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780520391635_c87231af-7be7-4ec9-8463-150017d7d766.jpg?v=1786013613"},{"product_id":"undying-fire","title":"Undying Fire","description":"Europe’s unquenchable flames, from hearth to Pyrocene, reveal a civilization’s combustible coreThis work offers a sweeping history of Europe told through flame—and a history of fire refracted through Europe’s landscapes, sciences, and empires. Drawing on and substantially updating his classic Vestal Fire, Stephen J. Pyne’s incisive new volume follows fire from Iceland’s oceanic fringes to the Siberian taiga and the Mediterranean’s blaze-prone rim, showing how Europe’s peculiar geography, history, and culture forged a singular pact with combustion. Organized in three sections, it moves from the elements of practice and ideas that make up Europe’s core fire narrative to vivid portraits of five fire provinces (Mediterranean, Central, Boreal, Eurasian, and Atlantic) before turning to the global consequences of European expansion.   Tracking millennia of human-made fire, Pyne reveals a relationship in which Europe’s elites sought to keep fire a servant, ever more tightly controlled. The transition to a fossil-fueled modernity, however, led to a paradox in which Europe lost its mastery as land use, climate, and flame turned feral and the Earth pivoted toward a Pyrocene in which humanity’s binge burning created a fire age to rival the ice ages.   The result is both a lucid synthesis and a provocation: what Europe’s global expansion set into motion has returned to kindle a resurgence of wildfire across the continent, starkly visible in the heat-dome summers of the 2020s. As tool, ecological process, threat, and symbol, fire illuminates Europe’s past—and its environmental futures.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57466546094453,"sku":"9780295754864","price":34.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57685755134325,"sku":"9780295754857","price":107.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780295754857_2b7a2ab0-33d2-48e0-9f39-e76337b338a4.jpg?v=1792598929"},{"product_id":"the-interior-west","title":"The Interior West","description":"Its fires help give to the Interior West a peculiar character, fundamental both to its natural and human histories. While a general aridity unites the region, defined here as the states of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado, its fires illuminate the ways its various parts show  profoundly different landscapes, biotas, and human settlement experiences.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this book, fire historian Stephen J. Pyne explains the relevance of the region to the national fire scene. The Interior West offered the first scientific inquiry into landscape fire in the United States, including a map of Utah burns published in 1878 as part of John Wesley Powell’s arid lands report. Then its significance faded and by the 20th century, the region had become the hole in the national donut of fire management. Pyne discusses the region’s more recent return to prominence due to fires along its front ranges; to invasive species, both exotics like cheatgrass and unleashed natives like mountain pine beetle; and to its fatality fires, notably at South Canyon in 1994.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Interior West\u003c\/i\u003e shows the variety of fire issues in the region and their significance to the country overall through thoughtful framing and lively essays.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57507883221365,"sku":"9780816537709","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780816537709.jpg?v=1787043025"},{"product_id":"five-suns","title":"Five Suns","description":"A climate defined by wet and dry seasons, a mostly mountainous terrain, a biota prone to disturbances, a human geography characterized by a diversity of peoples all of whom rely on burning in one form or another: Mexico has ideal circumstances for fire, and those fires provide a unique perspective on its complex history. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eFive Suns\u003c\/i\u003e completes a North American fire-history trilogy written by Pyne over the past 40 years, complementing his histories of Canada and the United States.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57573194727797,"sku":"9780816558421","price":28.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780816558421.jpg?v=1789395849"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-stephen-j-pyne.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}