Stephen J. Pyne

Fire in the Earth system.

Burn, Baby, Burn Wildfires can have dramatic and devastating effects on landscapes and human structures and are important agents in environmental transformation. Their impacts on nonanthropocentric aspects of the environment, such as ecosystems, biodiversity, carbon reserves, and climate, are often overlooked. Bowman et al. (p. 481) review what is known and what is needed to develop a holistic understanding of the role of fire in the Earth system, particularly in view of the pervasive impact of fires and the likelihood that they will become increasingly difficult to control as climate changes. Fire is a worldwide phenomenon that appears in the geological record soon after the appearance of terrestrial plants. Fire influences global ecosystem patterns and processes, including vegetation distribution and structure, the carbon cycle, and climate. Although humans and fire have always coexisted, our capacity to manage fire remains imperfect and may become more difficult in the future as climate change alters fire regimes. This risk is difficult to assess, however, because fires are still poorly represented in global models. Here, we discuss some of the most important issues involved in developing a better understanding of the role of fire in the Earth system.

The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth

Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire-making species, but ‘natural’ (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the functioning of some biomes. Globally, debate rages about the impact on ecosystems of prehistoric human-set fires, with views ranging from catastrophic to negligible. Understanding of the diversity of human fire regimes on Earth in the past, present and future remains rudimentary. It remains uncertain how humans have caused a departure from ‘natural’ background levels that vary with climate change. Available evidence shows that modern humans can increase or decrease background levels of natural fire activity by clearing forests, promoting grazing, dispersing plants, altering ignition patterns and actively suppressing fires, thereby causing substantial ecosystem changes and loss of biodiversity. Some of these contemporary fire regimes cause substantial economic disruptions owing to the destruction of infrastructure, degradation of ecosystem services, loss of life, and smoke-related health effects. These episodic disasters help frame negative public attitudes towards landscape fires, despite the need for burning to sustain some ecosystems. Greenhouse gas-induced warming and changes in the hydrological cycle may increase the occurrence of large, severe fires, with potentially significant feedbacks to the Earth system. Improved understanding of human fire regimes demands: (1) better data on past and current human influences on fire regimes to enable global comparative analyses, (2) a greater understanding of different cultural traditions of landscape burning and their positive and negative social, economic and ecological effects, and (3) more realistic representations of anthropogenic fire in global vegetation and climate change models. We provide an historical framework to promote understanding of the development and diversification of fire regimes, covering the pre-human period, human domestication of fire, and the subsequent transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial economies. All of these phases still occur on Earth, providing opportunities for comparative research.

Interpreting the Yellowstone Fires of 1988Ecosystem responses and management implications

Norman L. Christensen is a professor in the Department of Botany, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706. James K. Agee is a professor in the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. Peter F. Brussard is a professor in and the chairman of the Biology Department, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557. Jay Hughes is a professor in and dean of the College of Forestry and National Resources, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. Dennis H. Knight is a professor in the Department of Botany, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071. G. Wayne Minshall is a professor in the Department of Biology, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209. James M. Peek is a professor in the College of Forest Resources, Wildlife, and Range Science, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83843. Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the Department of History, Arizona State University, West Campus, Phoenix, AZ 85017. Frederick J. Swanson is a senior research scientist in the USDA Forest Ser-

Problems, paradoxes, paradigms: triangulating fire research*

Wildland fire research has historically orbited around a physical paradigm of fire. This strategy has yielded remarkable results, yet increasingly it cannot speak to the core issues that concern fire management. Two additional paradigms are needed. One would build on fire’s origins in the living world. The other would evolve out of fire’s significance to humanity, and humanity’s unblinking importance to fire’s presence on Earth. Note that each paradigm is coherent in itself, that each is capable of absorbing the others, and that each is insufficient on its own. It is unlikely that a master synthesis of these conceptions will emerge, and is not necessary. The need is to sustain research that addresses how fire really exists, not how select sciences can handle it. This essay sketches what the resulting fire-research triangle might look like.

Maintaining focus: An introduction to anthropogenic fire

Abstract The capture of fire by the genus Homo changed forever the natural history of the Earth. Even today fire appears at the core of many popular scenarios for an environmental apocalypse. Yet the larger history of fire - the varied ways human societies have sought to use and control fire, the trajectory of change over centuries if not millennia - is not well known. This paper sketches a conceptual framework for understanding the ecology of anthropogenic fire and how such fire practices compete with natural ignition sources and with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels.

The Culture of Fire: An Introduction to Anthropogenic Fire History

The capture of fire by the genus Homo changed forever the natural history of the Earth. The manipulation of fire, a species monopoly, defined humanity’s ecological niche. Even today fire appears at the core of many popular scenarios for environmental apocalypse. Yet the larger history of fire—the varied ways human societies have sought to use and control fire, the trajectory of change over centuries if no millennia—is not well known.

Wild Hearth A Prolegomenon to the Cultural Fire History of Northern Eurasia

Since the time of Homo erectus hominids have, through fire, interacted with the Earth. Anthropogenic fire has been present throughout northern Eurasia whenever ice sheets, sea levels, and climate have permitted; throughout the Holocene, occupation by Homo sapiens has been continuous. Through their fire practices humans have sought, from the earliest times, to reshape and render habitable their surroundings. The ways by which humans have protected themselves from wildfire and the means by which they have projected their own domesticated fires onto the land have varied considerably — they have changed over historic time as well as across geographic space. But their fires mark human presence as surely as flint arrowheads or burial mounds. Everywhere fire has mediated between humans and the land. The biota of northern Eurasia has thus coexisted, if not coevolved, under the pressures of anthropogenic fire.

Fire in the mind: Changing understandings of fire in western civilization

For most of human history, fire has been a pervasive presence in human life, and so also in human thought. This essay examines the ways in which fire has functioned intellectually in Western civilization as mythology, as religion, as natural philosophy and as modern science. The great phase change occurred with the development of industrial combustion; fire faded from quotidian life, which also removed it from the world of informing ideas. Beginning with the discovery of oxygen, fire as an organizing concept fragmented into various subdisciplines of natural science and forestry. The Anthropocene, however, may revive the intellectual role of fire as an informing idea or at least a narrative conceit. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.

Fire Conservancy: The Origins of Wildland Fire Protection in British India, America, and Australia

The advent of modern wildland fire protection was almost everywhere associated with the advent of modern forestry. Professional forestry itself evolved beyond folk practices when the Enlightenment applied its rationalizing impulses to the peculiar environmental and social circumstances of central Europe. It became a vital export to overseas colonies as the industrial revolution and imperialism established a global economy and a global ecology, and as Western science promulgated a global scholarship. Foresters joined other transnational cadres of European engineers and administrators. But everywhere that European foresters ventured they encountered fire practices vastly different from those of central Europe in the 19th century. Everywhere their precepts conflicted with local lore, their practices with local custom. Everywhere they found themselves immersed in a conflict over fire practices that was virtually instantaneous, often violent, and unavoidable.

Eternal Flame: An Introduction to the Fire History of the Mediterranean

The physical geography of the Mediterranean renders it an ideal landscape for burning. But for thousands of years its fire regimes have been set directly and indirectly by humans. Because of the region’s significance in Antiquity, it has been studied for a long time and has become for good or ill a paradigm for thinking about fire. In this regard the Mediterranean has been both a place to export ideas and a place to receive them. Today’s thinking about the Mediterranean and fire is thus as complex as its intricate landscapes. But the fundamental reality remains, as first voiced by Theophrastus: fire is tame or feral as humans contain or unleash it, which they do not only by the torch but by close tending of the landscape.