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Pyrophobia

The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (of Greek origin) occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g., agoraphobia) and in biology to descibe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e. more...

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g., acidophobia). In common usage they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject.

Many people apply the suffix "-phobia" inappropriately to mild or irrational fears with no serious substance; however, earlier senses relate to psychiatry which studies serious phobias which disable a person's life. For more information on the psychiatric side of this, including how psychiatry groups phobias as "agoraphobia", "social phobia", or "simple phobia", see phobia. Treatment for phobias may include desensitization (graduated exposure therapy) or flooding.

The following lists include words ending in -phobia, and include fears that have acquired names. In many cases people have coined these words as neologisms, and only a few of them occur in the medical literature. In many cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game.

Note too that no things, substances, or even concepts exist which someone, somewhere may not fear, sometimes irrationally so. A list of all possible phobias would run into many thousands and it would require a whole book to include them all, certainly more than an encyclopedia would be able to contain. So this article just gives an idea of the kind of phobias which one may encounter, certainly not all.

Most of these terms tack the suffix -phobia onto a Greek word for the object of the fear (some use a combination of a Latin root with the Greek suffix, which many classicists consider linguistically impure).

In some cases (particularly the less medically-oriented usages), a word ending in -phobia may have an antonym ending in -philia - thus: coprophobia / coprophilia, Germanophobia / Germanophilia.

See also the category:Phobias.

Phobia lists

A large number of "-phobia" lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other.

Some regard any attempt to create a list of phobias as an irrational endeavor because, theoretically, a person could become conditioned to have a fear of anything. Also, a significant number of unscrupulous psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text (see an example below) to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. For a couple of striking examples.

"... Poor performance or grades. Promotions that pass you by. moths phobia will likely cost you tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime, let alone the cost to your health and quality of life. Now Moths Phobia can be gone for less than the price of a round-trip airline ticket."
"... The expert phobia team at CTRN's Phobia Clinic is board-certified to help with Russophobia and a variety of related problems. The success rate of our 24 hour program is close to 100%"

Read more at Wikipedia.org


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Stephen J. Pyne - author
From Whole Earth, 12/22/99 by

Steve Pyne: fifteen years with the North Rim Longshots (a Grand Canyon fire-fighting team); Arizona State University professor burning candles in both history and ecology; today's torchbearer in the blazing lineage of American environmental historians (George Marsh, John Wesley Powell, Carl Sauer); and our long-distance fuel, accelerant, oxidizer, spark, flame, and embers for this issue. I consider him the issue's co-editor.

How does he know so much? You exhaust your intake reading him on the ecobuage or essartage fire/fallow cycle of France, and then on you go to Russia, or the need-fire of Ireland, or fire-stick firming in Australia, or slash-and-burn in Brazil. His fire spread is staggering, especially on the cultural centrality of fire, forestry, and agricultural practices--and also on the transitions from natural to aboriginal to agricultural to industrial to intermixed combustion. Smoking scholarship, burning prose, glowing metaphors.

Especially appealing are Steve's sympathies for those whose daily lives are intimate with open fire: the Smokejumpers, fire/fallow peasants, pastoralists. In them, he finds an antidote for our unbalanced pyrophobia. He looks to the ethical teachings of those who watch fire, think about it, implying that responsibility for such a flamboyant phenomenon (balancing fuel, flame, light and heat, and desire) is a balance between honoring open adventurous "free" flames and tending/caring for more focused utilitarian fire and heat. I couldn't agree more: fire (and water), the great gurus of Gaia.

A Body of Work

Where to start? America's Fires (1997; see page 64) is Steve's easiest, short (fifty-four-page) entree into wildland and forest fires and our changing cultural paradigms. World Fire (1995) is the gem of cross-cultural fire comparisons and is the most contemporary in its pursuits. Vestal Fire (1997), Steve's most recent, carries a denser wisdom, a melding of the previous eight books. It lays out the Roman origin and spread of the "imperial" European fire ideologies to the neo-Europes (the colonies) of the planet. Vestal Fire is a War and Peace-scale tome, good for many all-nighters.

Fire in America (1982) was the first in his fire cycle. Though Steve explains its limitations in his new intro (1997), his passionate desire to describe the importance of fire in human history and his closeness to his firefighter experience infuse this volume with a specific pyrophylic, pyromantic intimacy. It sets the tone, his respect for those close to fire's daily workings, for their experiential wisdom versus the academy's mind-bound, isolated ruminations. Burning Bush (1991) is about Australia, but even more about Steve's understanding that fire can be a form of cultivation, a fire-stick agriculture. For Fire on the Rim (1995), see page 67.

I think you get the idea. This is an unprecedented body of work in the history of American letters and, despite my anticipating that each book will repeat too much of the last, it doesn't! Fire has never had a better friend, benefactor, or keeper of the flame.

VESTAL FIRE

VESTAL FIRE An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World

1997; 659 pp. $34.95. University of Washington Press.

"... if fire is a point of discord, it is also a means of integration. It remains a focus, literally--its Latin roots meaning "hearth," and also altar, home, and family--for any human engagement with our surroundings.--WORLD FIRE

"Apart from outright war, almost any form of social unrest, from political protest to economic sabotage to insurrection, has quickly translated into fire. Citizens vote with the torch. --WORLD FIRE

"On the Rim we discussed fife endlessly: there was almost nothing else that mattered. We described our fires' quirks while hunched over ration coffee on late-night firelines, we compared our fires' ease and misery when we returned to the fire cache, we sang and cursed our fires at the saloon. They all, each one, had a personality. There were charmed fires and ugly fires, glorious fires and fires that were existentially wretched, fires rich with loose dirt and mean fires that burned amid nothing but roots and rocks. There were fires that hurt, fires that hummed, fires that inspired, fires that infuriated. The character of the fire determined our experience.

And that was how I would write about historic fires, about fire in toto. --FIRE IN AMERICA

"But industrialization has gone further. Much as early hominids sought to replace the flame with the torch, and as early agriculturists sought to substitute domesticated burning for wildfire, so modernized societies have striven to replace wildland combustion with industrial combustion. The furnace supercedes the hearth; the power of fire engines, the power of torches. The critical environments are mechanical, literally within machines, and those portions of the atmosphere and biosphere that directly exchange gases with them. Combustion is no longer necessarily even associated with flame. This has rendered the status of anthropogenic burning unclear.... --WORLD FIRE

"The agronomic [fire/fallow] circle would close, only when humans could import energy and materials from outside the prevailing ecosphere. That process began with overseas colonies, which became an outfield to Europe's infield; but it achieved its apogee when fossil fallows replaced living, and fire was sublimated into machines. Coal and petroleum --extracted from sources far removed from existing ecosystems--poured into the agricultural economy like an infusion of plundered treasure. Applied to fields they brought fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; inside internal combustion engines, they rendered obsolete the fodder-demanding horse, donkey, and ox; embedded within a global economy of capital and trade, they shrank the agrarian circle to a vanishing point.... this new agriculture, flush with imported biotic bullion, began literally redesigning the rural landscape with the fanaticism of a modernist architect. Banning fallow abolished a good bit of biodiversity and imposed its own ecological costs--an inflationary spiral of excess chemicals that piled up on land, seeped into water, and clouded the air. --VESTAL FIRE

"It is not just that fire may be changing world climate, but that the climate of world opinion is compelling a change in our ancient relationship to fire.... --VESTAL FIRE

"All the indigenes had fire....

Fire was there, and it remained for Europeans to define new relationships. In Madagascar they redirected it, in Hispanola they suppressed it, in New Zealand they co-opted it, in Indonesia they intensified it, and in Tasmania they exterminated and replaced it. At Easter Island they reclaimed an isle already colonized, degraded, and abandoned. At Jamaica they deconstructed a settled landscape and then repopulated it with new plants, animals, and peoples. Everywhere, smoke by day and flame by night was, in the words of Captain James Cook, "a Certain sign that the Country is inhabited." Natives set fires that confirmed their presence. Castaways lit signal fires to aid their escape. Fire and people--to find one was to find the other. --VESTAL FIRE

FIRE IN AMERICA

FIRE IN AMERICA A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire

"... if fire is a point of discord, it is also a means of integration. It remains a focus, literally--its Latin roots meaning "hearth," and also altar, home, and family--for any human engagement with our surroundings.--WORLD FIRE

"Apart from outright war, almost any form of social unrest, from political protest to economic sabotage to insurrection, has quickly translated into fire. Citizens vote with the torch. --WORLD FIRE

"On the Rim we discussed fife endlessly: there was almost nothing else that mattered. We described our fires' quirks while hunched over ration coffee on late-night firelines, we compared our fires' ease and misery when we returned to the fire cache, we sang and cursed our fires at the saloon. They all, each one, had a personality. There were charmed fires and ugly fires, glorious fires and fires that were existentially wretched, fires rich with loose dirt and mean fires that burned amid nothing but roots and rocks. There were fires that hurt, fires that hummed, fires that inspired, fires that infuriated. The character of the fire determined our experience.

And that was how I would write about historic fires, about fire in toto. --FIRE IN AMERICA

"But industrialization has gone further. Much as early hominids sought to replace the flame with the torch, and as early agriculturists sought to substitute domesticated burning for wildfire, so modernized societies have striven to replace wildland combustion with industrial combustion. The furnace supercedes the hearth; the power of fire engines, the power of torches. The critical environments are mechanical, literally within machines, and those portions of the atmosphere and biosphere that directly exchange gases with them. Combustion is no longer necessarily even associated with flame. This has rendered the status of anthropogenic burning unclear.... --WORLD FIRE

"The agronomic [fire/fallow] circle would close, only when humans could import energy and materials from outside the prevailing ecosphere. That process began with overseas colonies, which became an outfield to Europe's infield; but it achieved its apogee when fossil fallows replaced living, and fire was sublimated into machines. Coal and petroleum --extracted from sources far removed from existing ecosystems--poured into the agricultural economy like an infusion of plundered treasure. Applied to fields they brought fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; inside internal combustion engines, they rendered obsolete the fodder-demanding horse, donkey, and ox; embedded within a global economy of capital and trade, they shrank the agrarian circle to a vanishing point.... this new agriculture, flush with imported biotic bullion, began literally redesigning the rural landscape with the fanaticism of a modernist architect. Banning fallow abolished a good bit of biodiversity and imposed its own ecological costs--an inflationary spiral of excess chemicals that piled up on land, seeped into water, and clouded the air. --VESTAL FIRE

"It is not just that fire may be changing world climate, but that the climate of world opinion is compelling a change in our ancient relationship to fire.... --VESTAL FIRE

"All the indigenes had fire....

Fire was there, and it remained for Europeans to define new relationships. In Madagascar they redirected it, in Hispanola they suppressed it, in New Zealand they co-opted it, in Indonesia they intensified it, and in Tasmania they exterminated and replaced it. At Easter Island they reclaimed an isle already colonized, degraded, and abandoned. At Jamaica they deconstructed a settled landscape and then repopulated it with new plants, animals, and peoples. Everywhere, smoke by day and flame by night was, in the words of Captain James Cook, "a Certain sign that the Country is inhabited." Natives set fires that confirmed their presence. Castaways lit signal fires to aid their escape. Fire and people--to find one was to find the other. --VESTAL FIRE

BURNING BUSH

BURNING BUSH A Fire History of Australia

1991; 520 pp. $24.95. University of Washington Press.

"... if fire is a point of discord, it is also a means of integration. It remains a focus, literally--its Latin roots meaning "hearth," and also altar, home, and family--for any human engagement with our surroundings.--WORLD FIRE

"Apart from outright war, almost any form of social unrest, from political protest to economic sabotage to insurrection, has quickly translated into fire. Citizens vote with the torch. --WORLD FIRE

"On the Rim we discussed fife endlessly: there was almost nothing else that mattered. We described our fires' quirks while hunched over ration coffee on late-night firelines, we compared our fires' ease and misery when we returned to the fire cache, we sang and cursed our fires at the saloon. They all, each one, had a personality. There were charmed fires and ugly fires, glorious fires and fires that were existentially wretched, fires rich with loose dirt and mean fires that burned amid nothing but roots and rocks. There were fires that hurt, fires that hummed, fires that inspired, fires that infuriated. The character of the fire determined our experience.

And that was how I would write about historic fires, about fire in toto. --FIRE IN AMERICA

"But industrialization has gone further. Much as early hominids sought to replace the flame with the torch, and as early agriculturists sought to substitute domesticated burning for wildfire, so modernized societies have striven to replace wildland combustion with industrial combustion. The furnace supercedes the hearth; the power of fire engines, the power of torches. The critical environments are mechanical, literally within machines, and those portions of the atmosphere and biosphere that directly exchange gases with them. Combustion is no longer necessarily even associated with flame. This has rendered the status of anthropogenic burning unclear.... --WORLD FIRE

"The agronomic [fire/fallow] circle would close, only when humans could import energy and materials from outside the prevailing ecosphere. That process began with overseas colonies, which became an outfield to Europe's infield; but it achieved its apogee when fossil fallows replaced living, and fire was sublimated into machines. Coal and petroleum --extracted from sources far removed from existing ecosystems--poured into the agricultural economy like an infusion of plundered treasure. Applied to fields they brought fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; inside internal combustion engines, they rendered obsolete the fodder-demanding horse, donkey, and ox; embedded within a global economy of capital and trade, they shrank the agrarian circle to a vanishing point.... this new agriculture, flush with imported biotic bullion, began literally redesigning the rural landscape with the fanaticism of a modernist architect. Banning fallow abolished a good bit of biodiversity and imposed its own ecological costs--an inflationary spiral of excess chemicals that piled up on land, seeped into water, and clouded the air. --VESTAL FIRE

"It is not just that fire may be changing world climate, but that the climate of world opinion is compelling a change in our ancient relationship to fire.... --VESTAL FIRE

"All the indigenes had fire....

Fire was there, and it remained for Europeans to define new relationships. In Madagascar they redirected it, in Hispanola they suppressed it, in New Zealand they co-opted it, in Indonesia they intensified it, and in Tasmania they exterminated and replaced it. At Easter Island they reclaimed an isle already colonized, degraded, and abandoned. At Jamaica they deconstructed a settled landscape and then repopulated it with new plants, animals, and peoples. Everywhere, smoke by day and flame by night was, in the words of Captain James Cook, "a Certain sign that the Country is inhabited." Natives set fires that confirmed their presence. Castaways lit signal fires to aid their escape. Fire and people--to find one was to find the other. --VESTAL FIRE

WORLD FIRE

WORLD FIRE The Culture of Fire on Earth

1995; 379 pp. $30. Henry Holt and Company.

"... if fire is a point of discord, it is also a means of integration. It remains a focus, literally--its Latin roots meaning "hearth," and also altar, home, and family--for any human engagement with our surroundings.--WORLD FIRE

"Apart from outright war, almost any form of social unrest, from political protest to economic sabotage to insurrection, has quickly translated into fire. Citizens vote with the torch. --WORLD FIRE

"On the Rim we discussed fife endlessly: there was almost nothing else that mattered. We described our fires' quirks while hunched over ration coffee on late-night firelines, we compared our fires' ease and misery when we returned to the fire cache, we sang and cursed our fires at the saloon. They all, each one, had a personality. There were charmed fires and ugly fires, glorious fires and fires that were existentially wretched, fires rich with loose dirt and mean fires that burned amid nothing but roots and rocks. There were fires that hurt, fires that hummed, fires that inspired, fires that infuriated. The character of the fire determined our experience.

And that was how I would write about historic fires, about fire in toto. --FIRE IN AMERICA

"But industrialization has gone further. Much as early hominids sought to replace the flame with the torch, and as early agriculturists sought to substitute domesticated burning for wildfire, so modernized societies have striven to replace wildland combustion with industrial combustion. The furnace supercedes the hearth; the power of fire engines, the power of torches. The critical environments are mechanical, literally within machines, and those portions of the atmosphere and biosphere that directly exchange gases with them. Combustion is no longer necessarily even associated with flame. This has rendered the status of anthropogenic burning unclear.... --WORLD FIRE

"The agronomic [fire/fallow] circle would close, only when humans could import energy and materials from outside the prevailing ecosphere. That process began with overseas colonies, which became an outfield to Europe's infield; but it achieved its apogee when fossil fallows replaced living, and fire was sublimated into machines. Coal and petroleum --extracted from sources far removed from existing ecosystems--poured into the agricultural economy like an infusion of plundered treasure. Applied to fields they brought fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; inside internal combustion engines, they rendered obsolete the fodder-demanding horse, donkey, and ox; embedded within a global economy of capital and trade, they shrank the agrarian circle to a vanishing point.... this new agriculture, flush with imported biotic bullion, began literally redesigning the rural landscape with the fanaticism of a modernist architect. Banning fallow abolished a good bit of biodiversity and imposed its own ecological costs--an inflationary spiral of excess chemicals that piled up on land, seeped into water, and clouded the air. --VESTAL FIRE

"It is not just that fire may be changing world climate, but that the climate of world opinion is compelling a change in our ancient relationship to fire.... --VESTAL FIRE

"All the indigenes had fire....

Fire was there, and it remained for Europeans to define new relationships. In Madagascar they redirected it, in Hispanola they suppressed it, in New Zealand they co-opted it, in Indonesia they intensified it, and in Tasmania they exterminated and replaced it. At Easter Island they reclaimed an isle already colonized, degraded, and abandoned. At Jamaica they deconstructed a settled landscape and then repopulated it with new plants, animals, and peoples. Everywhere, smoke by day and flame by night was, in the words of Captain James Cook, "a Certain sign that the Country is inhabited." Natives set fires that confirmed their presence. Castaways lit signal fires to aid their escape. Fire and people--to find one was to find the other. --VESTAL FIRE

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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