"Fire is a daunting human ecological challenge and a major subject in science and policy debates about global trends in land conversion, climate change, and human health. Persistent environmental orthodoxies reduce complex burning traditions to overly simplistic representations of environmental destruction, degradation, and loss while reinforcing existing social inequities involving smallholders. Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing...

"A dramatic reorientation of humanity's relationship with fire, centralizing its place in the stories we tell about human history, climate change, and the future. The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since life first met land, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, a genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself...

In this stunningly original book, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that "cooking" created the human race. At the heart of "Catching Fire" lies an explosive new idea: The habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labor.