Stephen J. Pyne

Stephen J. Pyne (1949–present) is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, specializing in environmental history, the history of exploration, and especially the history of fire.

Education
Pyne received his bachelor's degree at Stanford University after graduating from Brophy College Preparatory, a Jesuit high school, in Phoenix, Arizona. He later attained his master's (1974) and Ph.D. degrees (1976) at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship to Sweden, was awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and had two tours at the National Humanities Center. He was a professor at Arizona State University from 1985 to 2018.

Pyne spent fifteen seasons as a wildland firefighter at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park between 1967 and 1981. He later spent the summers of 1983–85 writing fire plans for Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone national parks.

Career and research
Many of Pyne's works recount the history of exploration. These writings include his biography of G.K. Gilbert, The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager. Other works include The Last Lost World, which he wrote with his daughter, Lydia V. Pyne, and two books on writing nonfiction, Voice and Vision and Style and Story.

Since the 1982 publication of his second book, Fire in America, Pyne has become an authority on the history and management of fire, cataloging the fire histories of Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the overall planet. Pyne has been consulted to rank the severity and destructive effects of historical fires to contextualize recent wildfires intensified by climate change. He has written and co-authored three textbooks on landscape fires and their management. His 2015 book Between Two Fires and nine-volume series To the Last Smoke have summarized America's fire history, arguing that the US Forest Service was formed based on the European ideals of Bernhard Fernow, the third chief of the USDA's Division of Forestry, and it acquired significant government funding after successfully combating the Great Fire of 1910.

Pyne has criticized the proposed Anthropocene epoch as emphasizing a single species' domination over the environment. He instead advocates for a "Pyrocene epoch" defined by humanity's usage of fire, opposite to the Pleistocene epoch's Ice Age. Managed combustion of fossil fuels has supported the industrialization that is causing significant reductions in biodiversity and climate change, while the nuclear weapons testing has increased the soil concentration of trace elements.