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Foreword

A Fireless Land

William Cronon

Readers can certainly be forgiven for wondering what a book entitled The Ice, about the great frozen continent of Antarctica, is doing in a series of books devoted to the history of fire. The book’s author, Stephen J. Pyne, has made his scholarly reputation by tracing, book by book and continent by continent, the role of fire in shaping the natural and human past of this planet. The result is Cycle of Fire, a suite of books which the University of Washington Press takes great pride in publishing as part of our Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. Pyne has succeeded like no historian before him in helping readers see the full sweep of human history through the fiery lens of a planet whose carbon-based organic chemistry and oxygenated atmosphere make combustion an almost inevitable accompaniment of life on every continent but one … Antarctica. How, then, did this fireless place become part of Cycle of Fire?

There are several possible answers to this question. The first is more or less biographical. After completing what appeared at that time to be his magnum opus—Fire in America, on the history of rural and wildland fire in the United States—it looked for a time as if Stephen Pyne, despite his unquestionable talents as a scholar and writer, might fail to find a permanent academic position and would have to seek employment in a line of work that would not permit him to keep writing history. It was at about this time that he was given the chance to spend three months in Antarctica, a journey that profoundly influenced him and led directly to the writing of this book. But it was also in Antarctica that Pyne broadened his historical horizons beyond the North American continent where he had obtained his scholarly training, and began to consider the possibility of writing history on a much broader canvas. It is no accident that a short while after finishing The Ice he chose to write Burning Bush, a “fire history” of that other great southern continent—Australia. In it, he finally declared to himself and everyone else his ambition to write the world history of fire that he has since entitled Cycle of Fire. Without The Ice, Cycle of Fire might never have materialized.

But the kinship between The Ice and the other volumes of Cycle of Fire runs deeper still. Anyone familiar with Stephen Pyne’s other writings will recognize his trademark virtues in this book. The energy and passion for making physical and organic phenomena come alive as real actors inhabiting a historical stage that we too often perceive solely through human eyes: these are just as powerfully in evidence when Pyne writes about ice as when he writes about fire. We are unlikely soon to find another book on Antarctica that offers such an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic vision of this strangest of all continents. Readers of the fire books will not be surprised (though they will be just as delighted) by the ways in which Pyne manages to mingle tales of early polar explorers with painstaking explanations of ice crystals and the aurora borealis, or the ways he combines close readings of Antarctica’s literature and art with discussions of its legal jurisdictions and geopolitical conflicts. Pyne is an author whose curiosity and enthusiasm for anything and everything connected to his subject are positively voracious, so that by the end of his books no reader is likely ever to think about their subjects in the same way again. This turns out to be as true of ice as it is of fire.

One must dig deeper still, though, to realize that The Ice occupies a place so organic to Cycle of Fire that the series could hardly be complete without it. If one truly wants to grasp the source of Stephen Pyne’s passion for his chosen lifework, one must recognize that fire is for him both a metaphor and the ultimate physical embodiment of all that makes the Earth such a special place. We humans often congratulate ourselves for being the highest forms of life on a planet that as far as we know possesses the only life in this solar system, if not in the universe itself. We regard organic life as the phenomenon which more than any other sets Earth apart from everything else in the dark void of the heavens. But what Stephen Pyne long ago realized was that life is only a special case of the more general chemistry of carbon and oxygen that is constantly setting Earth aflame. The great fires whose stories he tells so compellingly in Cycle of Fire are one kind of burning, but so is life: a slower, cooler combustion which nonetheless enacts the same basic chemistry as the burning Earth. The fact that organic life plays such a central role in preparing the way for its hotter, more all-consuming companion is just further evidence of their basic kinship.

If fire and life have thus been bound together since the instant of life’s first creation, then in a sense so profound as to be almost mystical they share in common a birth and death that mark the beginning and end of all things. When the last animal stops breathing, when the last plant stops processing chlorophyll to turn sunlight into sugar, and when the last earthly fire completes its oxidation of the carbon carcasses these organisms will leave behind, what remains will be … The Ice. The frozen waste of Antarctica is thus a glimpse of the future that awaits us at the end of all time, when life and fire finally cease, and with them the human passions and ideas that have lent them so many meanings throughout the long sweep of human history.

Why does The Ice belong in Cycle of Fire? Although it was only the second book in the series, it in fact marked out the beginning and the end that would provide the narrative framework for all the rest. Standing beneath the aurora and gazing out across a seemingly endless expanse of land and ice that provide little fuel for fire and little food for life, Stephen Pyne discovered the epic frame that would yield a scholarly creation like no other in history. We are lucky indeed that he made his unexpected journey to the south and wrote this extraordinary record of what he found at the far end of the Earth.