Europes unquenchable flames, from hearth to Pyrocene, reveal a civilizations combustible coreThis work offers a sweeping history of Europe told through flameand a history of fire refracted through Europes landscapes, sciences, and empires. Drawing on and substantially updating his classic Vestal Fire, Stephen J. Pynes incisive new volume follows fire from Icelands oceanic fringes to the Siberian taiga and the Mediterraneans blaze-prone rim, showing how Europes peculiar geography, history, and culture forged a singular pact with combustion. Organized in three sections, it moves from the elements of practice and ideas that make up Europes core fire narrative to vivid portraits of five fire provinces (Mediterranean, Central, Boreal, Eurasian, and Atlantic) before turning to the global consequences of European expansion.
Tracking millennia of human-made fire, Pyne reveals a relationship in which Europes elites sought to keep fire a servant, ever more tightly controlled. The transition to a fossil-fueled modernity, however, led to a paradox in which Europe lost its mastery as land use, climate, and flame turned feral and the Earth pivoted toward a Pyrocene in which humanitys binge burning created a fire age to rival the ice ages.
The result is both a lucid synthesis and a provocation: what Europes global expansion set into motion has returned to kindle a resurgence of wildfire across the continent, starkly visible in the heat-dome summers of the 2020s. As tool, ecological process, threat, and symbol, fire illuminates Europes pastand its environmental futures.
