Kingdom of the Third Fire

Fire has existed on Earth for four hundred million years — charcoal evidence in the geological record reaches back to the moment when plant life colonized land and oxygen in the atmosphere first made combustion possible. But the story of fire as a human story begins somewhere far more recent and far more consequential: the moment a single species acquired a monopoly over ignition and began, deliberately and systematically, to reshape the biogeography of every continent it inhabited. Fire historian Stephen Pyne, whose half-century of scholarship has produced the most comprehensive pyrogeography in intellectual history, argues that this transformation was so total that it must be understood not as tool use but as a species identity: human beings are, at their biological core, fire creatures — we evolved smaller guts and larger brains because we learned to cook food, and climbed to the apex of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes.