“Among the ancient elements, fire is the odd one out. Earth, water, air – all are substances. Fire is a reaction. It synthesises its surroundings, takes its character from its context. It burns one way in peat, another in tallgrass prairie, and yet another through lodgepole pine; it behaves differently in mountains than on plains; it burns hot and fast when the air is dry and breezy, and it might not burn at all in fog. It’s a shapeshifter.”
“The intellectual idea of fire is a shapeshifter, too. The other elements have academic disciplines behind them. The only fire department on a university campus is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm sounds. In ancient times, fire had standing with the other elements as a foundational axiom of nature. In 1720, the Dutch botanist Herman Boerhaave could still declare that: ‘If you make a mistake in your exposition of the Nature of Fire, your error will spread to all the branches of physics, and this is because, in all natural productions, Fire… is always the chief agent.’”
“By the end of the 18th century, fire tumbled from its pedestal to begin a declining career as a subset of chemistry and thermodynamics, and a concern only of applied fields such as forestry. Fire no longer had intellectual integrity: it was considered a derivation from other, more fundamental principles. Just at the time open fire began retiring from quotidian life, so it began a long recession from the life of the mind.”
“Fire’s fundamentals reside in the living world. Life created the oxygen fire needs; life created the fuels. The chemistry of fire is a biochemistry: fire takes apart what photosynthesis puts together. When it happens in cells, we call it respiration. When it occurs in the wide world, we call it fire.”
“Today, ecologists refer to landscape fire as a disturbance akin to hurricanes or ice storms. It makes more sense to imagine fire as an ecological catalyst. Floods and windstorms can flourish without a particle of life present: fire cannot; it literally feeds off hydrocarbons. So as atmosphere and biosphere have changed, as oxygen has ebbed and flowed, as flora and fauna have sculpted biomass into new forms, so fire has evolved, morphing into new species.”
“A revolutionary phase-change all around. Until that Promethean moment, fire history had remained a subset of natural history, particularly of climate history. Now, notch by notch, fire gradually ratcheted into a new era in which natural history, including climate, would become subsets of fire history. In a sense, the rhythms of anthropogenic fire began to replace the Milankovitch climate cycles which had governed the coming and going of ice ages. A fire age was in the making.”
“The species that won biggest was ourselves. Fire changed us, even to our genome. We got small guts and big heads because we could cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we could cook landscapes. And we have become a geologic force because our fire technology has so evolved that we have begun to cook the planet. Our pact with fire made us what we are.”
“We hold fire as a species monopoly. We will not share it willingly with any other species. Other creatures knock over trees, dig holes in the ground, hunt – we do fire. It’s our ecological signature.”
“Still, ignition came with limits. Not every spark will spread; not every fire will behave as we wish. We could repurpose fire to our own ends, but we could not conjure fire where nature would not allow it. Our firepower was limited by the receptivity of the land, an appreciation lodged in many fire-origin myths in which fire, once liberated, escapes into plants and stones and has to be coaxed out with effort.”
“In 1954, the US anthropologist Loren Eiseley likened humanity itself to a flame – spreading widely and transmuting whatever we touch. This process began with hunting and foraging practices, but sharpens with agriculture. Most of our domesticated crops and our domesticated livestock originate in fire-prone habitats, places prone to wet-dry cycles and so easily manipulated by fire-wielding humans. The way to colonise new lands was to burn them so that, for a while, they resembled the cultivars’ landscapes of origin.”
“Instead of redirecting or expanding fire, the conversion to industrial burning removed open flame, simplified it into chemical combustion, and stuffed it into special chambers. Instead of being constrained by the abundance of fuels, anthropogenic fire was constrained by sinks, the capacity of land, air and ocean to absorb its byproducts. The new combustion was no longer subject to the old ecological checks and balances. It could burn day and night, winter and summer, through drought and deluge. Its guiding rhythms were no longer wind, sun and the seasons of growth and dormancy, but the cycles of human economies.”
“The new energy is rewiring the ecological circuitry of the Earth. It has scrambled ecosystems and is replacing biodiversity with a pyrodiversity – a bestiary of machines run directly or indirectly from industrial combustion. The velocity and volume of change is so great that observers have begun to speak of a new geologic epoch, a successor to the Pleistocene, that they call the Anthropocene. It might equally be called the Pyrocene. The Earth is shedding its cycle of ice ages for a fire age.”
“The flares speak to the extravagance of industrial fire – burning just to burn in order to get more stuff to burn. It’s both a positive feedback and an eerily closed loop that accelerates the process and worsens its consequences. Instead of seasonal waterfowl, vehicles powered by internal combustion engines traverse the landscape ceaselessly.”
“humans found in the firestick an Archimedean fulcrum by which to leverage their will”
“Gradually, however, that lever lengthened until, with industrial fire, we could unhinge even the climate and replace ice (with which we can do little) with fire (with which we can seemingly do everything). We can melt ice sheets. We can define geologic eras. We can, on plumes of flame, leave Earth for other planets. It seems Eiseley was right. We are a flame.”