The Still-Burning Bush

by Stephen Pyne

Overview

Long a fire continent, Australia now finds itself at the leading edge of a fire epoch.

Australia is one of the world’s fire powers. It not only has regular bushfires, but in no other country has fire made such an impact on the national culture.

Over the past two decades, bushfires have reasserted themselves as an environmental, social, and political presence.

The Still-Burning Bush traces the ecological and social significance of the use of fire to shape the environment through Australian history, beginning with Aboriginal usage, and the subsequent passing of the firestick to rural colonists and then to foresters, to ecologists, and back to Indigenes.

Each transfer kindled public debate not only over suitable fire practices but also about how Australians should live on the land. In Australia, the 2019–2020 season have heightened the sense of urgency behind this discussion, as the megafires of recent decades and the serial conflagrations in California have for Americans.

The Still-Burning Bush examines the global changes that are affecting Australia (and the world). Especially pertinent is the concept of a Pyrocene—the idea that humanity’s cumulative fire practices are fashioning the fire equivalent of an ice age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950354481
Publisher:	Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephen Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Among his many books are Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, and Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Prologue: Earth's flaming front 11

Part I

Firestick fundamentals: a primer 19

Firestick history: a synopsis 31

Part II

Fire conservancy 49

Early burning, light burning, no burning 55

Between two fires: creating an Australian strategy 69

Backfire: the environmentalist critique 74

Part III

As the world burns 81

Fire's rectangle: options for management 91

The green in the ash 111

Part IV

Pyromancy: divining futures in the flames 123

The still-burning bush 134

Where Australia sees the universe 145

Epilogue: Black and forever 151

Acknowledgements 155

Notes 157

Sources and further reading 161

Editorial Reviews

In a world on fire—literally and figuratively—a scholar revisits and reinforces the science behind the conflagrations. Both the scientific world and professionals who work in forestry management view Pyne’s seminal Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991) as something between a road map for preventing future disasters and a work of poetry. This follow-up is a hybrid of sorts, adding a new preface and epilogue to a previous sequel with the same title but also including contemporary context to the concepts that were reiterated in the 2006 edition… impressive… More solid work from a fire expert.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[An] eloquent and provocative book”.
—Simon Caterson, The Age

“An elegant and passionate contribution to a conversation that’s often caught in spin, agendas, fear.”
—Ashley Hay, The Bulletin

“The perfect solution will always elude us, but we can reduce the dangers associated with fire and use it to our and the environment's advantage. Pyne has contributed constructively to this urgent debate.”
—George Thomas, Coast & Country

“The argument is important, on-going and unresolved; and the book… intended to assist discussion on matters of public interest. Highly recommended.”
—A.M. Lucas, University of East Anglia, Reviews in Australian Studies

“Stephen Pyne has written an elegant, provocative and gently persuasive addition to his earlier books. It has the added value of being optimistic and practical over an issue about which many urban Australians fatalistically define as an inevitable periodical scourge.”
—Bill Tully, Voice

“No-one has quite synthesized the questions of fire, science, history and society in Australia as Stephen Pyne has done… Stephen Pyne, at his best, is—if not a poet—a beautiful writer. His prose has clarity and passion, filled with knowledge and understanding of a subject that has consumed much of his attention since the first of his 15 summers as a seasonal firefighter.”
—John Schauble, History Australia

“Pyne’s short book… charts the cyclical nature of official attitudes to fire in Australia and the transfers of the prevailing conventional wisdom about fire… This book is a brief and readable summation of the biology, the policy, the imposition of European values on a distinctly non-European landscape, the maturation of the technocratic attitude, the rise of the conservationist non-burners and the land use changes, which all have influenced strategic fire use in Australia… Read this book and benefit from the global perspective of this learned American author.”
—Robert Dyason, Australian Forest Grower

From the Publisher

2020-07-22
In a world on fire—literally and figuratively—a scholar revisits and reinforces the science behind the conflagrations.

Both the scientific world and professionals who work in forestry management view Pyne’s seminal Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991) as something between a road map for preventing future disasters and a work of poetry. This follow-up is a hybrid of sorts, adding a new preface and epilogue to a previous sequel with the same title but also including contemporary context to the concepts that were reiterated in the 2006 edition. It’s impressive that Pyne, an American scholar at Arizona State, commands such respect when it comes to the problem of Australian bush fires, but the ideas and context that he revisits here form the basis for strategies that are actionable across regions. The author also acknowledges that no geographic area can be addressed with a single method of containment. As in his previous works, Pyne’s primary totem is the “firestick,” the method of creating fire since prehistoric times that has become an instrument of both power and destruction, which often travel hand in hand. “Fire will happen, with or without people,” he writes. “But what people do with fire speaks volumes about how they live on the land, and what they do to reconcile those firesticks says much about how they live with each other.” The book covers a wide variety of subjects, from the history of humanity’s experience with fire and subsequent wildfires to the complicated philosophies involved in forest management, fire conservancy, environmentalism, and politics. Pyne’s insights remain sound, and he provides a few new ones, as well—e.g., the fact that the spread and intensification of industrial combustion is “the new prime mover of fire on Earth.” Fire is both a gift and a curse for the human race; how we choose to face it can mean all the difference.

More solid work from a fire expert.

Kirkus Reviews