Stephen J. Pyne

 

     Melanophila is a genus of beetles that, enabled by infrared-sensing organs and antenna sensitive to smoke, seek out fire.  They are not just drawn to fire the way a moth is to light, or bison to the regrowth after a burn, but as a requirement of reproduction. Flame, heat, and smoke attract males; the females lay eggs in burned stumps or beneath scorched bark; the freshly birthed larvae feast on burned wood.  The Melanophila are, literally, firebugs.

      The type beetle was identified in 1774; some 15 species are now known.  They are critically depend on fire, without which they will expire.  With it, they reproduce offspring into an ideal environment rich in their preferred food and largely free of competitors.  Reports exist of beetles finding fire up to 80 miles away.  They are, in a sense, fire foragers in a positive feedback. The more fire, the more beetles.

      As pyrophiles, the beetles are not unique. Thirty times more insects are known to display pyrophilic traits through behavior that draws them to fire and smoke, specific adaptations that promote such attractions, or significantly greater abundance in burned sites relative to unburned sites.  Probably 54 species have what is regarded as the most diagnostic feature, sensors that target heat and smoke, a preference for fungi that grow on burned wood, or as with Melanophila a reproduction cycle that relies on fire ('reproductive synchronicity'). Fire is a shape-shifter, synthesizing its surroundings; its associated insects reflect that diversity.

      The beetles are only a smattering of species, both plant and animal, that accommodate fire or, as with Melanophila, depend on fire to survive.  Many birds, mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates seek out recently burned landscapes, where they scavenge amid the ash and feast on the lush regrowth that sprouts afterwards.  Even flaming fronts can attract predators.  In Australian savannas the flames flush out small marsupials, lizards, and insects that are hunted by carnivores and insectivorous birds; above them all soar wedge-tailed eagles, kites, and falcons looking for prey.  Black kites, whistling kites, and brown falcons have even been seen to pick up smoldering branches and deposit them elsewhere, thus enlarging the hunting grounds (National Geographic, 2018). 

      Fire spreading is a talent the firebugs lack.  It isn't clear how intentional the firehawks are, and they can't start and stop fires, or nurture and pass along a fire culture.  But their capacity to transport firebrands moves the gamut of fire accommodations from passive to active, from adjusting to fire's presence to anticipating, requiring, and perhaps promoting it to encourage conditions that a creature wants. It's a spectrum of fire relationships that ends most densely with humans.  Like fire beetles they search out fires and burned sites; unlike any other creature, even the fire hawks, they can start and within limits start fires at will.  Their firepower allows them to hack into the operating system of whole ecosystems. 

      Here is where they differ from Melanophila and all the other fire accommodators and promoters on Earth.  The fire beetles are opportunists, relying on outside conditions to furnish fires.  Humans create opportunities by determining the place and timing of fires.  Its unrivaled firepower has left humanity as the keystone species for fire on Earth.  People themselves have long seen their capacity to manipulate fire as a defining trait – over and over, fire origin myths describe humans as weaklings until they get fire, at which point they become the biosphere's superpower.

      Thanks to cooking, humanity's dependence on fire is coded in its genome.  Then we went from cooking food to cooking landscapes for hunting, farming, herding, foraging, even fishing.  It's as though Melanophila could control the fires on which it depends, all the while reshaping the environment within which those fires occur.  "Niche construction" is jargon for saying that organisms manipulate their surroundings to support their needs.  Humanity's firepower has allowed it to reshape the planet.  We went from cooking meat and tubers to cooking Earth.

      Since the end of the last glaciation, humanity's fire practices have, with nudges, reorganized aspects of the Earth System.  The epoch of unbounded burning, however, has shoved the planet out of its 2.6 million years of serial ice ages and into a fire age.  A fire creature went global: humanity created a world powered by and pushed toward a world of more fire.

      Still, there were limits.  Fire had co-evolved with terrestrial landscapes and was bounded by their ecological baffles and barriers.  Those borders were elastic, and people could shift them within limits.  But when that quest fire moved from burning living landscapes to lithic landscapes in the form of coal, gas, and oil, those old fetters were smashed.  Prometheus shed his shackles.  Air, water, and land began overloading with the effluent of this novel combustion, a variety of burning for which humans were the essential agent. 

      Inevitably, fire beetles and fire hominins met.  More and more, people were responsible for planetary pyrogeography, which meant the habitats of Melanophila.  The pivot to lithic landscapes as a source of primary power, and the appeal to this firepower, to replace the ecological tasks previously done by flame unhinged the real of the beetles as it did climate.  In developed countries fewer fires occurred, and too many of those that did ignite did not do so within the regimens that fire beetles needed.  Melanophila found its habitat shrinking.

      Interactions between the two versions of firebugs, much like fire, run a gamut.  Some are harmless, like swarms of beetles annoying firefighters.  Some were comical, like the episode (perhaps anecdotal) in the 1940s  during a football game at the University of California-Berkeley in which so much cigarette smoke enveloped the stadium that it attracted enough Melanophila to plague the fans.  A few were serious.  To maintain FSC certification, Sweden enacted legislation that required a fraction of the slash left from logged forest to be burned to assure the beetle's survival (Berndt, 1991).

      It all seems a straight-forward retelling of another morality tale from the Anthropocene, with quirkier characters and perhaps greater illumination.  But there is another, complicating party in this menage a trois.  Fire.

 

      Really? 

      Since the Enlightenment, fire has been what Western science says it is, and since the discovery of oxygen in the late 18th century, Western science has defined fire as a chemical reaction shaped by its physical surroundings.  It's a physical process that can be fashioned into tools and housed in special chambers to produce power.  Something that had always existed in landscapes, loosely governed by biotas, wind, drought, terrain, was now deconstructed into combustion, each of whose components could be isolated and enhanced and the product monetized.  What had free-ranged as an ecological presence now resembled a factory chicken.  What had likely been our first domestication had the life literally taken out of it.

      But while combustion can be dismantled and reassembled in a lab or factory, and its effects replaced by other sources of raw power and its biological role supplanted by petrochemicals and machines, fire can't be abstracted from its habitat in living landscapes.  It's not a thing, not a substance, not an element.  It is a reaction that takes its character from its context, that in many respects resembles a creature. That resemblance is not limited to poetry and painting. 

      Though not itself alive by the definitions of modern science, it is a creation of the living world that takes on the properties of life and depends on that living matrix to breed and propagate. Life created the oxygen and fuels fire requires and in the form of humanity life provides most of its ignitions.  Its chemistry is a biochemistry: it takes apart what photosynthesis puts together.  It breathes, it feeds, it moves; it undergoes a life cycle, from a spark of birth to cool-ash death. It spreads by contagion.  Like a virus, an "infectious agent," not technically an organism, it takes on the properties of one when it (as it were) comes to life.

      Like other creatures fire shapes its surroundings, not only in what burns but as a selective force in evolution to modify those fuels to encourage or discourage more fire. Unlike other examples of faunal niche construction, fire propagates and involves everything it touches.  The end result is almost always to make the landscape more fire-prone.  Loren Eiseley famously likened humanity to a flame, consuming and remaking into something like its own image those landscapes it passes through.  Perhaps the reverse is equally apt, that fire resembles humanity, its most venerable ally.  Deep in the Pleistocene the two formed a mutual-assistance pact that has bolstered the range of each.

      In the end, fire may defy metaphors, much as it defies simple definitions or categories.  It changes with each time and place, even as it alters those times and places.  Ice is nature as modernist, fire is nature as post-modernist.  Fire furnishes metaphors, it rarely receives them.  Perhaps it is enough not to define its essence but to know what it does.

      So the story of Melanophila is really a story of three creatures – a fire-adapted beetle, a fire-wielding mammal, and fire, a biologically-based reaction in a nether world neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.  Fire is not a bug in the Earth System: it's a feature.  After all Earth is the unique home for Melanophila, Homo, and fire, which as Henry Thoreau observed, "is the most tolerable third party."

 

      Thank you for the invitation to speak – I'm truly honored. I'm a fire guy, but by training and temperament I'm also a historian, so let me indulge my instincts and reflect on how the fire world has changed over the past half century.

 

      My life with fire began in 1967 when I was hired as a smokechaser with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park.  I spent 15 seasons in all, 12 as crew boss.  Everything I've done since dates back to those seasons.  I even met and married my wife on the Rim.  Our oldest child spent her first two summers there.

      In 1967 the National Park Service, like all federal agencies, operated under a 10 am policy – suppression only and everywhere. On the Rim this meant a lookout, two slip-on units as pumpers, abundant snag fires, and lots of hiking and compassing since roads were few and surface water rare.  We lived where we worked.

      Nationally, the US Forest Service was a hegemon that oversaw virtually every aspect of wildland fire.  It dominated both hardware and software.  It set policy, funded nearly all research, and provided an institutional matrix for other federal agencies and those of the states.  The only fire-specific periodical was Fire Control Notes.  Mutual aid agreements fashioned a national system with the Forest Service as keystone agency.  Only the BLM in Alaska had a fire program independent of it.  The Park Service had two dedicated fire officers for its entire system.  International connections meant FAO-sponsored exchanges.

      That year the major fires were in the Northern Rockies.  Two burned to national publicity in Glacier National Park, and two big fires blew up in the Selkirk Mountains.  The Glacier fires gained notoriety because a grizzly bear attack killed two hikers at the same time.  The Sundance fire was the largest in the region since 1934; two firefighters died.  In 15 seasons on the North Rim our largest fire was 300 acres, on a mesa within the Canyon.  The largest regional fire was 1,000 acres.

      We were remarkably isolated from knowledge about the outside world.  We lived in housing and worked in buildings erected 30 years earlier by the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Radio reception was erratic; there were no personal phones and no TV.  Once a month the Coconino County bookmobile would roll in.  I learned about Apollo 11's lunar landing when Time magazine arrived in the mail a week later.  

      But fire was equally isolated within the larger culture.  Mostly it meant Smokey Bear, Bambi, and the occasional movie.  For American society at large wildfires were a freak of western violence or a California quirk, not an intrinsic fact of national existence. 

      Yet changes were afoot.  The sense that the current regime could not continue was surprisingly pervasive, like a super-saturated solution waiting only a prompt to crystallize.  In 1962 Tall Timbers Research Station began its influential fire ecology conferences and the Nature Conservancy conducted its first prescribed burn.  In 1968 the NPS reformed its policy to emphasize fire's restoration; ten years later the USFS followed suit.  Those top-down reforms made no difference on the Rim. 

~

      Today, American fire has undergone a massive makeover.  Forest Service hegemony has long vanished; and suppression costs have gutted the agency for most of this century.  Institutions, policies, and research are pluralistic. Prescribed fire is common, and in some places, foundational.  The US has treaties with its neighbors; a global fire network under the auspices of the UN is near completion.

      Today, wildland fire – or more broadly, landscape fire – is firmly implanted in the media's almanac of annual disasters and routinely claims headlines throughout the world.  Wildfires had been growing more feral for decades.  In California they burned deeply into Santa Rosa and took out Paradise; in Canada, they plunged into Slave Lake and trashed Fort McMurray; in Mediterranean Europe, they savaged Pedrogao Grande and Mati; in Australia, Black Saturday swelled into a Black Summer. In 2020 fire became that other contagion, the pandemic without the prospect of a vaccine.

      Underwriting these changes was another form of combustion – this one wholly under human control – as people accelerated their burning of fossil fuels.  Climate change metamorphosed into a climate crisis.  Fire found itself at the center of an Anthropocene.  Or perhaps of a Pyrocene, as humanity's burning summed up to the fire equivalent of an ice age.  The dialectic between burning living landscapes and burning lithic ones may be the core narrative of our time; it has rendered even climate history into a subnarrative of fire history. A fire crisis has morphed into a fire epoch.  What 50 years ago was something sequestered in outbacks and backcountry has become an informing feature of planet Earth.

      The International Association of Wildland Fire was organized after the inflection point of this transition.  Fire publications, fire conferences, fire effects – all were on the uptick of an exponential curve.  Earthly fire was too expansive a topic for any one discipline and too massive for any single agency or nation to handle. In 1989 came the first International Wildland Fire Conference and the publication of International Forest Fire News.  The following year the IAWF took on the task of trying to bring all people concerned with landscape fire into a common cause. 

      Since then the fire scene has quickened.  In the United States the fire revolution rebooted after the 1994 season.  In 1998, the Secretary of the Interior declared a 'national fire crisis.'  In 2002 the term megafire was introduced; in 2020, gigafire.  Fire seemed everywhere, with global tongues of flame proclaiming the advent of an environmental apocalypse. 

      ~

      What of the future?  The future of fire will depend on what humanity does.  So, too, the future of the IAWF will be what its members choose.

      It was chartered amid an awakening of fire-related interests.  It claims a unique position as a global association of fire folks – practitioners, researchers, managers.  Its size and catholicity are its great strengths.  It brings critical mass to whatever task it elects to address: it can invest a substantial voice and presence to issues that until it appeared had no constituency to speak for it.  It has been both mother ship and midwife to gatherings, journals, and other institutions.  What integrated fire management is as a concept, the IAWF is as an organization.

      Yet those same strengths are also a weakness.  It will be hard to hold all the parts together.  The tendency will grow to spin off new societies and specialty journals.  It will be particularly tricky to hold researchers and practitioners in a valence of shared enthusiasms.  The centrifugal will compete with the centripetal. Or to adopt a fire metaphor, the spreading perimeter will tend to fracture into multiple heads.  Science values the new; practice values the inherited.  Fire management needs both.   

      The IAWF is also a mentor.  I don't mean only its formal program to match prospective mentors with mentees, a project to which I try to contribute.  I mean its role in handing the fire community's accumulated knowledge of all sorts across disciplines, nations, and generations.  It's been said we don't own knowledge; we just hold it for a while, passed to us by our predecessors and in turn handed to our successors.  That is as true for organizations as for individuals. 

      The IAWF occurred at a unique historical moment when fire, environmental concerns, critical personalities, and international politics crossed and sparked.  It's hard to imagine the association happening a decade earlier or a decade later.  If it dissolves, I can't foresee it being reconstituted.  So while its role will surely evolve, it will thrive in the years to come if its members continue to do for that future what they have successfully done in the past.

 

Thanks.

       In November, 1997 negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which aspires to regulate the production of greenhouse gases, stalled when Europeans and Americans failed to agree on what might count as a carbon sink.  Americans wanted to tally carbon stored in crops, soils, and woods, while Europeans refused to let Americans continue to belch out as much carbon as they could combust if only they could connive enough biotic blotters to sponge up the mess.  They wanted Americans to get out of their damn cars or at least pay the same exorbitant prices for gasoline that Europeans have to. 

      So the talks broke down.  Americans went back to their multi-car garages and revved up their SUVs.  Europeans retired to their smug condescension over ill-disciplined Americans with their tendency to identify culture with extended-cab F150 pickups and all-terrain tires.  One can almost see the French intelligentsia sniffing over their sagging volumes of fusty Foucault and dreary Derrida.

      There may, however, be a solution.  The moribund American publishing industry should turn seriously green, and not with envy.  Paper is almost half carbon.  Books are carbon bullion.  Bookstores and libraries are carbon sequestration banks.  Published books - the bigger the better - may be the missing carbon sinks the U.S. seeks.  The more books we buy, the more miles we can drive.  That's a formula that should set publishing's tachometer racing.  Buy a book, save the planet.

      Do the numbers.  Approximately 45% of modern paper is carbon.  A book weighing a kilo holds 450 grams of carbon.  A back-of-the-envelope calculation (actually a pile-on-the-bathroom-scale reckoning) of my own humble oeuvre (12 books, more or less) weighs 10 kilos.  This may not seem like much - I harvest a heavier bucket of citrus every morning to make juice - but everyone can stockpile books, even in Maine and Iowa where lemons are more often found on used car lots.  If a modest 100,000 people bought my entire list, America would have proudly amassed a million kilos of processed carbon, roughly what the residents of Phoenix release every morning from gasoline just to get to work.  That trees are minced to make paper is irrelevant; or rather, the whole point.  The trees grow back.  The books stay.

      It's a virtuous circle.  The more books the public buys, the more robust the publishing industry.  The more vigorous publishing becomes, the more people will be enticed to write, and the more they will make from it.  A proper government would promulgate policies to encourage such a process.  A proper government would enact carbon tax credits for those who buy the goods, and dole out carbon subsidies to those who produce them.  Houses would then swell with shelving and groan under the weight of collected works.  Book superstores would sprout like mushrooms.  Libraries would proliferate like Circle Ks.  Publishing's chronic lament that it is economically marginal would vanish overnight.  The energy industry would buy up publishers to complement its existing distribution networks.  Gas stations would include self-serve, buy-at-the-pump paperback dispensaries.  Like a ringed benzene molecule, an industry would close the cycle of carbon spewed out and carbon sopped up.

      The real beauty of the scheme, however, is that no one actually has to read the books.  In fact, there is a case for leaving them in their shrink-wrapped cellophane (which adds its own, admittedly infinitesimal, carbon increment).  Here is an opportunity for deep(-time) discounting.  Sure, the Europeans will squeal, but they can hardly object to America's amassing of both carbon and culture.  After all, the French have managed to make their own "cultural" creations exempt from World Trade Organization rules.  Even they can't bare-facedly denounce a massive expansion of American book publishing as harmful to either trade or ecology.  If enough people bought it, for example, Al Gore's Earth in the Balance might be itself a practical solution to the problems he expounds.  In France's case, more books bought and fewer seriously read might actually help the world get on with its business. 

      The open road and the unopened book - it's America.  We can fill up our tanks with all the gasoline we want, so long as we fill up the trunks with books.  Let the Kyoto negotiations begin anew. 

      Australia is a fire continent.  Imagine California on the scale of the 48 contiguous states, but drier, more routinely kindled, and with winds that can transform the southeastern quadrant into a veritable fire flume.  From time to time, more often than most places, its simmering fires boil over into seeming tsunamis of flame.  It even boasts, in eagles and hawks, the only other species outside of humanity known to carry a firebrand.

      What makes Australia a firepower, however, is that it has a culture to match.  It has institutions to study, fight, and light fire.  It has a literature of fire, a folklore of fire, and a fire art that is continuous from Aboriginal bark paintings to modernist musings.  It has special bushfire collections at the National Museum of Australia and Museums Victoria.  It has a fire politics; on three occasions conflagrations have sparked royal commissions, and from 2009-2017, 51 official inquiries. 

      Bushfires have never been far from Australian consciousness because flame and smoke are never far from quotidian life, whether Outback stations or the city-states that demark European settlement.  That so much of Australia's firefighting capacity depends on volunteer brigades keeps the social connection especially close.  Other countries, other continents, have abundant fire, a few have a fire science, and some display patches of fire art.  Hardly a handful have them all, and perhaps none in anything with the range and cultural depth of Australia.

      With European settlement the worst fires acquired names and became historical milestones.  Red Tuesday (1898), Ash Wednesday (1983), and Black everything else.  The Black Saturday holocaust of 2009 completed that calendar.  It was not enough: there are scores of others, some nationally significant, many of regional memory, from the Dwellingup fires (1961) and the Black Christmas fires (2001) to the Alpine fires (2003) and now the yet-unnamed megafires of 2019-2020.  Call them the Forever fires, for they seem inextinguishable, burning with implacable insistence and smoke palls that extend their reach far beyond the flames' grasp.

~

      Australia and bushfire are old acquaintances.  But the past 20 years feel different.  The bad fires are more frequent, more eruptive, and more damaging.  The Black Saturday fires struck with the cultural force of a terrorist attack that seemed to question the very premises of a first-world society on a land capable of such fury.  The Forever bushfires deepen that query.  Those two events are geodetic markers by which to triangulate the future of Australian fire.

      But there are two other fires that provide a wider panorama.  One is overt, the fires that burn living landscapes, the bush.  The other fire is covert because it burns lithic landscapes.  These are once-living, now-fossilized biomass like coal and gas that we combust to power our industrial economies. 

      Those two fire realms are interacting in ways that are proving ever more entwined and threatening.  That so many of the Black Saturday (and California) fires started from powerlines is an apt metaphor for the way the two realms of fire can interact.  The knock-on effects are not restricted to global warming or ocean acidification.  They affect how people organize landscapes – their agriculture, nature reserves, transportation grids - all aspects of geography that influence the character of bushfires. 

      Initially, the two fires compete, as industrial societies try to abolish fire in the bush as they do in the built environment.  Sixty years ago, as the consequences of that experiment became apparent, American critics forecast a ruinous fire future and inspired a revolution in federal fire policy to restore good fire and so dampen bad ones.  This was underway before climate change acted as a performance enhancer.  The pervasive effects of a fossil-fuel economy were enough.  Now, it's payback time.  Instead of competing, the two fires are colluding.  We have been burning our combustion candle at both ends.

      Australia's predisposition to fire makes it an early flash point for what we might aptly term the Pyrocene.  But many of the same phenomena are appearing in America – unstoppable fires, fire deaths and fire refugees, smoked-in and incinerated cities, damaged watersheds and postburn floods, economic crunches from lost tourism, bankrupt utilities, and snakebit insurance companies.  Wildfires moving from exurban fringes to city cores.  Extended states of emergency.  Prolonged and painful cleanups.  Political anger. 

      Those locales that have a history of fire will exhibit the most flame, but the combustion miasma will seep into sites seemingly immune.  Paradoxically, places like California long frequented by fire are better prepared to cope with the coming crises.  Those like Gatlinburg, Tennessee not accustomed to conflagrations lack institutions and infrastructure and will struggle. 

      Even if fossil fuels ceased overnight, greenhouse gases will take a good while to work their way out of the atmosphere, so the climatic effects will linger.  This puts the immediate focus on coping with landscape fires.  There is plenty to do – harden communities, get more good fire into the countryside, design to accept that landscape fire is not a freak apparition from the fringe but an informing fact of modern life.  Wild, feral, or prescribed, there is much more fire to come.  Another paradox – we can expect a lot in the coming years – is that the more we stop burning lithic landscapes the more we will need to burn living ones. 

      These are the two fires that are triangulating the deep drivers of combustion not just for Australia but for the Earth.  Add the impacts together and it would appear that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age.  The Forever fires will stop at the Pacific shores.  The Pyrocene will persist long into the future.

C3PO
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