← 1440 Explores
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- [00:04]
Soni Kassam
Wildfires have gotten worse. Paradise, California in 2018 Maui, Hawaii in 2023. Then in 2025, a massive fire engulfs Los Angeles, flames reaching the iconic Malibu neighborhood and its beachfront homes.
- [00:21]
Steven Pine
It is like driving through hell itself down here.
- [00:25]
Soni Kassam
This LA fire is now one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history.
- [00:31]
Steven Pine
This is unreal. Oh my God.
- [00:40]
Soni Kassam
As our world is warming, fires are growing. In 2024, twice as much forest burned as it did 20 years earlier in 2004, reaching places that didn't used to burn during seasons that didn't burn. The western coast of Maui. The unprecedented wildfires in Canada. A state of emergency has been declared in five regions in Russia. The UK isn't prepar we have entered a new age of fire.
- [01:08]
Steven Pine
It was our constant companion. Now we've turned our best friend into our worst enemy.
- [01:14]
Soni Kassam
So how did we get here? How do wildfires begin and explode? And why have they gotten worse? And in this new, hotter age, how do we need to understand fire differently in order to fight it and maybe learn to live with it? I'm Soni Kassam and this is 1440 explores. We're on a mission to uncover the essential knowledge that explains your world. Stay with us.
- [01:45]
1440 Topics Narrator
Listen. Learning has never been harder. The Internet is overwhelmed with low quality content, clickbait with little substance, AI generated slope and opinions masquerading as facts. Curious people like you are left sifting through noise instead of finding what matters. Enter 1440 topics. We've curated the highest quality resources from across the Internet. Think data, visualizations, captivating videos, long form journalism and paired them with staff written overviews to make every subject easy to understand and explore. Want to learn about venture capital or how new weight loss drugs work? Do you keep reading about CRISPR but are missing the best 101 on the breakthrough technology? Find all of this and so much more at join140.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
- [02:43]
Soni Kassam
Steven Pine is a fire obsessive.
- [02:46]
Steven Pine
I'm an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Really a specialist in fire history.
- [02:56]
Soni Kassam
When he was 18, he spent a summer fighting fires in the Grand Canyon. Then another summer and another summer. Since then, fire hasn't really let him go.
- [03:06]
Steven Pine
I consider myself a pyromantic, not a pyromaniac.
- [03:10]
Soni Kassam
By the way, what do you mean when you say pyromantic?
- [03:14]
Steven Pine
Oh, someone who's prepared to see the world from fire's perspective.
- [03:20]
Soni Kassam
Stephen has written over 30 books on the subject and today he'll Help us understand not just how fire works, but how we've come to see fire as a culture and how now we need to see it differently. But first, to understand wildfires, we have to go way back into the past. Let's bring us back to 420 million years ago, where the story of fire on Earth begins. At that point, there were no birds in the sky, no flowers, no trees as we know them today. Instead, imagine a landscape of lush ground cover, and these plants were starting to do something kind of radical. Breathing out oxygen, transforming the air around them. And that set the stage for another transformation, something that would change the Earth forever. One day, Lightning flashed over a patch of plant, and for the first time, the three basic ingredients of fire met in one place. Fuel, heat, and oxygen. Otherwise known as the fire triangle. And the first thing you need to know, when that little plant caught fire, it made Earth into the only planet we've ever known to burn. Millions of years later, an early human ancestor found some fire and figured out how to keep it going, how to make it useful, making humans the only species that has learned how to domesticate fire. That discovery has made us who we are.
- [05:05]
Steven Pine
We got big heads and small guts because we learned to cook. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook Landscapes. Now we're a geologic force because we're cooking the planet. We are the fire creature.
- [05:18]
Soni Kassam
Humanity's intimate relationship with fire didn't just shape our bodies, it shaped our culture, too.
- [05:24]
Steven Pine
The hearth is the essence of the home.
- [05:26]
Soni Kassam
How we gather.
- [05:28]
Steven Pine
I mean, that's what makes people who share a fireside definition of a family.
- [05:33]
Soni Kassam
Humans love to keep fire in their fireplace, in a campfire, and when wild, far away from their homes. But recently, that's gotten a lot harder. Wildfires are wilder than ever, and that's changed our relationship to fire.
- [05:52]
Steven Pine
What I saw sort of stopped me in my tracks.
- [05:55]
1440 Topics Narrator
It's grown so powerful, it's creating its own weather.
- [05:59]
Steven Pine
I don't know how I could get any worse than this.
- [06:04]
Soni Kassam
So what caused fire to undergo such a dramatic change? How did we turn fire into something so uncontrollable and destructive? You might be thinking, duh, climate change, but the answer isn't that simple. To lay it out, let's go back to the fire triangle. Fuel, heat, and oxygen. We can use the fire triangle to understand how wildfires have exploded and how to rein them back in. We'll skip oxygen because there's usually enough around to keep a fire rolling. But fuel and heat, those stories are much more Complicated. So let's begin with fuel. For tens of thousands of years, indigenous people around the world burned land regularly to manage it. As they saw it, fire was a critical practice for maintaining healthy soil, plants and diverse wildlife. It also had another benefit. Lighting small fires protected them from giant fires because the small fires ate the fuel on the forest floor like dead trees and grass. This was so common that in 1542, Spanish colonizers sailed by Los Angeles and nicknamed it the Bay of Smoke. Sure, it could have been a wildfire raging, but more likely, it was the smoke of Native Americans burning controlled burns, also known as good fire. Then European settlers came, And they brought with them a very different attitude toward fire. Fire was dangerous, something to be suppressed. As America's population grew, so did the debate about how to manage fire, which became especially important in California and the American South. And then, on August 21st of 1910, the biggest wildfire in American history rages. Here's Stephen again.
- [07:58]
Steven Pine
Big fires break out. Three and a quarter million acres burn in the Northern Rockies, most of it in one great blowup.
- [08:06]
Soni Kassam
That's what they called it, the big blow up. After a long hot summer in Idaho, Montana and Washington, a cold front pushes hurricane force winds across the mountains, taking little fires from things like camp fires and controlled burns and merging them into a giant mega fire that gallops across 3 million acres in just 36 hours.
- [08:34]
Steven Pine
78 firefighters were killed in six different incidents scattered across the countryside. The army had been called out. They were brought in to help restore order. Afterwards, the Forest Service was authorized to spend what was necessary to fight the fires. They went a million dollars in debt, which was an enormous amount for that time.
- [08:56]
Soni Kassam
It was 1910. The Forest Service was just five years old. This mega fire scares the bejesus out of its leadership, who eventually decide that they don't ever want this kind of fire to happen again. So they come up with a new policy.
- [09:13]
Steven Pine
Zero tolerance. If we eliminate all fires as soon as possible, then we will never have big fires again because all fires begin as small fires. And so they mandated what became known as the 10am policy. That said the goal is to extinguish or control every fire by 10 o' clock the morning following its report.
- [09:35]
Soni Kassam
The 1910 fire and the 10am policy that followed ushered in the modern era of firefighting. And it was all in the service of one grand fight all fires. The Forest Service built roads into fire prone areas and thousands of lookout towers to spot smoke. They also built miles of phone lines to communicate between them.
- [09:57]
Steven Pine
The problem is that this is completely unmoored from ecological reality and the character of fire. And so all it did was make.
- [10:06]
Soni Kassam
Things worse, because the more fires they put out, the more fuel built up. 200 years ago, the Yosemite Valley in Northern California was a sprawling grassland. But as firefighters suppressed fires that would have naturally cleared vegetation, the valley transformed into a dense forest. This forest, under warm and dry conditions, served as abundant fuel for wildfires. Come 1960s, scientists are catching on and they demand a new approach with a whole new way of seeing forests. Not as a collection of trees that need protecting, but as a dynamic ecosystem where burning is a critical part of a natural life cycle. The Forest Service listened, and in 1978, they officially dropped their 10am policy. Instead of suppressing every fire, they adopted a more flexible approach. This included allowing some fires to burn under controlled conditions and even using prescribed burns as a tool for land Management.
- [11:08]
Steven Pine
This 10:00am policy was treated like a papal encyclical. I mean, this came from on high and there will never be a modification of it. And then, bang, it's gone.
- [11:20]
Soni Kassam
Before long, all the federal land agencies would follow suit.
- [11:23]
Steven Pine
It's like watching the Soviet Union implode.
- [11:26]
Soni Kassam
But while the policy may have changed officially on the ground, little was changing. It's hard to change old habits.
- [11:33]
Steven Pine
I mean, in some ways, it's like changing laws on segregation. You can change the laws, but it's going to take a long time before you start seeing the results in the field. And that's what's happened. We've been unable in most places to get it done.
- [11:49]
Soni Kassam
That's partly because of resource constraints, regulatory hurdles, and shifting public perceptions about the role of fire in ecosystems. And that overgrown Yosemite Valley? It's still overgrown, along with California and most of the U.S. the legacy of those decades of fire suppression is that dense fuel has built up and today it still sits there ready to burn. Alright, so we've got oxygen around us. And we've talked about how a century of fire suppression policies has disrupted natural ecosystems and left our landscape overloaded with fuel. And this buildup of things like deadwood and undergrowth increases our risk of severe wildfires. That brings us to the last piece of the fire triangle. Heat. This too comes back to humans. We are responsible for starting fires and making them more intense. In the case of wildfires, the vast majority are started by humans. Power lines, cigarette butts, campfires, and arson. And want to know the date with the highest number of wildfires in the US it's the 4th of July. Since the start of the new millennium. The number of acres that burn per year in America has more than doubled. One of the reasons is that humans have changed where they build over the last few decades. More and more people are living in wild areas called the wildland urban interface. All these homes and wild areas increase the risk that wildfires start and that when they whoosh across the landscape they cause damage to humans properties and lives. The LA fire of 2025 was so expensive not because of the amount of land that burned, but because of the prices of the homes that stood there.
- [13:43]
Steven Pine
It's a problem with the houses. These houses can be built at essentially the same cost, but different materials with different design that would be resistant to most of what fire can throw at you.
- [13:56]
Soni Kassam
Things like stone roofs, brick walls, and more spaces between homes.
- [14:00]
Steven Pine
So we could expand into more fire prone areas, but you have to live in them in particular ways to survive.
- [14:09]
Soni Kassam
But of course, more human ignitions aren't the only heat sparking extreme fires. When that cigarette butt lands, it's easier for fire to start and spread when fuel is warm and dry. Coming up Fighting fire with fire. Stay with us.
- [14:34]
1440 Topics Narrator
1440 started in 2017 with a simple to deliver fact driven, impactful news to smart, curious readers. Today, our audience of over 4 million is made up of engaged news consumers who want more than just the headlines. They want to understand the why and the how. Yet finding high quality resources to go deeper beyond this podcast, of course, has never been more difficult. The best work, from videos to long form journalism, is too often buried beneath countless pages of clickbait and low quality AI generated content. That's why we created 1440 topics. Our staff hand curates only the best content and organizes it into a separate single place for you to explore. We've done the hard work so you can spend more time learning about alternative investments, hurricanes, ancient Rome, and so much more. Continue learning at join140.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
- [15:41]
Soni Kassam
Okay, let's do a quick review. 2024 was the hottest year on record in a decade that included the 10 warmest years since records began. But what does a hotter climate actually do to wildfires? The answer isn't so straightforward. According to researchers, climate change doesn't just make the dry seasons drier, but also the wet seasons. Wet. Before the 2025 LA fire, California had one of its rainiest winters, followed by a bloom of plant life and then one of the most extreme droughts Southern California has ever seen. This combination of more fuel and more heat sets the stage for more extreme fires. In California alone, 15 of the 20 most destructive fires on record have occurred since 2015. And these extreme fires behave differently than smaller fires like the 2018 Carr Fire in Northern California. And it's not just California that we're talking about. Here's Stephen again.
- [16:47]
Steven Pine
People thought that temperate zones didn't burn because they don't have this regular, wet, dry cycle. Well, temperate zones like central Europe, northeastern US for the most part, have not historically had these explosive fires, but they can. We will start seeing more of that, I think, in the future, as climate change continues its trajectory and we continue to live the way we choose to live on these landscapes.
- [17:13]
Soni Kassam
So what do we do? How are we supposed to rein in this explosion of wildfires? According to Steven Pine, the answer isn't so simple.
- [17:21]
Steven Pine
It should strike us as very peculiar that these large megafires and urban conflagrations are a pathology of the developed world. I mean, these are the people with the most money, the most science, the most technology, and we're the ones who are being hammered by it. So there is something fundamentally wrong in our relationship and even in our understanding of fire.
- [17:45]
Soni Kassam
Stephen explains the fire triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen is only one way to see fire. There's also a more nuanced perspective, viewing fire as something like a virus, maybe.
- [17:59]
Steven Pine
Not itself fully alive, but dependent on the living world and so acquires many of its properties. I mean, it's birthed, it breathes, it eats, it moves, it even creates offspring in the form of spot fires. It dies. And if you think about fire in those terms, then your response to a problem, fire, is not just a physical response. Your sense is, okay, there's something about the setting, something about the habitat, the living landscape that is broken.
- [18:31]
Soni Kassam
But how do you fix a broken landscape? Many experts argue that besides curbing climate change, the answer is to fight fire with fire. This is what they call the fire paradox. In order to prevent large, dangerous fires that burn out of control, we need to light more small fires and return to the kind of burning that indigenous populations did before the idea took hold that all fires are bad. Stephen shares the story about a fire that burned in Arizona in January 2025. He could see the flames in the mountains from his window, but firefighters didn't try to kill it.
- [19:14]
Steven Pine
And this fire was completely out of control. There was a nothing anybody could do. Everything was favoring it. And then two things stopped it. One was another wildfire on the side that burned, so the flank stopped burning. And the other is that it burned into a fire that four years previously had been managed and they had carefully, over several weeks, burned out, expanded the domain of a wildfire to include a lot of other surrounding areas, tying it in. And it burned out on that. They did that at the same time LA is burning. And that that contrast for me, a very powerful one. They are managing this and that is the choice. We are going to have these bad fires and they're either going to be stopped by our prior treatment using fire in some form, or they are going to be stopped by other wildfires.
- [20:11]
Soni Kassam
As Steven sees it, with the burning of fossil fuels, humans have shifted the world into an age of fire, what he calls the Pyrocene.
- [20:20]
Steven Pine
With our various fire habits, we have created the fire equivalent of an ice age. We are remaking the planet bit by bit.
- [20:29]
Soni Kassam
In the Pyrocene, we can't avoid fire.
- [20:32]
Steven Pine
We are all being affected by fire. Fire touches us all.
- [20:37]
Soni Kassam
But we do have a choice. Do we have good fire or bad? To create more good fire means lighting controlled burns that eat that extra fuel, like the buildup on the forest floor. And pulling that off at scale would require transformations in our infrastructure, like national fire associations that help people burn their own land and laws that encourage them to burn.
- [21:00]
Steven Pine
It's just casual, not careless, but just, yeah, this is just what you do and this is how you clean up the countryside. This is sort of spring cleaning for nature and that's completely alien to us now.
- [21:16]
Soni Kassam
It would mean a return to a culture of regular burning that existed long before the 10am policy. It would require a transformation in practice, but also in mindset. Fire, Steven says, is not something we should demonize.
- [21:30]
Steven Pine
Fire is a shapeshifter. We need to shape shift with it. In some ways, we can recover from an abusive relationship to fire and make it our best friend again, our companion. So not all fires are bad.
- [21:48]
Soni Kassam
I guess it's time we learn to embrace fire wisely because only then can we heal both the land and ourselves. Thanks for listening to 1440 explores. I'm Sony Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you think@podcastoin140.com while you're at it, start your learning journey with us at join140.com subscribe to our free daily and weekly newsletters on world affairs, business and finance, society and culture, and much more. 1440 Explorers is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Dan Bobkoff and Kim Naderfin Pietersa. It was fact checked by Sanam Skelly. Our sound designer is Jay Cowett. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff. And the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.