The Long Burn
The geography of Earthly fire remains today neither exclusively natural nor exclusively human. We have not put fire in significant ways into the Sahara, save through the flaring off of natural gas. Nor have we abolished fire from the Siberian taiga. But the geography of fire looks the way it does because of what we have done and not done. That power did not originate with industrial fire. We acquired it as part of our heritage as a species. While Third Fire has prompted a change in kind, not just one of degree, the reality remains that humans have created fire’s contemporary geography.
Clearly there have been epochs in which fuels have exceeded fires, in which there has been more biomass than burning. And there are times - the present age, for example - when fire combusts more than what the biosphere grows. Unfortunately, the long-term course of fire history is unknown and will probably be understood only obliquely - as charcoal buried in sediment, as gases lodged in the atmosphere, as shifting climates.
The historical contours of Homo sapiens as a planetary fire force, however, are better fathomed. Overall, the fire load of the planet has increased; by how much it is difficult to say. In many areas, human agency has meant a change in regime, not in the absolute presence or absence of fire. Only rarely, and then very recently, have humans removed fire from any significant realm. Almost always that expulsion involves competition with, or replacement by, industrial combustion. Probably the Earth’s fire load has increased over the last century, at least as measured by the flow of combustion. Ultimately even this source must shrink. Anthropogenic fire will again have to restrict itself to the cycles of what can be grown. Humanity will have to transcend Third Fire technology, as it did Second Fire, to fashion other sources of fire than controlled combustion. But that prospect lies centuries in the future. It may not arrive by the end of the third millennium.
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Fire has meant many things to us, and we to fire. Yet throughout the span of centuries and constantly amid all our shifting roles - suppression of lightning fire, promoter of anthropogenic fire, stoker of industrial fire - we have remained the keeper of the planetary flame. Viewed over geologic time, our presence may appear fleeting, but measured by its ecological effects, we have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid, throwing embers to all sides, overturning continents, altering climates, wiping out and restoring biotas. Such is the power of fire. And whether or not it was a power we sought, much less deserved, it was a power we gained, and one we have never renounced. The seizure of fire was our most daring, our most profound gamble. It made us the biotic creatures we are.
Our prolonged crash into the biosphere has been, above all, a long burn. Beyond the next epoch of geologic time, well after this species has expired and another must examine its record, we may come to be seen as we have so often seen ourselves, as a flame - destroying, renewing, transmuting. The Earth’s greatest epoch of fire will most likely coincide with our own. Unquenchable fires will have marked our passage. Charcoal will track our progress through history. The flame - tended, suppressed, abandoned - will speak uniquely to our identity as creatures of the Earth.
As it should.
- Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press, 2000; ISBN 0-295-98144X; http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Brief-History-Weyerhaeuser-Environmental/dp/029598144X), pp.184-186