Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN PYNE

When I was 18, I signed on as a smoke chaser at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and began a career as a pyromantic. Not a pyromaniac. Important distinction.

On a fire crew, you soon learn how fires shape the season, and how fire seasons can shape a life. And I wondered if the same might be true for humanity. After all, we are a uniquely fire creature on a uniquely fire planet.

So eventually, I traded in my Pulaski for a pencil, and then a PC, and became a scholar on fire. So let’s gather around this figurative campfire called a Ted Talk, and let me tell you the story of fire on earth and of the keystone species that for good or ill, has become the keeper of the planetary flame. And how we’ve created a world with too much of the wrong kind of fire, too little of the right kind of fire, and it’s making our world less habitable.

Well, let’s begin with fire. Among the ancient elements, fire is the odd man out. Earth, air, water all are substances. Fire is a reaction. It synthesises its surroundings. It takes its character from its context, and that makes it a shape shifter.

But it’s also a shape shifter intellectually. You know, all the other ancient elements have got academic disciplines devoted to their study. The only fire department on a university campus is the one that sends emergency vehicles when the alarm sounds.

The fundamental setting for fire is the living world. Life created oxygen. Life created fuel. The fundamental chemistry of fire is a biochemistry. And as soon as plants began colonising land, they burned, and they’ve been burning ever since.

But they burned in a way that was very patchy. Some places, some eras, had lots of fire routinely. Others only episodically or even rarely. And one reason is that life did not control the third element of the fire triangle, namely ignition.

Well, that changed when a creature arrived who could wrest control of ignition away from lightning and fire at will. And at that point, we complete the cycle of fire for the circle of life. But we got a lot, too.

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 now we’ve become a geologic force because we’ve begun to cook the planet. It seems we’re intent on turning Earth into a kind of crock-pot.

Well, we hold this particular firepower as a species monopoly. Other animals knock over trees, dig holes in the ground, hunt; we do fire. That’s our unique ecological signature.

But our firepower comes with real limitations. Not every spark spreads. Not every fire is going to behave as we wish. And the reason is that the power to propagate resides in the setting.

So we began changing the setting. We slash woods. We drain peat. We loosed livestock. In a score of ways, we began altering and magnifying the combustibility of the places we inhabit.

But this too has its limitations. You can only coax or coerce so much out of a setting before it begins to degrade. And if we want more power– and it seems most of us always do– we have to find something else to burn.

Well, we found it by exhuming and burning lithic landscapes. Coal, oil, gas and the rest, these are the fossil fallow of an industrial society, and with them, we have begun once more to remake the world. Traditionally, we have thought of fire history as a subset of natural history, particularly climate history. But now it’s becoming clear that natural history, including climates, are subsets of fire history.

This new combustion burns without the old ecological checks and balances. It burns day and night, winter and summer, through drought and deluge. For a long time, the question the human quest for fire concerned, obsessed over sources. Finding enough stuff to burn. But now it’s becoming a problem of sinks. The capacity of land, air and the oceans to absorb all the byproducts of our burning.

Well, when you began industrialising, it’s a huge phase change. And I’m going to call it the pyric transition, by analogy to the better known demographic transition. Because during this initial phase, there’s a real ramping up of burning. There’s a population explosion, and a lot of those fires are really nasty and damaging and abusive.

But then eventually, the new order begins to establish itself. By technological substitution and outright suppression, the population of fires plummets. Good fires as well as bad fires. It falls below replacement values. It can no longer do the ecological work required.

So if the pirate transition begins with a kind of fire orgy, it tends to end with an ecological fire famine. Well, many nations looked over, looked across the spectrum of really wrecked landscapes and adopted a programme of state-sponsored conservation to protect their remaining estates, and in many cases, colonial holdings, from the ravages of axe and fire.

This was a global project. It was pursued from the Northern Rockies of the United States to the central provinces of India. Interesting index of the reach of these ideas. Rudyard Kipling wrote a sequel to The Jungle Book, in which he describes what happens to Mowgli after he grows up. He joins the Indian Forest Service and fights against poaching, and you guessed it, fires.

Only much later would the paradoxes become palpable. That in many cases, setting aside land to shield it from fire only created permanent abodes for fire. And that the effort to suppress all fire only created an ecological insurgency that we could no longer contain.

Well, this phase change runs like a terminator through Earth history and contemporary geography, sub-Saharan Africa, awash with fires. Western Europe, ablaze with lights. Well, not all those lights are powered directly by industrial combustion, but you can bet industrial fire is somewhere fundamental in their chain of creation. And they all substitute for open flames. Or a finer grain but more politically radical example, North Korea, distinctive by the absence of evening lights. But if you look at the daytime, equally distinctive by the concentration of open fires.

So how does it work? Well, it’s all around us. We don’t even see it. Consider the setting we’re now in. At one time, a building like this would be filled with working fires. Flames for lighting, heating, cooking, even entertainment.

They are all gone. We might have an occasional symbolic or ceremonial or token flame, but otherwise, it’s gone. And yet this space continues. It’s always, fire is a kind of dark matter to be shaped by fire. The materials you’re sitting on have all been tested for flammability. This room is equipped with automatic sprinklers and smoke detectors. The design of the seating and its capacity is determined aligned with the exits, all of which have special illuminated signs with their own autonomous power sources.

So apart from those token or ceremonial flames, however, the only fire that might occur here is a wildfire. And that turns out to be a pretty apt metaphor for industrial landscapes generally. So let me see if I can summarise this very brief history of a very big subject.

For aeons, natural fire prevailed, but it was lumpy in space and time. And people come. We increase ignition by orders of magnitude. And we begin rearranging landscapes to make them more combustible. The domain of fire expands vastly, and the pulses and patches are recoded.

And then we come to industrial fire. It competes with all the others. And this time, we have to think about the landscape as thick, because we’re taking stuff out of the geologic past, and we’re lofting it into the geologic future.

So, two grand realms of combustion, seemingly incommensurable, three kinds of fires, none of which play well with the others. How are we going to divide three into two and have something left over? Because if we fail, we simply cede the world to feral fire.

How we cope will depend, however, not only on our technology, but how we imagine ourselves in the world. This is the Aspen fire, boiling over the Santa Catalina Mountains and bearing down on Biosphere 2. Two very different visions of the future.

Biosphere 2, a completely engineered, self-contained entity. Something that in principle could be plopped down on another planet. It has no tolerance. Zero. For fire. Every fire prevented or put out is a problem solved.

For the Santa Catalinas, free burning fire is both inevitable and essential. And here, every fire put out is a problem put off. Interestingly, we can map these two visions onto prevailing images of fire held particularly by Americans.

So here, from the 2000 fire season in the Northern Rockies, a view of fire as a benevolent presence in a kind of pristine nature. And a year later, fire is a malevolent presence in a built landscape. What’s missing in all of these? What’s missing is some image or narrative of ourselves in that scene as constructive agents using fire to make a more habitable world.

So let’s go back to the fundamentals. Fire in the living world, ourselves as holders of the torch, two narratives prevail. One is the Promethean story. It speaks of fire as technological power.

A fire is something abstracted from its setting, perhaps by violence, and certainly held in defiance of an existing order. Well, we need a lot less Promethean fire. We need to find surrogates for combustion as a source of generic energy.

The other narratives are more, let’s call it primeval fire. And it speaks of fire as a companion on our journey and something of our shared stewardship with the world around us. I particularly like the kid with the fire stick. No wonder he’s grinning. But how else is he going to learn to burn properly?

We need a lot more primeval fire, because fire does biological work that nothing else does. So as we enter the future, the earth is shedding its cycle of ice ages for a fire age. Our relationship to fire made that possible. Our past is a record of how we have used our firepower.

Our future will be a record of what we have learned from that experience. But you know, I’ll bet that when the time comes to tell that tale, we choose to do it around a fire. Thank you.