Stephen Pyne: The Human-Fire Relationship

29:11And that becomes a fire threat. We have a lot of fire in our future. And the choice is which kind we want. I come back to this is our species heritage. This is what we do. And it's time to reclaim that. Wait, why is the conversion of renewables or to renewables going to cause more stuff to burn? No, it won't. The conversion by itself won't. But if we apply that energy in the same way that we've applied fossil fuels to organize the landscape, then we are going to have a big fire problem in that landscape. The climate change part of it may go down. But as we can see from the 19th and early 20th century, you don't need huge droughts and climatic heat domes and the rest of it to cause fire.

30:04There's plenty of other ways to get big fires, and we've seen them. Now it's being overwhelmed by climate change and the rest. But as we wind that down, three months in the spring or fall, that's enough to have big fires. If you've got all this stuff out there and it's arranged in a way that threatens communities and communities are not designed to accommodate fire's presence and the rest of it. Many of us live in cities now in the developed world and fire is gone out of our daily lives. We don't have working flames in our houses anymore. We get it with electricity. We'll have propane. We'll have fossil fuels for gas or heating or whatever else.

30:41But we don't have fire. We don't clean up our yards by burning it. In fact, all these things are prohibited. So we found they're still mostly based in fire, burning of fossil fuels, but we don't see it anymore. And we've forgotten that fire connection. And we've tried to project that into the countryside and the larger landscape. We can apply this firepower from our machines to overwhelm nature's fire. That is a failed formula because what it does is the fires that survive are the ones we can't control. And they do much more damage than all these little fires. It's deciding we've got some bad bacteria in our gut.

31:27We've got an infection, so we kill everything. The good and the bad. We needed the good. And we've got to find a way. That requires that you make decisions. you make choices. Those choices are going to be based on social and cultural and economic values. They're going to be political choices in one form or another. So to live with fire means that we have to be able to talk to one another and come to some sort of consensus about what we're going to do. And we accept that as legitimate. Fire is not just a technical problem. It's about how we live on this planet. And right now we're not doing a very good job of it.

32:09Backing up for a second. Now let's call this firefighting for dummies. So what's the gist of how you put out a forest fire? We see news of planes dumping stuff and people jumping in and cutting back trees and all that. But what's the gist of how you put out a forest fire? Let's go back to our campfire. How do you put out a campfire? One way you can put water on it or dirt. If you just bury it, then the fire can continue to smolder underneath. So you also have to break up the stuff that's burning and you have to prevent new stuff from coming in. And that's basically what you do at a much larger scale in a forest fire.

32:56So you create a break in the fuels. That is the vegetation. Ideally, you go down to mineral soil. So there's nothing that can burn. Even smoldering can't go across. And the width of that depends on the intensity of the fire. If you've got flame lanes 200 feet, you'd have to build a fire break the size of football fields. And we're not going to do that. We can't stop it that way. Other than that, you can put some kind of retardants or quenching element, water, if you have it. But you don't always have water in wildlands or in the countryside. And if you're in a drought, The water supply may be even less than normal.

33:37So water can be limited. Retardant can be effective. But both of them are mostly effective against fine fuels. That is the pine needles, the twigs, the small branches, because they can coat it. Fire occurs on the surface of wood. And if you coat that surface, that's all you need. So they're most effective, and that can stop it. So if you've got a fire moving fast in grasslands or some shrub lands, I think there's a big fire in California now in the Mojave Preserve. These are invasive grasses. It can be very effective at that because it can coat it long enough. The coating doesn't have to go through a canopy of trees, which intercepts it.

34:19And the coating may not be blown away by the wind. You can get it on that fine stuff, and that could be effective. So aerial stuff is most effective right at the start. it can help you control it can help people on the ground control it if you've got an engine you've got roads access you've got an engine or something you may be able to drop water bring water on squirt water on it as in a city you may be able to use helicopters to do site-specific drops in areas that are problematic or a fire spotted a spark went across your fire line you need to control that. Otherwise, the whole thing can start over again.

34:55You mop up. It's basically a lot of stirring. It's not very glamorous. It's pretty much stoop labor over a long time and pretty grungy. The other way to control fires, particularly larger fires, is to remove their fuel. And in this case, you can't build a fire line. You can't do it fast enough or big enough. You take what's called an indirect attack. So instead of trying to go mano a mano along the fire line, you pull back to some place that's more or less defensible, a well-established road with a right-of-way, a large river, cliffs that are rocky. And you use that as a break, and then you burn out the material between that site and the approaching fire.

35:45This also takes time to do. And this can be done well, or it can be done badly, like anything. And if it's done badly, you just blackline it, you just napalm it, scorched earth, and you maybe stop the fire, but you may have incinerated a lot of things that could have accommodated a fire much better. So in that case, if you're smart, you plan this out and you do it systematically in ways that actually introduce what might actually be good fire into that landscape. And some parts will overburn, more severely than you want, but a lot of it may be what you would want it if you did a controlled fire in that environment.

36:26These are techniques that are now being used in a lot of areas where you put your firefighting hardware and strength to protect communities, municipal watersheds, so forth. Other than that, you pull back to a place that makes sense, that you can hold and burn out from systematically. A lot less risk to firefighters. You get an amount of fire on the land, and it can be done more cheaply. So there are lots of ways. What do you do? When I was a smoke chaser, we would get out to the fire. Maybe it'd be a tree or two, a dead snag burning. Maybe some surface fire spreading around a bit. whatever we would contain the surface fire so it didn't spread then we would fell the tree and that was probably the most hazardous thing we did because you get a burning tree and you're rattling it with a chainsaw and trying to put it on the ground you put it on the ground and then you break it up just like you would a giant campfire and you systematically put it out and that's it on these really large fires, it's much harder.

37:35And we still tend to think that all of our mechanical might can overpower these fires. And we've seen some of these large fires, particularly in California, we build these fire lines and it just goes right over them. You can get spot fires, sparks, embers can go a couple of miles ahead. And if you miss one, it's like starting the fire over again. So that's very difficult. And we keep trying, but that's very hard. And it really is not effective. We don't have something the scale of fire that we can match these large fires. Yeah, we can knock down these little fires, these nuisance fires, these medium grade fires, little effort, we can contain it.

38:17But the really large ones, the ones that are the most dangerous, the ones that do the most damage, we can't do anything to get out of the way. And could those large fires have been prevented by prescribed burns? That's a great question. They can't be prevented, but they can be changed. We can modify what it burns. We really can't control the wind and the humidity. We can't control mountains and canyons. They're what they are. They're not going to change, but we can modify the stuff that burns, the vegetation. And the best way to do this is in advance. And you try to get a landscape that can accommodate the sort of fire it grew up with and try to keep fire on the ground to prevent it from getting in the canopies.

39:08There are some biotas that simply burn in the canopy. That's how they burn. But we've allowed the patches of that burning to become huge by removing fire. and in some ways by, not just by suppression, but by all the other ways we've done it. And so now they burn much bigger blocks with very different ecological consequences. We have fires that used to burn on the surface and forests that were very well adapted to that. Maybe every year, what did it matter? You're burning off basically grass and a year's needle cast, pine needles on the ground. Easy. We've allowed that to become overgrown with stuff intermediate fuels that allow fire to get into the canopy.

39:50And then that forest is not adapted to that kind of fire. So we could restore that older fire regime, that older pattern of fire. We've experimented with a variety of things. Can you crush and masticate some of those shrubs and lower stuff? Can you thin, which is a kind of weedy wooding? You're taking out the small reproduction that's come in, leaving the older trees behind. Can you do that and alter the pattern of fuels? Yes, you can. But we've also found that those work best if they're also accompanied by burning. So you put a lot of fuels on the ground and you burn them, that is the best outcome.

40:31Other than that, burning without all the mechanical treatment is better than just the mechanical treatment by itself. For one thing, you've now put a lot more stuff on the ground where it's accessible to fire. Up next on Remarkable People. I can remember when I was in school, the story from climatologists was that we were headed for a new ice age and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just the arithmetic. It's all the various rhythms and the rest of it. And we should be getting ready for it. We're not going to have an ice age now because we've created a fire age.

41:10Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So if I read, oh, there's a forest fire now at Yosemite. Am I supposed to think, oh my God, another big tragedy? Or am I supposed to think, oh, this is good. It's getting rid of this material on the ground. So in the long run, this is a good thing. I'm glad you brought up Yosemite. About 50 years ago, they started a program of systematically restoring fire. And it's had its ups and downs. And they haven't done as much as they wanted or as much as they should have.

41:58And they are now recommitting over the past few years, getting fire back in the valley. They're having to remove a lot of trees that weren't there when the park was established that have come in because fire was eliminated. They're having to thin and reintroduce fire in the sequoia groves, the mariposa grove, to prevent them from being overwhelmed by fire. And they've been experimenting with how to reintroduce fire in the backcountry. And the PICA fire that we're seeing is part of that reintroduction program. And they've got about 50 years experience. They've learned a lot. there's still a lot to do.

42:34But what they have done is to draw one of these big boxes where there are natural barriers to the fire spread, or some places they will put in a hand line. So it's not a bulldozer that tears up the landscape and it may be burning out from that. They will be working with that fire within that box. And the real problem they face is not the fire blowing up so much as smoke because it's all going to go in the valley. And so you have evening smoke with the normal cool air drainage. And that can be an annoyance. It can be a health hazard at times if it's really thick for people, particularly if they have any kind of lung ailments.

43:18And so part of their problem managing fire turns out, how do they keep smoke from the areas where people are densest and where it might be an actual hazard. So it's very difficult. So this fire may be going for a while, and then it turns out California's fire scene changes, and the smoke becomes intolerable. They may have to intervene and put that fire out in some way, or speed it up. And they're experimenting with lots of things. They've had to put out a lot of natural fires in this one basin, the Illouette Basin, where they've been doing this since the early 70s. And they're experimenting. Well, we had to put it out for other reasons.

43:58The timing wasn't right. But maybe in the fall, we could go back and relight it right where it left off. And then there's a milder burning period until the rains come. And that might be a way. So there are all kinds of ways to do it. I think people think of like it's an urban fire and you just roll up enough hoses and firefighters and you just smother the thing. That's not how it's going to work in nature and we need those fires. That's part of what made the park what it is and why we value it. So we have to work with fire. That means we're constantly negotiating with fire and fire has some say in this.

44:35It's not just ours to throw around as we wish. There's some give and take. Fire will do things if we do it its way. But we've up until a century or so ago, we managed to live with fire pretty well. And now we've got this paradox that we have all of this energy, all of these machines, all of this science, all of this firefighting technology, and the rest of it, and we can't control fire. What happened here? Maybe it was the nature of how we changed society, how this new power that fossil fuels gave us allowed us to rethink how we are going to live on the land. And we thought we could do this because we didn't see immediate consequences.

45:17But then you do start seeing the consequences. And now they're on a global scale. I did a short book. It came out this spring called Pyrocene Park. And I had a chance to join a backcountry trek. The park had organized a group of fire people and some of the upper administrators of the park. They were going into this basin where they started restoring fire 50 years ago. It was a three-day trek and people would talk about it and the scientists would say how much better this landscape is than outside where it hasn't gone through this process. The water flow is better. Biodiversity is better. Character of the fire is better.

45:53And it was great. But it also occurred to me that Yosemite is in a sense a microcosm of what I'm seeing happening to the earth. This is an area that was shaped by ice. The ice ages created almost all of the great monumental landscapes and the features that we have, even the distribution of waters and forests and the character and so forth, we're all shaped by ice. And increasingly now it is being dominated by fire, both the fossil fuel fires that are altering the climate, the atmosphere, but also all of the other fires that we're seeing in those landscapes that have resulted from our transition.

46:32And it turns out here's a park. It's a flagship park for the national park. It's the best endowed fire management park in the country. And it struggles to get the right kind of fire back in, to get the regime. It's a hard task. So many competing interests and values at risk. So fine, they're doing pretty well. What about all the other parks that aren't as well-equipped? What about all the surrounding national forests that have very flammable landscapes below? Yosemite's fires ultimately burn out into granite. But what about all those other places that are burning into denser forests? How do you manage them?

47:14How do you manage all those competing interests and the rest of it? It's really tough. But if we're serious, that's the task before us. The other thing, a lot of the fire problems are things we need to fix anyway. Why do we have power lines starting fires? This is absurd. We've known for decades we needed to fix the grid anyway. Let fire be a part of that. Do we really want to convert all of our agricultural and open spaces to exurbs and suburbs? Is that a land use that we really want to promote? So maybe that's a fire problem. So maybe fire is solving other kinds of things and so forth. Fire is integrating everything around it.

47:53and a lot of those things need to be fixed anyway. So we're fixing fire, and fire can be used to help fix that. So in some ways, it's not that we have one huge problem and we have to mobilize to fix this one huge thing. Fire is all over the place, but that also means there are lots of things we can do.

48:14I realize this is kind of a startling vision for someone who's not used to thinking about the world and fire in this way, but this is what you get. Two weeks ago, I interviewed Ted Scambos and he's the Mr. Antarctica, the, is it Twaits? Twaits Glacier. Yeah. So he's Mr. Twaits Glacier. And he had a similar story about the rising sea level and stuff. And man, it's going to be a depressing month on my podcast. But what's depressing is that even if we change now at speed, so many things are locked in. There's a lot of lag time built into this. So we're going to be dealing with the consequences for a long time.

48:55Yeah, I actually see in my perverse moments, I think the other reason we need to keep all that fossil fuel buried is because we may need it. Because the geophysics of the ice ages didn't change when at the end of the last glaciation, we've been in an interglacial. And I can remember when I was in school, the story from climatologists was that we were headed for a new ice age and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just the arithmetic. It's all the various rhythms and the rest of it. And we should be getting ready for it. We're not going to have an ice age now because we've created a fire age to replace it.

49:38But But there's a lesson in that now that we've learned we can disrupt the climate, we're in the business of having to manage it. And if we manage it properly, we may be able to forestall the next ice age or nudge it in useful ways. And to do that, we're going to have to burn a hell of a lot of fossil fuel. So why are we doing it now when a future generation may need that for another purpose? But that's really long-term, almost science fiction fantasy. But I don't know that it's completely out of order if we think about fire. Fire is our friend. Let me get this. Ice is not. You're saying that we may face another ice age, so we need to save our carbon-based fuels for that day when we need to heat ourselves?

50:28Yeah. Some future generation, who knows, several hundred, maybe a few thousand years from now. People in West Virginia. thing is pushing it towards the cold, pushing it towards cold. We may need it for another purpose. Why are we wasting it now and multiplying our problem? Wow. But that would be a case of where our ability to manipulate fire may save us a lot of grief. So that's my interest in the story and the speculation. Can I ask you a real personal question because you're scaring the shit out of Yeah. Okay. So my house is on a couple of hills that's covered with eucalyptus trees. Is that crazy?

51:07I know eucalyptus burns like a candle, right? Am I asking for it? It's very likely you're going to have a fire there. It's going to burn hot, but you're not helpless. Cleaning up under the eucalypts so that they don't have fire to carry into the canopy. They have leaves, not needles. The leaves are impregnated with all kinds of oils that easily volatilize and can erupt in flame. But I think managing the eucalyptus around and especially putting your house in order. And what takes out houses are basically embers. You have these blizzards of sparks blowing ahead of the flaming front. And those sparks, it's like a swarm of locusts coming in.

51:55and if there are any points of vulnerability, they're going to find them. That is a place where a fire can get started. So it can get started in cracks if you have very large grid vent coverings so embers can blow into your attic. If you've got vegetation right up against the house, embers get into the vegetation, start a fire, then you've got fire burning right next to the house or steps, all of those things. And the other part is flame. And this depends how close your neighbors are and whether your neighbors have taken care of their place or not. So in some ways, the fire spreads like a contagion.

52:32And in some ways, fire is a virus. It's not alive, but it depends on the living world for oxygen and fuel and to burn. So think about what would you do for COVID? So you wear masks to prevent aerosol spread. That's like hardening your house against embers. You clear out an area right around maybe four feet or so, right around the house to prevent surface spread or fire coming in. That's social distancing. And then getting enough of the neighborhood to protect itself, that's herd immunity. And in some ways, it's a very simple way to imagine how to protect your house. But then think about the social context and political context of getting a neighborhood to do it.

53:12So you protect your house, but all of your neighbors haven't. And there you go. You're still at risk. But I invite you the next time you see an aerial view of a community that's been burned out or go back and look at all the classic views over the last, say, 20 years or 30 years. And what you see is that the houses are incinerated. The cars are melted down to pools of aluminum, but the trees came through fine. So it is not the trees that are the hazard. If you've got a tree right next to your house, that's going to burn, probably because the house is going to set it on fire. And then it feeds back it.

53:49But even Paradise, California, look at the aerial views and you see the surrounding forest came through pretty well. It's adapted to fire. The city was not. I might have to take this out of the final episode, but the people around here scared me enough where when I moved here, we cut down about 150 eucalyptus forestries to get distance from them. Well, people like it. I was looking at the Oakland Tunnel Fire in 91, which is the annunciation for this new era of where exurbs and cities are burning. And there was one house we saw that burned three times now. It's a great view. You're willing to do it, but there are also social costs.

54:39People may have to put their lives at risk to protect your house. Your house may be a threat to others. At some point, it is not up to you to negotiate on your own with fire. It's a social decision. And that's what makes it very difficult now. Okay. I want to switch gears completely while you got me all shook up, which is, you know. Well, the point is that it's fairly, and there are lots of guides out there now and groups to help. The whole Firewise program is committed to this and the communities to do it. It just isn't happening at scale. So when we cut down the eucalyptus trees, we had them chipped.

55:18So now the ground is a lot of eucalyptus chips. Was that the wrong thing to do? It's not necessarily a bad thing to do. There are problems now with large chipping operations where they have mounds of chips, and then that is self-igniting. In other words, it's like a pile of oily rags. And so we're seeing some episodes of that. In your case, it's spread out. That will burn. It won't necessarily burn with the vigor of shrubs or pine needles and so forth because they're larger chips and they're flat, but it will burn. And if it gets going, it will throw up a lot of heat, which you probably don't want.

55:58And it also smothers any kind of native grasses or flowers. So you might consider disposing of those. I don't know. It sounds like you're in an area where you're probably not going to be allowed to burn it. But that would be a great thing to just burn with your neighbors. And they're forming prescribed fire associations now where private lands is becoming a deal. And California has changed its liability statutes regarding prescribed fire to make it more likely. So that would be an option. It probably isn't an option for you. So you will have to haul it out. But I'll use that. Let me just give you a sense of the absurdity of this.

56:41I grew up in Phoenix, the outskirts of Phoenix. And you just burn off your lawn in the spring before the rains come in the summer. And it took five minutes, 10 minutes. and it's gone. Well, now you're certainly not going to be allowed to burn off your lawn in a city. I have to rent a dethatcher, which scarifies all this stuff up, all the dead stuff up instead of burning it. So I'm running fossil fuels to run this dethatcher. Then I have to bag it in plastic bags made from oil. And then I put it out where it will be hauled off in a fossil fueled garbage truck to be dumped into a landfill where it decomposes to methane.

57:25No flame, no fire, no smoke. That is acceptable. Whereas the old way of just doing it and you have a neighborhood thing, okay, everybody, we're going to do it now. And it's over with done. That's where we've gotten to. But that could be corrected. Doesn't that sound absurd? Yeah. Okay. Getting away from fire for a second. Yeah. You have written at least 15 nonfiction books that I can figure out. And I want to know how you write. What word processor do you work from an outline? Do you get a content editor? Do you turn in the manuscript and run away from it? What's your writing process? Writing for me is a habit.

58:12And it's like exercise. And you'll have a lot of people who run and they'll say they missed the run. If they don't get it in, they feel run down, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, for me, what writing. You ask not to talk about fire, but there's a saying in fire. It came out of Florida where they teach prescribed burning. And the saying is every day is a burn day. And you assume that you are going to do burning unless something stops it, as opposed to saying, get up and let's see if everything's lined up. Wow, everything's lined up. So let's think about burning. That for me is the same mantra for writing.

58:44Every day is a writing day unless there's something that intervenes. So I just assume I'm going to be writing. And when I was younger, I wrote at night. As I got older, I write in the morning. I carry around a little notebook for notes and stuff. I spend a lot of time thinking about the organization, how the organization can support what I'm writing. It's not just a bag of data. There should be a narrative in it. There should be an organizing device and so forth. Think about that. I am writing as I go along researching. I read stuff and I'm always, how does this get translated into text? And are you using a word processor?

59:29Yeah. Word processors were a great invention because I had to retype manuscripts, large manuscripts. and you just introduce more errors. It's endless. And that took a huge amount of time. Word processing, all that goes away. It was hard for me to learn to edit on the word processor. I wanted to print out and I still prefer that. Short stuff I can do on the monitor, but otherwise I want it printed and I want to be able to move stuff around and not just have it all in my head. I actually taught nonfiction for a while in grad school. I taught a course. And my sense is you need a system. You need a method.

1:00:12But everybody's method is different. It's like exercising or dieting or learning to play a musical instrument. You've got to have some regular way, make it habitual. But you need to find what will work for you. and there must be hundreds of books out about writing and they're all correct. This is how you can do it because it worked for me. This is what I did. I look at that and I say, this makes no sense to me at all. The lesson is you need a system, but you need a system that plays to your strengths. Okay, my last question about writing. Do you completely outline your book and then fill in the outline or are you like playing it as it goes?

1:00:56I have never used an outline of the sort I was trained at elementary school. And the older I get, the more writing experience I have, the more abbreviated the outline becomes. What I want to know is that what is the overall design here? How do the parts fit? What is the organizing principle? What are the motifs? In a sense, it was like a decorative thing. If there are certain phrases or images that recur, how do they fit in? And then I begin writing. I immerse myself in whatever the data sources are for what I could write for maybe a day or a day and a half. And then I just write that with this larger thing in mind.

1:01:39So a sort of compass bearing. I know where I'm going. But other than that, I'm not going to go through this tree. I'm not going to climb over this boulder. I'm going to go around it. But I'm getting to that direction, that sort of vision. And the other thing I think is really vital is voice, getting your voice right for whatever the project is and getting your own voice in general. I found a lot of students teaching this thought they had to write in an academic way. And half of the course became a detox program, getting this, flushing all that out of their system so they could speak in their own voice.

1:02:13And then that freed them to be able to do other things. So I'm a great believer. Voice and vision are the two things. I think you nail that down, they solve a lot of problems for you. But I'm saying that as someone who just previously said, you need a system, but it's got to be your own system. So that's a system I've evolved. You need to find your own. So as you look back on your career, is the conclusion that you just need to own a niche? You are the Martha Fellow of fire. You're the mother of fire, right? Right. So is your advice on a niche? It could be Antarctica. It could be fire. It could be rising sea level, but own something.

1:02:55I think in a career sense, that's very valuable, but I don't know how to advise someone to find it. This was completely accidental for me. And probably my best single book was The Ice. It had nothing to do with fire, but it built on Grand Canyon. It was about Antarctica. And that was just an opportunity. I didn't know what to do with it. There was this Antarctic fellowship, and they're trying to get people in the humanities to go to Antarctica. I went for three months. I spent Christmas at the South Pole. I spent New Year's at Dome C, which is probably the end of the world. And it made a profound impression on me, actually.

1:03:33When I wrote my first fire book, I thought that was the end of it. There were no academic jobs. I couldn't get anything. I wanted to write the book. I was having to give up my life as a North Rim long shot, as we called ourselves. And I wanted this as, yeah, this is what I got out of it. And I had no idea that it, and then I just decided I'd keep going. Do I want to drill down more into that topic or go broader? And I thought broader would be more fun. What does Australia look like? And Canada, Europe, including Russia, lots of smaller, what is India? Very interesting fire story. All over the world you can go.

1:04:16You can find this stuff. I just kept at it. And I kept thinking. For me, it was like being on the American River in California in 1848. You're just walking down picking up nuggets. Why isn't this place swarming with people? This is great stuff. But there was nobody. And so I wound up creating a field for myself. And you think, well, that's great. Now you're known for that. But how many students do I have studying that? How many students did I have coming in? Nobody was interested in FIRE. Nobody's hired in history to study FIRE. What do I do for Grant? Who reviews it? You've done something new, something interdisciplinary.

1:04:59You've invented a field. But if there is no institutional context for that field, you're just this crazy guy. out there with a torch. And wow, that's really cool. But the MacArthur Fellowship was really a windfall for me because it allowed me to continue this when I had no other really support for it. Who's going to do that? Novelty is useful up to a point, but freakishness is not. And it's a narrow line. Okay. It turns out to have been a great career choice. If I had another 20 years and money, I could still do South America's yet to be done. I've got a book on Mexico, but South Africa, most of Asia, nobody's done it.

1:05:44I could continue doing this. So yeah, I invented a field, but in some ways I can feel like maybe it's like a gated community. It's great. But now the world changed. I'm doing all this fire stuff and nobody was particularly interested. And now the world started burning in very visible ways. And so suddenly, everybody's doing fire now. The place is overflowing with all these disciplines that had no interest in fire are now engaged with fire. Everybody's studying it. So I don't think I could have done what I did if I were starting now. In a sense, it was just an empty field and nobody saw it. But if you're trained to be a fire guy and look for smokes out there in those difficult landscapes, I was trained to see fire.

1:06:28And it just had to make that an academic pursuit rather than just this long shot at having a great summer. So there you have it. Stephen Pine and his remarkable career with fire. A few days ago, I learned that my insurance company is no longer writing homeowners policies in California. One of the big factors in this decision was the threat of wildfires. That's how big a deal this is. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Beth Daly of The Conversation for suggesting and making this episode possible. My thanks to Madison Nismer, the drop-in queen of Santa Cruz. She's on fire at Jack's whenever she's in the water.

1:07:18Tessa Nismer, researcher. She prepares me for these interviews. And then there's the sound design team. Remarkable as they are, Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez. And finally, the rest of the gang. Oh my God. Louise Magana, Alexis Nishimura, and Fallon Yates. This is the Remarkable People team. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. Oh wait, I forgot to tell you. In the first week of March, my new book is coming out. I co-authored it with Madison Nisemer. It's called Think Remarkable. Get it as opposed to think different. So beginning in the first week of March, you can probably order it right now at Amazon in advance.

1:08:13I want you to read Think Remarkable. It explains how to make a difference and how to be a remarkable person too. Thanks.

1:08:30This is Remarkable People.