[ad_1]
TEMPE, Arizona: Another fall, more fires, more refugees and cremated homes. For California, flames have become the colors of fall.
The burning fire is the immediate provocation of havoc, as its storms of embers are engulfing the landscapes. But in the hands of humans, combustion is also the deepest cause.
Modern societies are burning lithic landscapes, biomass that once lived now fossilized into coal, gas and oil, which is exacerbating the burning of living landscapes.
The influence doesn’t come just from climate change, although that’s clearly a factor. The transition to a fossil fuel civilization also affects how people in industrial societies live on earth and what kinds of fire practices they adopt.
READ: Comment: Rising temperatures, fires and floods highlight the importance of understanding extreme weather events
LISTEN: EP 4: Make greener money in the fight against climate change
Even without climate change, there would be a serious fire problem. US land agencies reformed policies to restore good fire 40 to 50 years ago, but outside of some places, it has not been achieved on a large scale.
What were lithic landscapes have been exhumed and no longer only underlie the living.
Indeed, once released, the lithic is superimposed on the living and the two different types of burning interact in ways that sometimes compete and sometimes collide.
Like the power lines that have started so many wildfires, the two fires are intersecting, with lethal consequences.
A CAR WITHOUT A DRIVER
As a fire historian, I know that no one factor drives it. The flames synthesize their surroundings. Fire is a driverless car that sped down the road integrating everything around it.
Cars drive across the Golden Gate Bridge under a sky filled with orange smoke at noon in San Francisco, California on September 9, 2020 AFP / Harold POSTIC
Sometimes you face a sharp curve called climate change. Sometimes it is a complicated intersection where the urban landscape and the countryside meet. Sometimes these are road hazards left over from past accidents, such as logging, invasive grasses, or post-burn environments.
Climate change acts as a performance enhancer and, understandably, demands most of the attention because it is global and its reach extends beyond flames to oceans, mass extinctions and other side effects.
But climate change is not enough on its own to explain the megafire plague. Climate integrates many factors, just like fire. Their interaction makes attribution difficult.
HUMAN FIRES
Instead, consider fire in all its manifestations as the informational narrative. The critical turning point in modern times occurred when humans began burning fossilized biomass instead of living.
That set in motion a “pyric transition” that resembles the demographic transition that accompanies industrialization when human populations first expand and then recede. Something similar happens with the fire population, since new sources of ignition and fuels are available while the old ones persist.
READ: Comment: Forget the bamboo straws. We named elephants in Singapore’s climate debate room
READ: Comment: To combat climate change, investors must keep their shares in fossil fuels
In the US, the transition sparked a wave of monstrous fires that swept down the rails of the settlements – fires an order of magnitude larger and more deadly than in decades. Clearing and logging fueled serial conflagrations, which erupted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the final decades of the Little Ice Age.
It was a period of flame-catalyzed havoc that inspired state-sponsored conservation and a determination to eliminate free-burning flames. Led by foresters, the belief spread that fire in landscapes could be caged, as in ovens and dynamos.
Finally, as technological substitution (think replacing candles with light bulbs) and active suppression reduced the presence of open flames, the fire population declined to the point where the fire could no longer do the required green work.
Meanwhile, society reorganized around fossil fuels, adapting to the burning of lithic landscapes and ignoring the latent fire in the living.
Stock photo of industrial emissions. (Photo: AFP)
Now sources overload sinks: too much fossil biomass is burned to be absorbed within ancient ecological limits. The fuels of the living landscape accumulate and rearrange. The weather is insane. When the flame returns, as it should be, it comes like a forest fire.
WELCOME TO THE Pirocene
Widen the aperture a bit and we can imagine Earth entering an era of fire comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyro-equivalent of ice caps, pluvial lakes, periglacial washout plains, mass extinctions, and shifts in the sea level. It is a time when fire is both the main engine and the main expression.
Even climate history has become a subset of fire history. Humanity’s firepower supports the Anthropocene, which is the result of not just human meddling, but a particular type of meddling through humanity’s species monopoly on fire.
The interaction of these two fire kingdoms has not been studied much. It has been an exaggeration to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology.
READ: Comment: Things you love that are being destroyed by climate change
But industrial fire, unlike landscape fires, is solely a product of human manipulation, so it has been kept outside the confines of ecological science. It is as if the intellectual sinkhole of understanding cannot contain the new realm of burning any more than nature can contain its emissions.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
However, in humanity, the keystone species for fire on Earth, those two terrestrial burning sands, like smoke from separate fires drawn into a single convective column, are merging.
In the developed world, industrial combustion organizes agriculture, built environments, peri-urban environments, and wilderness reserves – all that are available for landscape fires. Societies even fight landscape fire with the counterforce of industrial fire in the form of pumps, engines, planes and vehicles to transport crews.
READ: Comment: Australian bushfires and vacation adaptation to a warmer and drier world
READ: Forget a ‘new normal’: experts say Australia’s worst wildfires are yet to come
The interaction of the two realms of fire determines not only what is burned, but also what should and should not burn. Change the path that leads to the fire.
Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: burning areas, areas needing to burn, off-site impacts with damaged watersheds and airs, the breakdown of biota, the omnipresent power of climate change, rising sea levels , an extinction mass, the alteration of human life and habitats, and you have a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a pyrocene.
The outlines of that era are already visible through the smoke. If you doubt it, ask California.
Stephen Pyne is Professor Emeritus in the Arizona State University College of Life Sciences. This comment first appeared on The Conversation.
