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The mastery of fire separates humans from other animals. Our use of this chemical reaction – on landscapes, in hearths, and in industry – is one of our most fundamental and influences on the environment. Without fire, many of our foods and landscapes would be unrecognizable. But fire also destroys homes and habitats, and inspires or even expresses conflict between different people.
Fire is a chemical chain reaction akin to photosynthesis in reverse. Once sufficiently heated, fuels react with oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide, water vapor, and heat energy. The size, type, and moisture content of fuels, as well as the prevailing weather conditions (humidity, precipitation, temperature, and wind), are crucial in affecting the threshold for ignition and potential for spread. The most common fuels for fire are biomass like trees or grasses, and fossil biomass like coal or oil. Fires are more frequent in landscapes with both wet and dry periods, like seasonal tropics or Mediterranean climates. Biomass accumulates during wet seasons and then dries out. Deserts are typically too dry for combustible biomass to accumulate; humid temperate, boreal, and humid tropical regions only occasionally dry out sufficiently to allow fires to propagate.
Barring spontaneous combustion at high temperatures, most fires require external ignition to spark the chain reaction. Humans and lightning are the most common ignition sources, though falling rocks and volcanism also occasionally spark fires. Lightning’s prevalence varies from region to region: while around 6,000 lightning discharges occur each minute across the globe, they are not uniformly distributed. Mountainous regions and places where lightning is not associated with drenching rainfall are particularly prone to lightning fire ignition. The western United States is one such place; 200-1,700 lightning fires occur each year on government forestlands in California alone.
In many places, humans ignite more fires than lightning. Humans first observed that the animals they hunted congregated on the flush of new grass after lightning-strike fires, or that useful plants grew in burned areas; archaeological evidence suggests that humans fully mastered the art of lighting and tending fires between 350,000 to 400,000 years ago. Our techniques evolved rapidly in recent centuries, beginning with sulfur-tipped matches in 1827 and moving toward tools like aerial bushfire ignition and turbocharged internal combustion engines.
Every human culture has stories and beliefs centered on fire, which has come to symbolize the links between humans and the divine, both in legend and in practices like cremation.
Fire can be divided into four broad categories. Landscape fires are natural landscape and anthropogenic landscape fires such as vegetation fires, biomass burning, or “wildland” fires; and point fires are domestic and industrial fires, which are contained to a single, man-made point, such as a stove, furnace, or engine.
Landscape Fires
Natural landscape fires are ignited by nonhuman sources like lightning. Charcoal found in lake sediments and other paleo-ecological evidence shows that fires burned nearly everywhere before the arrival of fire-bearing humans.
However, humans now burn more lands than lightning, and have long relied on fire as a simple and effective tool to control and shape landscapes for a better life. Humans have also created combustible conditions by unleashing livestock or slashing vegetation. Fires renew and expand grasses crucial to both wild game and domestic livestock, and clear brushy vegetation to facilitate cultivation, travel, visibility, and security. Frequent, small, early fires are the best way to control wildfires, by avoiding fuel buildup. Fire also encourages (or discourages) specific plant types, flushes out animals for hunting or bees for honey collection, and uncovers mineral outcrops or wild tubers.
Anthropogenic landscape fires are common across the globe. For example, in Kansas, ranchers set tallgrass prairies alight each spring to improve grazing. In California, oak woodland managers copy the techniques of indigenous Yurok people, who burned in part to encourage a good acorn harvest. In Africa, wildlife reserve managers burn savannah grasslands to improve habitat for a variety of ungulates and their predators. In Scotland, hunters torch the moors to improve grouse habitat. In India, foresters use prescribed fires in sal forests to improve timber harvests; Florida foresters do the same in pine woodlands. In Mali and northern Australia, a mosaic of frequent fires throughout the year serves not only to shape the vegetation, but also to control the spread of later wildfires. In Oregon and Brazil, farmers burn crop stubble to facilitate the return of nutrients to the soil. In Madagascar and Thailand, farmers prepare crop fields by burning the standing vegetation.
Today, as a result of both natural and anthropogenic landscape fires, an estimated six million square kilometers, or four percent of the earth’s land surface, burns annually. In some regions-particularly the savannas and grasslands of places like northern Australia, Sahelian Africa, or around the edges of the Amazon Basin-fires burn perhaps half the land each year.
Point Fires
Domestic and industrial fires are also an anthropogenic contribution. Domestic fires include campfires and home fires used for cooking, heat, and light. Fire allowed our ancestors to cook and cure foods, vastly expanding the range of edible foods and the possibilities for storage. Campfires at cave entrances protected prehistoric humans from dangerous predators. Their light expanded our productive capacities. Today, the campfire, fireplace, or barbeque remains an enduring site of human sociability.
Industrial fires are, like domestic fires, anthropogenic point fires, but differ in technology and fuel type. Technological advances in the past two centuries, and associated exploitation of fossil biomass fuels, contributed to the invention and rapid spread of different kinds of engines, furnaces, and factories. The campfires or wood stoves of our ancestors have, for most people, been replaced by a coal-burning power plant linked to an electricity grid, or by pipelines and bottled gas. Industrial fires are now at the root of most human productive and economic activities-from jet engines to automobiles, coal-burning power stations to gas furnaces. Humans now consume 400 million trillion joules of energy annually, or almost two-thirds of the earth’s overall combustion budget.
The impacts of fire are complex and highly dependent on temporal and spatial scale. Short-term trends may not reveal major long-term effects, and vice-versa. In some ecosystems, such as oft-burned grasslands, vegetation and soil nutrients recover relatively rapidly from the immediate effects of fire; in other ecosystems, single fires can be major drivers of landscape change.
Shaping Vegetation Communities
Both natural and anthropogenic landscape fires play a key role in shaping vegetation communities. At its simplest level, increased burning favors fireadapted species. Grasses typically fare better than woody species, yet some bushes and trees display a wide variety of adaptations to fire, including the protection of thick bark, seeds that require fire to open or ash beds to sprout, the ability to re-sprout from epicormic buds, or the placement of significant plant parts underground.
In the savannah environments of Africa, early dry season burns every few years can a promote tree cover, while later fires reduce tree cover. Seed availability, grazing intensity, soil type, annual variability in timing and amount of precipitation all affect the outcome.
Many seemingly “natural” landscapes may owe at least part of their ecological character to people. Geographer William Denevan has argued that before the arrival of Columbus, the burning and cropping practices of indigenous Americans, then numbering in the tens of millions, had shaped landscapes all over the Americas. While some debate persists over this assertion, it is clear that American prairies, African savannas, or the Brazilian cerrado would look fundamentally different without fire.
Humans first visited the large Indian Ocean island of Madagascar only 2,300 years ago. The fires unleashed by settlers over the next millennium across this island increased grassland cover at the expense of woody vegetation, particularly in the highlands.
Fires associated with agriculture lead to even sharper vegetation changes, as people closely control the vegetation that succeeds a burn. Polynesian sailors settling new islands like New Zealand started a process of burning and clearing just as 18th century Scottish and Irish farmers used slash-and-burn agriculture to clear a foothold in America’s heavily wooded Appalachian Mountains. Fires used for agriculture still play a key role in deforestation today, in places like Africa (for subsistence farming), southeast Asia (to establish oil palm plantations), and the Amazon (for the farms of colonists and ranchers).
Soil and Water
Fires affect soils in several ways. Typically, erosion rates increase on burned plots for a limited time, though regular burning does not necessarily increase long-term erosion. In some ecosystems, however, fires may trigger erosion events that are major drivers of geomorphic change.
Soil nutrients like nitrogen and potassium increase in the short-term after a fire, due to ash deposits and reduced plant uptake of nitrogen. Longterm effects depend on soil and vegetation type, fire characteristics, topography, climate, soil formation rates, and complex nutrient cycles. For example, in the closely studied tallgrass prairies of Kansas, where fires burn annually, researchers determined that while fire volatilizes organic nitrogen, this has no impact on grassland productivity as biological and biogeochemical feedback cycles serve to fill the gaps. Under a very different fire regime-slash and burn agriculture in tropical rainforests-soil degradation is usually minimal, except when the land in question is steeply sloped or permanently cleared.
Fire’s hydrological impacts are highly ambiguous and context specific. In terms of water quality, influxes of ash and detritus are thought to be relatively short-lived. Recently burned areas can exhibit higher surface temperatures, higher evapo-transpiration potential, and less vegetation cover, leading to warmer water and faster runoff. Some impacts are counterintuitive. For example, in some South African watersheds, nonnative wattle trees lower the water table. Frequent burning can control these water-hungry trees and maintain a higher water table.
Air Quality and Emission
All forms of fire affect air quality. Since combustion is rarely perfect, fires release not just carbon dioxide and water vapor but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons, and various smoke particulates into the air. For humans, these emissions can be simple irritants or serious health hazards, depending on the scale. Large landscape burning events such as the 1997-98 fires in Indonesia impacted 75 million people. Health impacts like respiratory ailments led to the deaths of perhaps 16,000 infants and affected people’s livelihoods.
Indoor cooking and heating fires, when poorly ventilated, contribute to a variety of diseases, including pneumonia, chronic respiratory diseases, lung cancer, and asthma. Smoke from domestic fires is blamed for over a million premature deaths per year around the world.
Fire emissions play a major role in atmospheric chemistry, radiation budgets, and climate change. Research summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that increased emissions have demonstrably changed many aspects of the global climate since the pre-industrial era.
Prior to about 1940, the primary source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions was land clearing and cultivation. Since then, emissions from industrial fire-factories and vehicles-have far eclipsed these in impact. All the same, tropical land clearing, often through fire, continues to be major source of greenhouse gases; global landscape fires corresponding with the strong 1997-98 El Nino season were recently shown to have emitted 30 percent more carbon monoxide than vehicles and power plants during those two years.
Conflict over Fire
The impacts of fire have long made it a topic of regulation and controversy. The pastoralist of lore, with his wandering herds and free-burning fires, occasionally clashed with those whose property his fires threatened. Villagers protected their crop fields, homes, or sacred groves from free-burning fire, and sought punishment for anyone who sparked a damaging fire.
With the Industrial Revolution came industrial fire, which freed many human productive activities from our dependency on landscape fires. fields are now fertilized with chemicals, not ashes. Along with industrialization, the 19th century also saw major advances in science, growing capitalist economies, and newly powerful state bureaucracies. These trends led to increased government and scientific intrusions into the management of many landscapes, removing them out of the hands of villagers. In such strategies, there was no room for fire.
Modern resource management in the 20th century were based on ecological theories of the day, particularly the idea of succession, which viewed change in vegetation communities as an orderly, staged progression from bare soil to a climax, usually forested. Fire was seen as an outside disturbance working against succession. Technological advances like tractors and bulldozers gave humans a mechanical means to clear vegetation instead of burning, as well as powerful tools to effectively fight fire. At the same time, state resource management bureaucracies gained further power over the management of far-flung landscapes.
Emphasis on Fire Supression
As a result, fire landscapes changed. Forest fire suppression was the core strategy for much of the 20th century in places in the United States, France, southeastern Australia, francophone Africa, and Indonesia. Fires were seen to threaten timber assets, infrastructure, and aesthetic qualities, to be anathema to economic development, and to degrade soils, water, and land cover. For example, after the massive 1910 wildfires that burned 12,000 square kilometers of forest in the northern Rockies, the U.S. Forest Service mobilized a massive fire-fighting campaign, establishing a network of fire towers, access roads, and firefighters. By 1935, stated policy was that all fires be extinguished by 10 a.m. the following day; in the 1940s, a charismatic cartoon character, Smokey Bear, was conceived to spread the fire control message to younger generations.
France took a similarly strong approach to fire suppression, even in its fire-prone Mediterranean regions, relying on impressive fire-fighting technology. In its tropical colonies, France sought to replace firestick farming with intensive agriculture and state forests. In the 1930s, the colonial rulers attempted to ban all fires in their African and Asian colonies. However, political and logistical realities forced officers to accept some pragmatic exceptions to the ban, like pasture renewal burns or preventive burning.
There were exceptions to the fire suppression approach. In America, farmers and ranchers continued to enlist fire as a key tool for managing Kansas prairies, California grasslands, and Hawaiian cane fields. Even the U.S. Forest Service continued to undertake controlled burns in the productive pine forests of the southeast. In India’s sal forests, field foresters and local villagers convinced the British colonial forest bureaucracy that fires served a key role in the regeneration of these valuable trees.
Full fire suppression began to lose favor in much of the world in the second half of the 20th century. Already in the 1950s, colonial officers in Africa began to see fire as a “necessary evil” for range management. Lessons from field-based foresters and new ecological research began to tentatively change the paradigm in America in the 1960s. Californian forester Harold Biswell tirelessly argued for the benefits of prescribed burning. New policies emerged that allowed some “natural” fires to burn in wilderness areas, or that allowed resource managers to practice controlled, prescribed burns.
Fire and Politics
However, fire would continue to be politicized. Industrial fires fuel the growth of urban society, but lead to damaging impacts on air quality, health, and climate. Restrictions based on environmental concerns frequently clash with the use of fire as an efficient and affordable tool by a variety of land users. When city residents are forced to cough their way through a smoky fire haze, politicians call for rural land managers to stop burning. When images of slash-and-burn farming are associated with the demise of tropical forests, calls go out for an end to such techniques for the sake of biodiversity conservation. As a result, some countries reaffirmed strict suppression laws. For example, Mali outlawed all burning in the 1980s; Madagascar did the same in 2002.
Today’s policymakers must deal with a number of important complexities. First, the fire suppression paradigm persists, often reflecting the concerns of an urban public. While resource managers and scientists argue for a legitimate place for some fire in some vegetation systems, public perceptions focus on the destructive side of fire. When treasured national parks burn, like America’s Yellowstone in 1988, discussions of the ecological role of fire are often lost behind fiery headlines.
Nearly a century of fire repression means that many ecosystems suffer an overabundance of flammable fuel. When a lightning bolt or camper’s match ignite a fire during a dry spell, the result is catastrophic. Fires burn hotter and bigger than they would in frequently burned environments. The legacy of suppression may be a key factor in the large number of catastrophic wildfires burning the forests of America, southeast Australia, and Mediterranean Europe over the past two decades. In turn, footage of raging flames and charred buildings from these events spurns continued political pressure to stop all fires.
Prescribed or controlled burning plays a key role in current fire policy. Fire is a difficult and expensive tool to master, and escaped controlled burns are not only frequent but also generate bad publicity-as when an escaped controlled burn almost torched New Mexico’s Los Alamos nuclear labs in 2000. Resource management agency mandates are shifting from resource production to recreation and conservation, to the point that effective broadscale controlled burning is not always feasible.
In many wealthy nations, the spread of the ruralurban fringe puts large property assets at the risk of fire. Houses built in the forest or in abandoned farm country, whether in the foothills of the Sierra, the French Riviera, or Sydney’s outer suburbs, pose a complex problem for fire managers, as fuels accumulate to dangerous levels.
Finally, fire management is vexed by the realization that there is no fundamental “right” or “wrong.” The only constant is that the outcome is shaped by the decisions of humans and the vagaries of nature unique fire creatures on a unique fire planet.
Bibliography:
- Stephen Pyne, World Fire (University of Washington Press, 1995);
- Stephen Pyne, Patricia Andrews and Richard D. Laven, Introduction to Wildland Fire (Wiley, 1996);
- Rocky Barker, Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America (Island Press, 2005);
- Paul Crutzen and Johan Goldammer, , Fire in the Environment (Wiley, 1993);
- Thomas Vale, Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape (Island Press, 2000).
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