Fire: A Brief History

8. Frontiers of Fire(Part 3): Fire Colonizing by Europe

It helps to remember that the geographic expansion of Europe resembled that of other peoples. The slow saturation of continental Europe by sedentary farmers matches the southward migration of the Han Chinese, both of them crowding swiddeners and herders to the margins. The long reach eastward across Eurasia by Slavic peoples echoes the great probes of Bantu speakers southward through Africa. Even the expansion’s seaborne phase recalls the Austronesian diaspora, which was also committed to remaking lands according to the precepts of agriculture. That Europeans moved plants, animals, diseases, and peoples beyond their ecological hearths—sometimes far from their places of origin—had ample precedent. But this expansion differed in scale, the shock-intensity of the encounter , and the extent to which Europeans plunged on until they reached every hill and stream on the planet. Even those distinctions, however , pale before the venture’s catalytic power. At its midpoint, Europe industrialized, and Europe’s imperial outreach became the vector for spreading Third Fire over the Earth. As a fire planet, the Earth looks the way it does because Europe sailed beyond its confining shores and eventually hauled the industrial revolution under its sails. No previous diaspora had the sheer global sweep of Europe’s. What Europe did not colonize outright, it affected indirectly through political meddling or commercial contacts. Some landscapes, like Australia, were simply overrun with European colonists, but many more adjusted their land usage and fire regimes to the European presence. Everywhere Europeans observed such changes, but not everywhere did they like what they saw. Too often contact meant a kind of ecological plundering—culling the most valued trees, the bulk killing of fur seals, dodos, and passenger pigeons. A landscape appeared of eroding soils and drying springs, of biotas beaten down and infested with weeds and pests. And of course everywhere those Europeans saw fires—strange fires, wild fires, devouring fires. Chapter Eight Frontiers of Fire (Part 3) FIRE COLONIZING BY EUROPE 139 Such observations did not mean much, however, until the scientific revolution outfitted European thought with both the means to assess the change and an apparently rational program by which to correct it. The Enlightenment could measure, and it could criticize, and it did both. Moreover, it flourished amid a renewed surge of European exploration and colonization, and proposed a rational reaction. Critics argued for programs of resource conservation, which in turn required statesponsored agencies to oversee them along with a program of scientific study to ensure that they were right. The result was the invention of institutions often global in their geographic sweep and universal in their intellectual assumptions. Those became as much a feature of Europe’s ecological imperialism as trading companies, folk migrations, marketdriven extinctions, and wasted forests. Thus it mattered hugely what Europe thought about fire. Since most Enlightenment emissaries came from temperate Europe, flame burned more brightly in the colonies than in the homelands. Whatever happened seemed to happen with fire on hand. Colonists applied it without the social shackles fire practices had known in Europe, and natives without the legitimating context of European cultivation. It was but a small leap of logic to suggest that to control fire was to control the land and its peoples. Indeed, greater coercion was possible overseas than at home. But even as Europe weighed its judgments about what fire was right and proper, it was itself undergoing a revolution in combustion more profound than any since Prometheus handed humanity the torch. Industrialization combined with imperialism to make, move, and dissolve fire frontiers. The fire geography of the Earth today is largely the outcome of what an imperial and industrial Europe did, or tried to do. How Europe Expanded Fire’s Realm Even as Europeans marveled at Tasmanian Aborigines who walked everywhere with their firesticks and at Virginia Indians who speared fish with open flames nestled in their canoes, they themselves wore strike-alights with their bucklers while their frigates held flame constantly in the hold. Their own fires they hardly noticed. Yet they, no less than the peoples they met, traveled with fire near at hand and used it to make habitable the places they encountered. Above all, fire was the ecological enabler that, rightly used, made European agriculture possible. 140 Frontiers of Fire (Part 3): Fire Colonizing by Europe 141 how europe expanded fire’s realm Europe’s Grand Narrative of discovery and...