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One of the themes of The Sacred Balance is that natural processes which are not understood can easily be underestimated. In Episode Three of The Sacred Balance, David Suzuki travels to the Ponderosa National Forest in Arizona, to visit Dr. Stephen Pyne - a professor of fire history at Arizona State University who provides insight into the importance of fire to the health of forests and to human culture. In addition to the broadcast portions of David's interview, here is more of what Stephen Pyne had to say: |
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Stephen Pyne on the role of fire in nature - especially in arid climates: "It is damaging but temporarily. It's part of the creative destruction, if you will, out of nature's economy. Lots of good things happen. The long term effect is that it will probably go back to being what it was before. That is, fire can be very conservative if it occurs in the usual pattern. It does lots of things. It's frees up a lot of nutrients that are stuck in these logs. There's not much to decompose them in an arid climate like this. A lot of critical ingredients - chemicals - get locked up. They have to be freed. It shakes and bakes. It promotes some species and drives off others temporarily. It rearranges. Prune, thin out, it's doing all kinds of things. And you know, the point is that this forest was used to this kind of fire. And if you take that kind of fire away from it, it suffers." |
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Stephen Pyne on fire in human history: "Well, we've always had fire. I mean, the Homo Erectus apparently could tend it, but probably not till Homo Sapiens and sort of a modern tool kit - the striking and drilling and all that - could we make fire. So I think part of the interest in eternal flames, maintaining the hearth fires, goes back to those very early times where if you lost fire you couldn't recover it easily. People didn't need to fight fires in the way we do now because they lived in environments that had been shaped [in part] by deliberate burning that prevented catastrophic fires from crowding in where they might live. |
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Stephen Pyne on why fire will always live in the human imagination: "We're the fire creature. Other animals knock over trees and dig holes in the ground and hunt, but we're the creature that manipulates fire. We've done it for all of our existence as a species, we have a monopoly over it." |
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Stephen Pyne on fire as a natural - and human - phenomenon: "Fire is very much a product of the living world. The living world created the oxygen that fire requires, it supplies the fuel that fire feeds on, and in the form of people it supplies the ignition." |
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Stephen Pyne on the irreplaceability of fire: "Most Urban people and most people increasingly live in cities, distrust fire. Rightfully so, you don't want large flames cascading through buildings. But if that is their only experience of fire, then they don't know how to deal with it in other settings. You can easily substitute a lightbulb for a candle, but you can't substitute a tractor and pesticides and herbicides for burning off the fallow field. And we can't substitute chainsaws and bulldozers and fire retardants for a fire in a forest." |
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