It was and continues to be attitudes like Ernest Swift’s—the idea that every single natural resource can and should be harvested for financial profit—that changed the climate, and led to the age that scientists now call the Anthropocene. Fire historian Stephen Pyne, however, argues that the Pyrocene would be a more appropriate name for our time, for the landscapes born of the Industrial Revolution.
In his book-length essay The Pyrocene Pyne explains that unlike the other classical elements, fire as we define it actually cannot exist without life, without the combination of oxygen and the carbon-based, organic molecules of which all living things are composed. Fire appeared as soon as plants colonized continents, and, as far as we know now, it cannot be found on any other planet in the universe. Pyne divides fire on Earth into three types: “first-fire” is the naturally occurring fire that appeared with the first life, the fire that lightning starts on the mountain, that burns until the rain puts it out.
“Second-fire,” according to Pyne, is the fire that hominins learned to use, work with, tame. We became what we now consider “human” because we learned to cook our food with fire and use fire to warm our hairless bodies. We fought wars with fire and lit our way with torches. We also learned to use fire to burn fields and wild places in order to promote the growth of food plants, and we started burning wild landscapes in controlled ways, to prevent the kinds of conflagrations that we see today. These practices of lighting intentional fires to promote the health of landscapes and the people who live on them are now referred to as cultural burning. Yet critically, until the Industrial Revolution, “Human-kindled fires burned as first-fires did, in living landscapes, subject to shared conditions and constraints.” No matter how large they grew, Pyne explains, they would always run out of fuel eventually; the rain could always douse them, even if it took some time. They existed within biological limits, and this kept them from growing so large that they could, for example, significantly change the composition of the atmosphere in fifty years.
This is because the effluent of first and second fires disappears into the sky, or is returned to the soil, as vital nutrients. People indigenous to ecosystems that rely on fire understand this. In her master’s thesis, “Nez Perce Perspectives on Fire Management and Program Accessibility,” written at Washington State University, Daniella Drader explains: “Fire ‘makes new life’ and Nez Perce understand the intricate balance between the tool and their own survival.” Drader goes on to quote one of the interviewees in her study: “‘[fire] provides habitat for the deer and the elk…brings nutrients into the earth…herbs and medicines that we use and the foods that we eat start to thrive after fire goes through…it benefits us.’” Drader explains: “When fire is viewed as part of a whole (e.g. in conjunction with other elements) and is considered sacred, management is impacted. Fire transitions from just being a tool to becoming personal, like a relationship.”
For many years, humans and fire developed these kinds of relationships all over the world. The centrality of this kind of fire to the human narrative is evident in our myths. “Over and again,” Pyne explains, “origin myths speak to a frail and threatened species that became powerful only when it acquired fire.” Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, the foundation of civilization in Greek myth. This story is so common around the world that it has its own category in the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, and variations are told by the tribes of the Northwest.
Even beyond the realm of myth, fire infuses our languages. We use it as a metaphor for the other things that we are evolved to care most about—the spread of disease, of love, of rumors, of war.
But when certain people started to set what Pyne calls “third-fire,” the relationship changed.
Third fire is the fire that burned once humans learned to take carbon-based fuel from the geologic past—originally, coal and oil—and burn it in the present, to power machines. Third fire was born of European thought during the period known as the “Age of Enlightenment” (but which Pyne calls “fire’s dark age”) and the Industrial Revolution. Pyne explains: “Third fire burns lithic landscapes no longer bounded by such ecological limits as fuel, season, sun, or the rhythms of wetting and drying. The source of combustibles is essentially unbounded; the problem is the sinks, where to put all the effluent.” The effluent of “third fire” is the atmospheric carbon dioxide responsible for changing the climate.
“Third-fire unhinged not only climate and biotas, but the affinity between people and fire,” Pyne explains. “Second-fire was an act of domestication … Both fire and people spread in a kind of mutual assistance pact. There was a fundamental inequality in their relationship because fire could exist without humans while humans could not exist without fire. But each operated within common conditions.” It wasn’t until they created third fire that humans—specifically, humans of European origin—unleashed something new on the planet, the consequences of which they could not imagine.
A large part of the problem came from the way that industrialization and colonization worked together to spread the Northern European fire ethos around the world. Northern Europe, Pyne explains, is actually one of the only regions on Earth that doesn’t rely on fire to balance its ecosystems. Perhaps as a consequence of this, Northern Europeans believed that fire made a “good servant but a bad master.” While many people understood themselves and fire to be in a mutual relationship, Northern Europeans saw it as a hierarchy, and wanted to be on top.
Because Northern Europeans could not understand that fire might be good for a landscape, they outlawed cultural burning practices in all of the places that they colonized, including the Northwestern U.S.. As Emily Washines, a scholar and Yakama Nation tribal member, “explains,” “This [the lighting of intentional fire] was noted in the 1850s through different journals from non-Natives. It was really a source of confusion on their part for not knowing why we did that. To them, we were just burning things up for no reason and it was very peculiar that they would be walking through areas that were charred. They didn’t understand why.” Over time, Pyne goes on to explain, people in industrialized regions began demonizing all kinds of fire, and not just cultural burning. As technologies advanced, cultures that still relied on fire for cooking and warmth were labeled backward and primitive, dirty, undeveloped.
This is because “developed” people had started burning their fires far away from their bodies—at coal power plants, in the engines of cars and trains. This is reminiscent of other troubling separations inherent to our globalized production systems: the way that most of us can no longer kill our own meat, though we’re happy enough to eat it; the way that we buy goods made in factories with inhumane working conditions, because they are ten thousand miles off, and we never see them. The fires burn night and day, and we can cool and heat and light our homes, order packages of goods from across the ocean that were made and transported by nothing but a series of burnings—and we never have to see the smoke, or fear that our children will stray too near the flames.
“When we” (and by “we,” it should be clarified, Pyne seems to mean humans of European origin) “shifted to burning fossil biomass, the shock caused cultural amnesia about our heritage of fire,” Pyne explains. “We replaced or suppressed our traditional knowledge, and our felt understanding of how fire worked in such settings, much as we replaced the hearth with a propane heater and chandeliers with fluorescent lighting … Taking fuels out of the geologic past, burning them in the present, and releasing their by-products to a geologic future—this is fire’s new narrative arc and one of the grand markers in Earthly history.”
By the time conversations about fire management were being had in the Western U.S., in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cultural amnesia of the white foresters was complete. In their minds, there were only two alternatives left: let fire burn unmitigated in wilderness, as they assumed it always had done, before their arrival, or suppress it completely.