Fire: A Brief History

9. Industrial Fire: Stoking the Big Burn

Getting spark and tinder together at the right moment was, for nature, always chancy. Humans improved those odds by making ignition more or less constant and by chipping or coaxing biomass into ready fuel. This did not ensure, however, that lands burned at will. Not every spark kindled flame; not all combustibles could burn at all times; weather mattered enormously. Outside of dwellings, fires still burned with the seasons. But the primary limitation on humanity’s control over fire remained having enough of the right stuff to burn. No matter how clever a people or how ingenious their technology, fire could flourish only where biomass could. Anthropogenic fire could not evade the ecology of growing plants, could not escape the cycles of life and decay, or could do so only for a while and then with serious damages. People could fashion grown biomass into fuel, but they could not make fuel from nothing. They needed new worlds for fire. Europeans did that first by geographic discovery, then by a technological one, the discovery of ancient lands, long fossilized but now ripe for burning. The outcome was industrial fire. What does “industrialization” mean? Commonly it is understood as a social, economic, and perhaps political process that redefines the relationship of people to one another. Only secondarily has it been considered an environmental event, and then murkily, as a source of pollution. But its meaning for fire history is crystal clear: it refers to the burning of fossil biomass. Just as Second Fire had before it, industrial fire sought out or created new landscapes for burning, and so expanded fire’s realm. Humans could now burn biomass stockpiled over geologic time, a millionfold increase in fuels available for combustion. The source mattered because even prime movers like steam engines and their offspring could not by themselves shatter the primordial ecology of fuel so long as they burned wood, peat, or dung. They remained very much within those old cycles and, being ravenous, only rushed the Chapter Nine Industrial Fire STOKING THE BIG BURN 155 fuel question to a crisis. The technology mattered, too, because coal and oil demanded a suitable combustion context. Unlike branches, sod, and seaweed dragged to fields to overlay fallow, they contributed nothing if burned in the open. Third Fire was no less interactive than those that preceded it, but unlike them it burned within a technological setting rather than a natural one. Combustion, fuel, and machinery thus coevolved , as flame, vegetation, and air had before. If what went into the flames differed, so did what came out of them. Industrial fire began to alter every fire habitat, overloaded ecological sinks, and reshaped the society that wielded it. It affected not only fields, farms, woods, and wildlands, but cities, manufacturing, trade, capitalism , politics, technology, and social order—all on a planetary scale. What “industry” meant after Third Fire was very different from what it had meant before. So was our concept of the human role as fire keeper. In older fire ecologies, everything humans did could be done by something else. Lightning set fires, elephants pushed over trees, wombats dug in the ground, bison fed on grass, cougars hunted deer. Humans had an extraordinary capacity to mold and move the pieces of this mosaic, but if they left, those parts would assume, by themselves, some new pattern. In a fundamental way humans could depart the scene and the basic principles of fire ecology would still apply. This is not true of industrial fire. 156 Industrial Fire: Stoking the Big Burn Figure 13. The Big Burn. The defining trait of Third Fire is its reliance on fossil fuel. That required, in turn, new chambers to combust the mineral biomass, a combination that broke down and isolated fire into its elemental features. For Earth, Third Fire announced another defining trait, that this species of combustion depended utterly on humans. The top graph tracks the outcome, the Big Burn, as measured by the annual flux of carbon from burning fossil biomass. In fact, the modern world’s reliance on fossil biomass is greater than these figures indicate because petroleum, in particular, is distilled into other chemicals for uses other than fuel. By any reckoning, the burning of fossil biomass constitutes a new source of earthly fire on a huge and escalating scale. Calculations from 1990 estimate that Third Fire claims some 60 percent of the planet’s overall combustion budget. How this combustion interacts with...