A Planet with Too Much Combustion and Too Little Fire
More than open fires misplaced, missing, or mixed, industrial fire has emerged at the onset of the third millennium as the driver of planetary combustion. More and more, fire appears less as something that results from climate and increasingly as something that shapes climate. No longer does combustion seem contained within ancient ecological equilibriums, however these might be defined. It grows exponentially with its endless, exhumed fuels. Critics claim that even wildfires -- those that gorge on cleared rainforest, those that sweep through surging scrub -- are themselves ecological aftertremors of the industrial quake that has shaken the Earth.
Third Fire's ashes and fumes are overfilling the biological sinks allotted for burning. Greenhouse gases are stuffing a thin atmosphere, not only with carbon dioxide but with more exotic (and potent) gases like bromine released by wildfire and like methane pumped out by organisms that thrive after the burn. But there are other, worrisome outcomes as well: acid rain, poor visibility, tropospheric ozone, threats to human health from combustion-generated particulates. All of this toxic cocktail free-burning fire also yields, but with seasonal timing and with an evolutionary history of adaptations and in quantities that biotas and the planetary atmosphere and oceans can absorb. Their shared chemistry -- their competition for combustion sinks -- has put fossil-fuel industrial fire into direct rivalry with biomass-fueled open fire. One way to reduce the impact of industrial fire, critics argue, is to reduce other forms of burning.
The Kyoto Protocol commits its signatories to stabilize and eventually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The source of the gases doesn't matter. A molecule of carbon dioxide loosed by land clearing in Sumatra is no different from molecules released by charcoal cooking fires in India, savanna burning in Zambia, or controlled burning for Karner blue butterfly habitat in New York. In a system of carbon credits, one can trade one form of burning for another. In the United States, for example, a proposed expansion of controlled fire for ecological benefits would require a reduction in industrial emissions. The competition for combustion -- hidden from most people by the machinery of modern industry -- must surface as the value-laden choice it has always been.
* * *
An exponential growth in industrial fire cannot continue indefinitely. The deep question is how growth might slow, halt, or reverse itself. Is there a combustion equivalent to the demographic transition that has historically characterized societies as they industrialize? The earliest population changes typically combine high birth rates with plunging death rates, which makes the overall growth explosive. Something similar might well occur with fire. A pyric transition might show an outburst of combustion -- an exorbitant use of fossil fuels that gradually replaces traditional burning. Over a period of decades, a more sustainable fire ecology would emerge. That is the optimistic scenario.
There is evidence to support it. There are places and processes where industrial fire can substitute for open flame, and there are huge improvements possible in fossil-fuel combustion. More cars, for example, do not automatically mean more carbon dioxide. In technologically advanced societies, a "decarbonization" of energy is under way such that greater energy (and fewer emissions) result from more efficient combustion of carbon-based fuels. The commercial development of fuel cells to power vehicles could prompt the combustion load of the planet to drop as quickly as the arrival of the internal combustion engine caused it to shoot up. Industrial fire threatens because it is undiluted -- too singular, too recent, too disaggregated from the larger ecology of Earth. That can change.
So can the argument that this fire, like others, ought to be suppressed, that the absence of fire is intrinsically better than its presence. Contemporary attempts to regulate burning resemble strategies of nature preservation that seek to protect a place by stripping away the human presence. Yet it is not possible to reserve the atmosphere, or to preserve climate; they will change, with or without human action. Rather, it may be that future generations will seek to wield Third Fire to reshape climate as they have Second Fire in the past to reshape biotas. After all, most of the climates in which humanity has evolved have been unfavorable to human life; people relied on fire to make them livable. So, in coming centuries, we may seek to use industrial fire to render climate more agreeable, to stall the onset of new ice ages, to dampen the swings of drought and deluge. Controlled burning may extend its range to the sky. Tweaking climate may combine with engineering genes to define the macro- and micro-economics of nature's future economy.
-- Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press, 2001; ISBN 0-295-98144X; http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Brief-History-Weyerhaeuser-Environmental/dp/029598144X), pp. 180-182
Third Fire's ashes and fumes are overfilling the biological sinks allotted for burning. Greenhouse gases are stuffing a thin atmosphere, not only with carbon dioxide but with more exotic (and potent) gases like bromine released by wildfire and like methane pumped out by organisms that thrive after the burn. But there are other, worrisome outcomes as well: acid rain, poor visibility, tropospheric ozone, threats to human health from combustion-generated particulates. All of this toxic cocktail free-burning fire also yields, but with seasonal timing and with an evolutionary history of adaptations and in quantities that biotas and the planetary atmosphere and oceans can absorb. Their shared chemistry -- their competition for combustion sinks -- has put fossil-fuel industrial fire into direct rivalry with biomass-fueled open fire. One way to reduce the impact of industrial fire, critics argue, is to reduce other forms of burning.
The Kyoto Protocol commits its signatories to stabilize and eventually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The source of the gases doesn't matter. A molecule of carbon dioxide loosed by land clearing in Sumatra is no different from molecules released by charcoal cooking fires in India, savanna burning in Zambia, or controlled burning for Karner blue butterfly habitat in New York. In a system of carbon credits, one can trade one form of burning for another. In the United States, for example, a proposed expansion of controlled fire for ecological benefits would require a reduction in industrial emissions. The competition for combustion -- hidden from most people by the machinery of modern industry -- must surface as the value-laden choice it has always been.
* * *
An exponential growth in industrial fire cannot continue indefinitely. The deep question is how growth might slow, halt, or reverse itself. Is there a combustion equivalent to the demographic transition that has historically characterized societies as they industrialize? The earliest population changes typically combine high birth rates with plunging death rates, which makes the overall growth explosive. Something similar might well occur with fire. A pyric transition might show an outburst of combustion -- an exorbitant use of fossil fuels that gradually replaces traditional burning. Over a period of decades, a more sustainable fire ecology would emerge. That is the optimistic scenario.
There is evidence to support it. There are places and processes where industrial fire can substitute for open flame, and there are huge improvements possible in fossil-fuel combustion. More cars, for example, do not automatically mean more carbon dioxide. In technologically advanced societies, a "decarbonization" of energy is under way such that greater energy (and fewer emissions) result from more efficient combustion of carbon-based fuels. The commercial development of fuel cells to power vehicles could prompt the combustion load of the planet to drop as quickly as the arrival of the internal combustion engine caused it to shoot up. Industrial fire threatens because it is undiluted -- too singular, too recent, too disaggregated from the larger ecology of Earth. That can change.
So can the argument that this fire, like others, ought to be suppressed, that the absence of fire is intrinsically better than its presence. Contemporary attempts to regulate burning resemble strategies of nature preservation that seek to protect a place by stripping away the human presence. Yet it is not possible to reserve the atmosphere, or to preserve climate; they will change, with or without human action. Rather, it may be that future generations will seek to wield Third Fire to reshape climate as they have Second Fire in the past to reshape biotas. After all, most of the climates in which humanity has evolved have been unfavorable to human life; people relied on fire to make them livable. So, in coming centuries, we may seek to use industrial fire to render climate more agreeable, to stall the onset of new ice ages, to dampen the swings of drought and deluge. Controlled burning may extend its range to the sky. Tweaking climate may combine with engineering genes to define the macro- and micro-economics of nature's future economy.
-- Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press, 2001; ISBN 0-295-98144X; http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Brief-History-Weyerhaeuser-Environmental/dp/029598144X), pp. 180-182