Our World Is On Fire

Well, first blog of the new year is coming out.  I've at least three other writing tasks I ought to be working on tonight.  I just couldn't help but share the latest book I wandered through and find myself stuck in its message.  The book is "Fire  -Nature and Culture" by Steven J. Pyne.  I can only recommend it.  Dr. Pyne takes us on a journey in this book.  A journey back in time to when fire existed only as a condition of combustion resulting from the spark of lightning, -rarely spontaneous combustion- and a time we were still a gleam in Nature's eye.  Nice starting point for a mythologist like me these days.  The kind of book I sink my canines into as I read along and wonder, "Where have I been all my life?"

Yes, I know, you have caught me walking graveyards in France looking for my "roots" and now you have me reading about the origin of "fire".  From the beginnings in Dr. Pyne's book we move to man's discovery of it after some eons of calling it "god" and of evolving to a point where we got a hair-brained idea that instead of just wishing we could have something warm to eat besides sun-ripened carrion, we figured how to capture fire and eat some BBQd left overs from a savannah fire just a little west of the Serengeti or Fergus Falls, Minnesota.  (I'll let Dr. Pyne tell you more about it.  My memory is way to weak on first reading to have the recall I'd like for this post).  So, man, about 1,000,000+ years ago, maybe, has experienced some hot lunches even without Federal Hot Lunch Programs being invented yet.  Things start cooking in his evolution then too.  Mostly his brain starts getting bigger because of better nutrition.  Then, to hell with trees for nests, and we're off on foot with our crew and mammoth bladders full of nuts, berries, seeds and wildfire heated lunches.  Suddenly, and one of us, say, Mary Jane McCarthy gets the idea to poke a stick in a wildfire and run off to her cave with the tip of her stick ablaze.  When she gets to the cave her loyal husband, Ronnie Bob, lets say, is laying in his nest of sedges and grasses when Mary Jane runs up and in trying to wake him from his all day nap drops the stick in the nesting material setting Ronnie Bob ablaze.  "Holy Shit!", Mary Jane cries out, "You kids get over here and try this roost I just invented."  So, it's not good for Ronnie Bob, but Mary Jane and the kids are off and running with a new technology everyone in Little Rock, France is all "fired" up about and man continues to evolve like crazy as the one and only creature in 5 or so billion years of earth's evolutionary processes to be a "fire carrier".  Great news for the newly evolved Homo sapiens, but "whoa be tied" to the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants.  Humans now have "fire by the ass" so to speak, and they aren't about to teach all the other little live things how to be the tenders of the flame.

Time passes and you know the story.  We burned the hell out of places to increase production of certain foods we liked and that liked to have a wild fire over them now and then.  Well in a couple hundred fifty thousand years, maybe, we start doing all kinds of things like domesticating animals after we get the hang of planting and growing seeds and hording food like crazy.  This all means we have to protect our food from Attila the Hun and his cousins and the Celts and maybe the Aborigines from Australia if they ever figure out how to get off that big island again.  On and on we go....Then pretty soon, like 5,000 years or so, and everyone is getting the hang of all cooking with fire and accumulating wealth for our favorite King and the fights begin in earnest.  Yup.  Too much KNOWLEDGE.  God then creates the world in seven days and the Jews create a handbook for dominion over the earth and religions are born and our mythologies begin to get their butts kicked (yes, our Fire Gods are long dead by now.  Who can afford them when the Jews have the one and only God and the Catholics are doing the same and the Muslims are also fighting like hell to keep the one and only God pole position while all the illiterates of the planet are just trying to eat and saying they want to go to heaven and trying not to get burned at the stake or have another great flood or have their false gods turn out badly for them, etc.

Well lets flash ahead before you burn me at the stake.  All of a sudden we get sick of our fire sticks and having to light the hearth every night and go fetch a sprig of fire from the Town Fire Manager when our night fire goes out.  (When you read the book you're going to like it when Dr. Pyne teaches you the origin of the word, "Curfew".  So cool, and here's a hint, it comes from a French word of course, kinda, sorta).  So, some guy comes along and decides he's going to harness fire into a box and create a kind of "internal combustion" machine and BOOM! out pops a STEAM ENGINE.  Well not quite that fast, but I'm trying to get through this so I can do something I'm supposed to be doing tonight-like take a bath-"pheweee"-finally).  Suddenly just like that some guys have the steam engine while the rest of mankind is still playing around with firesticks, firecrackers, dynamite and other extraordinary things, none of whom has yet "harnessed" fire in an internal combustion capacity like the white supremists going forth from the Renaissance:  And whoa be us up steps the "Industrial Revolution" and we are off to the races again.  Only this time our brain doesn't enlarge enough to make us realize we ought to think about the consequences of this new invention before it's too late.  Our brain does get smart enough in no time for us to realize that "wood" is a dumb way to run a steam engine so why not try some "bubbling crude" that Jeb Clampet has bubbling up out of the ground in Pennsylvania or Texas or Nigeria or wherever he was from.  So now look out.

Yes, fossil fuels are GREAT....Easy to handle (messy and stinky, but easy), easy to store, easy to transport and...FULL of energy compared to wood.  Even compared to coal which we got sick of smelling in London and couldn't see through.  I know.  This is too fast.  History doesn't move that fast, right?  Wrong.  History is instantaneous.  It's a great concept.  All you gotta do is think about it and you can go through 3 million years of history in a couple pages of a blog, even..., even if it doesn't make any sense like this blog doesn't yet.  Stay with me and I'll loose you, I promise.

Yes, men play with fire still and yet, eventually candles kind of die out, fireplaces become too risky in towns built of wood.  And its way more fun to have Stender's Standard Oil truck drive up to the house with a truck full of oil fill your tank in the basement and feed it into your furnace with a length of tubing and "poof" you have a warm house without a bucket of ashes to carry out every other day, AND, best yet, the kids don't play in the bucket and start the house on fire, etc., etc. 

We also have learned of course, during this long time, that we can use fire or fight fire depending on our dominion decisions.  If we want to save our renewable combustibles, we put the fires consuming them out when they happen.  (Think forest fire here).  If we want to weaken our enemies we burn them out, bomb them, nuke them, what ever with our invented fire sticks that are really, really something under the Geneva Convention.  (PS.  Gas warfare is still a kind of fire stick warfare, don't forget).  We are finally smart enough know to have moved beyond firesticks and have invented fire engines to put out house fires, airplane tankers to carry water over forest fires and in doing so saving our trees for important stuff like making corporate CEOs wealthy even if we have to "fire" them and throw them a golden parachute.

Suddenly, like overnight almost, we realize that our big fire prevention program is working really well in America, not so well in the Amazon (where we're making money off their trees by slash and burn and selling them cows to graze on the piss poor forage that comes up afterward and then fires come along and burn their grass villages down because we forgot to sell them fire engines and aero-tankers, etc.)  But, back here in America we've suppressed our need for free ranging fire cuz we have it all burning in a box (if you don't believe me go outside and start your car).  Also in the meantime not just the Amazon and Borneo are burning, but Siberia and northern Canada are pretty much burning  out of control because no one with a 5,000-20,0000 square foot house lives in those places and needs fire protection.  I mean who cares about "defensible space" around a Yurt in Mongolia or a melting igloo in due north Canada.  But, we're going to save our "forests" even if it kills our "hotshot crews", smoke jumpers, or innocent bystanders trying to protect houses that have not been prepared for surviving a wild fire with a defensible space cleared around them.  Oh, yes, this is the controversy in areas where we have wild lands coming up to urban sprawl or what the fire marshalls call the "urban interface".

In the meantime, what do you suppose is happening to all the communities of plants and animals that depend on fire for their renewal?  Yeah.  Don't know do you?  Oh, maybe you do know about this.  They're disappearing because they are becoming hugely combustible and the next wildfire is going to torch them to the quick. 

So I'm going to go away now, but leave you with a couple of things Dr. Pyne left with me at the end of his book.  Just some little quotes to wet your whistle more for getting a copy of his book or stealing mine.

Here's what he says about fire management agencies pondering the conundrum of public outcry from too much "FIRE" and the ecological problem of plant community and species extinctions are likely if fire is removed as a normal occurrence in such wild places:

 "A simple resolution would hold that they had too much of the wrong kind of fire and too little of the right." (Page; 187).

And in his "Epilogue" he amazes me once more as he concludes that we live on a fire planet; a planet that evolved with fire as a tool for evolution before man showed up to capture it and apply it wisely or otherwise.  And in referring to the biological or technological work fire has yet to do, the results will depend on how we, the only beings playing with matches, learn to understand its place in the cycles and circles of life on this planet and the deal we made with fire for the power it brought to our caves, pea-sized brains and moon-sized egos:
 
"Fire wild, fire tame, fire mechanized--the torch remains in our hands, subject to the whims and wishes of our heads

In the end, fire is not a thing.  Try to place it and command it "be still" without removing either oxygen or fuel, and it runs away.  It is not a spirit anymore either.  Like Nietzsche's God, we have tried to kill it by controlling it with science and technology.  It is now chemistry; fuel, plus oxygen and a spark = fire.  But, is that all it is, really?  Just chemistry?  Even as we now know some of the life on this planet that evolved with fire is in steep decline and likely walking into eternities black hole.  And what about this great cure we have for elusive fire; the containment of it in our internal combustion machines?  Are those black boxes not spuing forth great gases at rates nature cannot purify the soot and fumes fast enough for our breathing balloons to bathe our bodies in the precious oxygen rich, particulate poor,  atmosphere we simply call "air".  And likewise, how about those 99.5% of all climate scientists we are trying not to be Chicken Littles running around yelling, "The Sky is puking, The Air is warming, The Sun is disappearing, We are falling..."??.

Have you ever wondered about the wonders of fire while sitting around a campfire in a wild place and thought that we humans might not be quite as in charge of the dominions as have been told to be?

Producer:  "Break for Commercial. Camera One. Take."

Ron