I’m thinking again about how all of us—humans and nonhumans alike—are treated as mere units of commerce by the capitalist system. I go there a lot, these days, as I read and read (and read and read) to figure out how we got here, why we’re like this, and why we can’t seem to fix it.
How we got where? Fix what? Well, it’s this: I’ve just read the scientists’ latest warning to humanity, and it’s bad. It’s really quite bad.
But that’s nothing new.
And that’s what I don’t get, how we can still be in this death spiral, with how often we’ve been warned, with all we know. It’s why I read obsessively, seeking insight into our human nature and maybe, even, ideas on how to move forward in the face of all our crises.
Several years ago, I managed a coalition of environmental organizations working toward gray wolf recovery in the American West. As part of that work, I came to be in conversation with a scientist named Bill Ripple, in his role as a carnivore ecologist. His name should be a household one, and although it’s not, I’m glad his work has penetrated the awareness of many: he was the lead co-author on the studies that showed how reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park created profound ecological restructuring.1
Imagine that: animals impacting the physical world in such a way.
The more we look, actually, the more this shows up: whale populations may have once driven vertical ocean circulation to a large degree; salmon carved away the Cascades mountain range.
But of course, the clearest example of an animal altering geochemical cycles on a landscape and planetary scale is us. We’ve converted our home planet into a giant barnyard to feed us in our concrete mazes, and we’re emptying the land and seas of other lives to do it. Our power structures are now completely predicated on access to fossil fuels and insomuch as individual humans have a role to play in this capitalist dystopia, it’s as cogs and lubricants for the great machine.
I’m struck by how many of the bedrock products of the modern industrial world were given us by ad agencies laboring on behalf of Capital to monetize toxic byproducts. Using the human population as a sink for corporate waste has a long tradition in my country and has had disastrous impacts on our health and our biomes.
Nitrogen fertilizers are one of the most well-known of these. Chemical manufacturers, retooling war chemical plants after World War II, needed a new market for their nitrogenous feedstocks. Ten large manufacturing plants in the U.S., the forerunners of today’s agrochemical corporations, stopped making nitrate for bombs and started making ammonia for fertilizer. With Japan’s and Europe’s manufacturing capacities in ruins, the U.S. became the foremost supplier of nitrogen fertilizers, which much of the world nows relies on to the detriment of ecosystems everywhere.
Fluoridation of many municipal water supplies is another. Fluoride gas (highly toxic, think Sarin and Novichok) is a byproduct of phosphorus fertilizer production. Regulators finally forced American manufacturers to scrub it from their smokestacks, but that resulted in a new byproduct, fluorosilicic acid. This liquid, a suspiciously short time later, was deemed “necessary” to feed into the water supply of much of the United States. According to an article from Oregon State University, “Many are surprised to learn that unlike the pharmaceutical grade fluoride in their toothpaste, the fluoride in their water is an untreated industrial waste product, one that contains trace elements of arsenic and lead. Without the phosphate industry’s effluent, water fluoridation would be prohibitively expensive. And without fluoridation, the phosphate industry would be stuck with an expensive waste disposal problem.”
Asbestos was widely used in flooring tiles in the last century not because it provided a superior product, but because an application was needed for the waste products of asbestos mining operations. It’s still being removed at great expense from American homes by hazardous materials handlers.
And as far as more direct impacts to human health, in that we actually ingest their products, the various manufacturers of industrial seed oils, what we euphemistically call “vegetable oils,” have been shameless to the point of diabolical. I challenge you to read physician Cate Shanahan’s exposé of the seed-oil industry, Dark Calories, and remain neutral about the very idea that any one human would dare to coerce other humans into eating these things.
Cottonseed oil, for example, is the toxic byproduct of cotton production (which itself was, of course, the major cause and product of slavery in the American South). Once some semblance of human rights for cotton field workers developed—for example paying them a pittance rather than enslaving them as free labor—the profit margins on that crop shrank dramatically. Thus, the industry needed some other way to monetize cotton. The waste product, the bitterly lethal seed, was crushed, heated, washed with hexane, deodorized by a many-step industrial process, extruded into some semblance of oil, and then dyed to make it look like something a human might eat. (It’s important to note that unrefined cottonseed oil is still used as an insecticide today.)
Housewives of the early 20th century at first refused to cook with this foul product until, in an attempt to make soap with it, Procter & Gamble’s chemists accidentally created what is now called Crisco. Flavorless, odorless, promoted by advertisers as a cleaner, healthier, and cheaper alternative to animal fats, this once-toxic substance (now made differently toxic by its extrusion into trans fat), became the favored cooking oil of a generation of Americans. My mom used it throughout my childhood. We now know that it, and not the natural fats it replaced, was a major cause of heart attacks.
In working with Bill Ripple’s wolf research back in 2018, I eventually came to realize that in addition to his carnivore ecology work in Yellowstone, he was the lead author on the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. The original warning, the first notice I suppose, had been published in 1992 and signed by about 1,700 scientists from around the globe. Bill tells about coming across that article around 25 years later and realizing how little progress we’d made. He dove into the current climate and biodiversity data, collated the updated metrics, drafted up an article, and sent it to about 40 colleagues hoping a few would sign on.
By the time it was published in 2017, over 15,000 scientists from around the world had signed on, endorsing his warning, which went on to make international headlines and has become one of the most-cited papers ever published. While truly dire, it still urged action, calling on leaders and citizens worldwide to make immediate and drastic changes in policy and behavior to forestall catastrophic climate change and ecosystem collapse.
That was seven years ago. Bill and colleagues have just published 2024’s annual update to the warning, and the tone is markedly less encouraging.
It’s worth reading Bill’s summary of the paper in The Conversation. To the extent that I can reliably pick out the tone in a scientific article written by someone I knew briefly in a former decade, I thought Bill seemed … not himself. Resigned, perhaps.
I hope I’m wrong, and that he’s the ebulliant professor he always was, but at any rate, my heart goes out to him. Imagine being one of the scientists who showed that restoring the natural world has the potential to solve many of our cascading mega-crises, and imagine seeing the ongoing, enthusiastic response to this knowledge, but later finding that none of it seems to be derailing our industrial juggernaut. As Bill et al. state flatly in the paper, most all the indicators are trending in the wrong direction. They write: “Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage.”
Here’s where my mind gets stuck in a loop. Why? Why are we still at an impasse?
It’s not from lack of knowledge, that’s for sure.
Nor is it from lack of solutions.
I think it’s from capitalism, actually.
Stephen J. Pyne’s book, The Pyrocene, is informative here. Pyne proposes three “ages” of fire and suggests that rather than an Anthropocene, we are in an epoch defined by our fire use, more accurately called the Pyrocene. In the age of first fire, flame was an inevitable consequence of life moving from the oceans and onto the land. Plants used the alchemy of photosynthesis to produce so much biomass from light energy that a mechanism was needed to convert matter back into energy. Hence: fire, lightning-sparked in the newly oxygenated atmosphere of Earth. Photosynthesis and fire as dance partners; plants capture light, fire releases it again.
Pyne proposed that second fire arose as a species capable of controlling fire—that’s us, the sapients—arose during a period that was amenable to fire—that’s the most recent interglacial. Thus, at the end of the last Ice Age, one of the members of genus Homo was just coming into maturity. While previous interglacials were peopled by our other human relatives, those gaps between Ice Ages failed to provide the evolutionary spark that led to an ape that could effectively control fire as a planetary ecological force.
Not until the most recent retreat of the ice did our developing skills coincide with a warmer, less-icy planetary surface that was capable of carrying flame. This also coincided with the expansion of sapients across more of the Earth’s landmasses and the extinction of the great Pleistocene megafauna like giant sloths and woolly mammoths. Pyne makes the leap that anthropogenic fire, which we carried with us in our banked firesticks from continent to continent, converted the biomes of every place we encountered into ones that could survive fire. Thus, human fire may have played as large a role, or larger, as direct human hunting in the extinction of the mega-world animals that preceded our widespread dominion of the Earth.
For my part, I feel drawn to Pyne’s view that our fire use is perhaps the core of what distinguishes our species; it’s what makes us human. More than the fact that our large brains and language skills may be attributable to the nutrients unlocked by cooking food (and cooking ecosystems, as Pyne notes), it’s also about our niche more broadly. Whales drive ocean circulation and feed complete ecosystems when they die; wolves drive the behavior of their prey species and thus cause forests to grow differently. Similarly, humans burn things, leaving fire-adapted ecosystems in our wake.
Perhaps Gaia evolved Homo sapiens “on purpose” to heat her up and pull her out of the ever-deepening Pleistocene. After 2.6 million years locked in an Ice Age, with brief interglacials to allow some evolutionary radiation, what if humans were a response to a feedback loop that threatened to pull Earth’s systems into an irreversible—and final—spiral into Snowball Earth? Earth needed a species that could spread fire, developmentally ready to take the reins as the planet’s keystone species at just the right time to prevent her from slipping back under miles of ice, perhaps permanently.
If that’s so, what Gaia failed to reckon on was humanity figuring out how to tap into third fire: fossil fuel.
In my years as a public-lands lawyer, every single logging proposal I’ve evaluated, whether for purposes of profit or fire prevention (thinning), has involved miles of new road-building and extensive reopening of closed roads. Road-building in the forested drainages and mountainsides of the American West is an expensive and difficult endeavor.
Forget what you might imagine about a tractor blading across a flat field to cut in a new road; no, what’s needed here are roads that can support a tractor-trailer full of massive logs on a steep mountainside. The earthmoving equipment first cuts into the profile of the hillside, a long horizontal wedge on contour that drains away the groundwater beneath, dewatering streams above and below the road, leaving a landscape behind that’s drier and more fire-prone (oh, the irony).
Logging contracts require that our multitude of small and large streams cutting across the road’s path must be protected from the mud and dirt that will run along the road at the first rains, so culverts and water bars should be installed at great expense (little secret: these are rarely done to standard, if at all). The salmon-bearing streams below the roads thus silt up just as the first rains are calling the fish home to reproduce, burying under thick layers of mud the pea gravel they must have for their nests.
Dump truck after dump truck will then rumble along this new horizontal gash through the forest, laying a least a foot of gravel (0.3 m) to create a roadbed sturdy enough to handle the weight of a fully loaded semi truck on an inherently unstable slope. Once it’s finally built, the road (or even sadder, the rebuilt road that had in some prior decade been closed and reverted to forest but is being reopened like a long-healed scar) will bring in new weedy species. These include vehicle-carried humans who would be unlikely to have arrived there under their own steam. The humans will bring garbage, more weeds, and noise to scare away the local biota; worst of all though, they’ll bring fire. Fire from their cigarettes, fire from their fireworks, fire from their truck chains sparking on the gravel, fire from their firearms, fire from their cookstoves, fire from their malice and fire from their parties.
Because that’s what our species does. We carry the flame.
I don’t say that to blame, I really don’t. Our propensity to bring our firesticks with us everywhere we go is intrinsic. But we must not lie to ourselves about what we do, what we cannot help but do, and we must account for it in our planning. If humans bring fire wherever they go, particularly when they are in vehicles, and if we want to deter fires from reaching certain areas, then we should not build roads into those areas. If we want to minimize incursions of flammable weeds into intact ecosystems, we should not build roads there. If we want to keep water in the living soil such that wildfires die down to a smolder when they reach the moist enclave of a tall green cathedral, we should not cut roads there.
Roads lay out a welcome mat for wildfire. Pyne tells us they “follow roads into logged or cleared areas, acting as fuses to carry fires into new sites.”
As with the projected impacts of climate change, we have known all of this for decades. In the United States, the best research on the disastrous impacts of roads comes from the very forestry agencies—in particular, the U.S. Forest Service—who do most of the road building.
Similarly, the best, most recent analyses of the inefficacy of thinning/logging for fire prevention and mitigation also comes directly from the Forest Service. Yet, the agency is pushing hard across the West to lower environmental hurdles to logging projects and incorporate heavier thinning projects, even in the old-growth forests that it has been directed to protect. If this sounds like a bureaucracy in which the left hand is not talking to the right, well, that’s just it.
One Forest Service scientist told me a few years ago that working in the agency made them feel schizophrenic in that the agency’s forest management actions did not jibe with internal direction from the agency’s own scientists. Why? I think we’re back to that one word: Capital.
Imagine this: you’re an environmentalist at a Forest Service tour of a proposed logging project in the backwoods of California or Oregon. The foresters are your typical guys: bluff, cheerful, love their job being in the woods all day, bullish on logging but open to leaving a few more trees for the owls, usually, if you ask nicely. They think you’re kind of a hippie wacko, but they’re a bit wary too, because they know your group might sue their bosses, and when you do you usually win and cancel out all their planning, so they’re trying to be careful what they say. There’s usually one guy from the fire squad, too, and maybe a botanist or hydrologist.
There’s sometimes a wildlife biologist too, who, when most of the guys are a ways up the road radioing back to the district office, will sidle up to you, the only lawyer in the group. They’ll give you a significant look, say thanks for coming out here to see this place, it’s really something, and will hand you a flash drive or a folded-up map with some letters and numbers scrawled on it. Some deciphering back at the office will reveal those are endangered species letter codes and survey geolocations, with pages in the reports picked out for your attention. You have to put it together from there: oh, I see, the biologists’ surveys turned up a threatened or endangered species here, and over there, too. But their boss doesn’t want that to show up in the final NEPA documents released for public review, because it’s certainly enough to get a judge to stop the timber sale. Why else this clandestine behavior?
It’s there in the way the agencies accidentally-on-purpose fail to post all the underlying scientific reports that are done for every proposed logging project until an annoying lawyer asks them over and over to make them public.
It’s there in the way agency officials under cover of anonymity will say that the only recourse for environmental destruction on public lands is lawsuits from environmentalists, because without a court order, the higher-ups in an agency will not greenlight projects that comply fully with environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act. Instead, under political and bureaucratic pressure, they will choose the project that can make the agency the most money or pad the balance sheets of some senator’s favored lumber company.
Otherwise-skeptical people who might usually dig a bit deeper on government corruption often give our forestry agencies a pass. I think maybe it’s because forestry seems sort of benign, maybe boring. But in fact, there’s big money in logging, and in western states, there’s political clout too.
Decisions are being made right now in these dull agencies about how to manage some of the world’s most important carbon sinks, by which I mean the forests of the United States. Because there’s big money to be made, Capital corrupts the conversation. Without continually asking Cui bono?—who benefits?—while knowing enough about the players to get to the right answer, the wisdom of the natural order is often missed by those who purport to have the solution to wildfires in the West.
The issues of forestry and fire are often portrayed by non-specialists in the media as a simple matter of “log it or it’ll burn,” but as with everything, there’s a complexity that’s belied by the talking points.
Third fire—or fossil-fueled fire, also known as combustion—is Stephen Pyne’s conception of human time-travel. Upon the discovery of how to burn liquid sunlight, stored away as oil and gas in the Earth’s crust for millions of years, we humans jolted our planet out of what may have been a new descent into cold at the end of the Middle Ages. The Little Ice Age, which lasted from ~1550-1850, was the culmination of depopulation in Europe and North America by successive waves of plagues.
Agricultural enterprises were abandoned, particularly in the Americas, which were well-cultivated before then. Up to 90% of indigenous Americans were killed by diseases from overseas: fallowed fields became forests again and these rapidly growing trees sequestered enough carbon to tilt the entire planet into a cool period. (This again, right? Looks like we can cool the planet. We know what works, we just have to do it, only let’s do it without mass human death this time. We know how to do that, too.)
Heralding the end of the Little Ice Age, in the early to mid-1800s, European exploration returned widespread human fire to the Americas with waves of land-clearing and burning to follow. This second fire, human use of a natural force to burn living matter, heated the atmosphere.
But more significantly, around this time European technology first captured third fire, fossil fire, in steam and combustion engines. Successive surges of exploration and conquest carried this new fire around the globe, with capitalism as its handmaiden.
Pyne calls this the pyric transition. It’s the “dark Passover” where the new third fire meets existing second fire in a wave traveling across the surface of the Earth. Some of its outcomes are probably good, such as when people can move from cooking over the open flame of second fire in their smoky kitchens to the cleaner-burning gas-powered stove of third fire. Others are undeniably bad, such as when the stable village lives of Nigerian families are rent by the profiteering of petrostate corporations. The pyric transition, with all its outcomes, is always tumultuous.
All those industrial byproducts I listed above, which ad agencies created a perceived need for such that they are now integrated in our everyday experiences as surely as hot water and grocery stores, are results of the pyric transition to a world ruled by fossil fire.
And here, the species that was in some sense genetically coded to spread second fire around the world, that did so as a biological mandate, now has to make the choice to give up the power granted it by third fire if it wants its home planet to stay habitable.
There’s the rub, I think. Pyne quotes Matthew Boulton, business partner of James Watt and the builder of the first commercial steam engine: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.” Boulton, though less well-known than Watt, was no less a founder of the Industrial Revolution, and he put his finger directly on the gift that third fire gives our species: previously unimaginable power.
One barrel of oil does the amount of work an adult human male can accomplish in five years.
Control of that kind of energy source would—and did—give nation-states’ elites godlike powers. Those who controlled that power controlled the Earth. They still do. They will not give that up willingly.
Pyne writes of the Industrial Revolution: “Combustion became once more an informing principle, but this time as an unbounded source of anthropogenic power by which to disrupt the Earth. The blowback has been colossal.” He says the transition changed the course of fire history; I’d go much further and say the Industrial Revolution, with its partner capitalism, changed the course of life on Earth.
Rachel Donald states it as clearly as I’ve seen. Fossil fuel powered economies, for those who can capitalize on them, “are the best imaginable systems to buttress political power.” She writes:
Asking the biggest economies in the world to get off of fossil fuels is not only a demand to shrink their economies, but their access to power. They will not have the same opportunity again to shore up power in such a centralised way. Renewable energy systems can be deployed in a decentralised way: villages can install their own wind turbine, individuals can put solar panels on their roof, and a seaside town can invest in wave energy. The cost of renewables is through the floor. It is the cheapest energy system in the world. It makes economic sense to deploy it. The only reason against it (barring a concern for biodiversity) would be it threatens power structures by emancipating populations from a centralised power system.
Here’s the thing that all the renewable energy boosters fail to grapple with: our growing worldwide renewable energy supply has only added to electrical generation capacity; it has not replaced fossil fuel use. That, and only about 30% of our carbon emissions come from electricity generation anyway. Something else has to change.
I prefer to accept inevitabilities about human nature and craft solutions that take them into account. So, if there’s no conceivable universe in which the great powers of today will voluntarily relinquish the power granted them by fossil fuels, aka third fire, then where does that leave us? What solutions can we conceive that circumvent this blockade? I think there’s a clue in our genetic destiny as wielders of nature’s fire, Pyne’s second fire.
The Tamm Reviews are a well-regarded series of papers on the world’s most pressing topics within forest ecology and management. Named after Swedish ecologist Carl Tamm, these reviews originate in invitations to well-regarded scientists and culminate in definitive meta-analyses.
The most recent Tamm Review was helmed by a U.S. Forest Service researcher and several Nature Conservancy scientists (a group that’s been somewhat alarmingly pro-logging for wildfire prevention). The analysis concluded that the scientific evidence to date establishes that prescribed fire alone is far more effective than logging (thinning) at reducing wildfire severity. Logging first, followed by prescribed fire, was slightly more effective than fire alone at reducing severity, but only 10% of the reduction was attributable to the logging. A full 82% of it was due to prescribed fire.
Logging before burning costs almost 8 times as much per acre as just burning alone. And even worse, as I described above, roadbuilding and logging cause water pollution and soil erosion while also releasing large volumes of carbon to the atmosphere that should be kept safe in living trees. Yet the Forest Service and its boosters in the public discourse continue to push for increased logging in our beleaguered forests. Why, when the agency’s own top scientists are telling us the cheaper, more effective, and ecologically healthier alternative is to focus on burning?
How is the more expensive option attractive to Capital? One answer is that fire-prevention work is often packaged and sold with a commercial timber sale to pay for it. The ideal situation from the agency’s perspective is when the site to be thinned and burned has enough big trees to be profitably sold. Where these big, profitable trees can still be found is in our remaining (naturally fire-resilient) mature and old-growth forests. This is why the agency is trying to bamboozle the public with its new narrative that mature and old-growth forests need thinning for fire protection. They do not.
It’s a win-win for the Forest Service when a project like that can be found. Eternally cash-strapped because Congress never allocates enough funding, the agency forever scrambles to stretch whatever dollars it has left after its ruinously expensive firefighting duties. With these “logging to save the forest” projects, agency heads get to look like they’re doing something to prevent future fires, while selling enough trees to cover the expense of prescribed fire.
It’s amazing what people will reveal when you just ask them directly. After 2020’s massive wildfires in Oregon, I stood on a scorched hillside with a bevy of scientists from the local research university and a bunch of Forest Service staffers, and asked the agency’s regional director why they wouldn’t just leave the massive standing trees along the road, scorched but many still alive, when only a tiny percentage of them could conceivably be a safety hazard to drivers. He knew well that most of the blackened but living trees would recover, and that even the dead giants could stand for 20-50 years or more. We were standing on a disused, dead-end gravel road that led to a permanently closed campground. Traffic volume—and risk—was low.
In front of all those people, he said the wildfires were a jackpot for the agency. All those big old trees, which the agency had been legally barred from cutting while they were alive, were now fair game after the fire, even if they weren’t actually dead and were providing increasingly rare habitat for fire-dependent wildlife. That “volume”—formerly locked away by environmental laws—was now available to the tune of millions of dollars to fund all sorts of projects. He told me that without selling those giant burned trees, many still quite alive, the agency couldn’t pay for legitimate fire-prevention efforts, like ecological thinning (of spindly, unprofitable tree plantations) and prescribed fire around rural neighborhoods. It’s really quite a conundrum.
It’s a question of third fire versus second fire. Money versus traditional wisdom. The mechanical, the profitable, the scalable versus the hand-cut, the adaptable, the human-scale.
Do you want to see diesel-powered log trucks and tree “harvesting” machines rampaging through the forest? Or a group of humans on foot, probably several of them members of local tribes who’ve been firing the forests for millennia, walking the woods with the modern equivalent of the firestick? Not for nothing, a harvesting machine employs a couple of guys at most, but a series of prescribed burns welcomes scores of people to really good employment.
When people advocate for logging—yes, and thinning—to save our forests, they don’t often recognize that this kind of heavy equipment is what will invade the forests to do that work. These machines convert the living to the dead with record efficiency. And it’s heartbreaking that many forest creatures’ fear response is to freeze in their nests, only to be “processed” through this machinery. If you have the stomach for more, the video below may require you to click through to play it.
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Sarah Kendzior offers guidance here:
The most important thing for people to do now is know their own moral compass because they are being told to accept things and back things that they normally would not. They’re trying to rationalize that decision to themselves. So take a hard look at what you believe is right and wrong and pay attention to that inner voice more than to any voice you’re hearing outside, even if it proclaims itself to be an expert. You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong. Retain that compassion and retain that strength.
In your thinking about any of our environmental and human crises from wildfire to extinction to global heating, consciously choose to privilege solutions that use our inborn talent for second fire—natural flame with all its smoke and ash, tended by our human hands—over third fire—fossil flame captured in machinery and technology. Choose fallow-burning fields and layering them with compost (produced by the slow combustion of decay) versus diesel-powered application of fossil-fuel fertilizers and poisons. Human-directed flames in forests versus smog-belching log trucks and mechanical tree harvesters. Our species’ God-given role versus an attempt to be powerful as the gods.
Is it analog instead of digital? Good. Does it privilege the human over the mechanical? Do it. Is it local, or decentralized, or good for the beings and places in your biome? That’s perfect.
Is it line with your kindness and your morals, or does it make you rationalize and justify? You know which to choose.
Does it pretend to boil down a living system into a binary yes-or-no, a one-size-fits-all? Or does it make space for nuance and complexity? There’s your answer.
Take a leaf from photosynthesis and its partner, lightning, catching and releasing the light in an ages-old dance. We catch the lightning, too, and remake the world into a warm place where life can thrive in its unimaginable complexity. That’s our gift. We just have to remember we’re not gods, and we’re not time-travelers. We are—and it’s a beautiful role we’ve been given—the keepers of the flame.
I was ready to wrap up my study of The Pyrocene when Pyne’s epilogue hit me with another mind-bending phase shift. I’ll leave it here in its entirety. See how it lands with you.
Of all the paradoxes proposed by the Pyrocene, the strangest may be that our fire practices may have unwittingly forestalled the return of the ice. The Little Ice Age might have continued; the next, promised glacial might be pushed to the margins as humans fiddle with climate rheostats. Since it’s easier for people to live with fire than with ice, we may have bought ourselves some time—some room for maneuver. Our fire practices, however inadvertently, may have spared us an impossible future of ice, though we may perish equally from fire if we don’t control our burning, which is to say, ourselves.
We need to keep our fossil biomass in the ground. We need to store it, not only to cool humanity’s feverish presence today, but to have it as a stockpile to ward off ice’s return in the future. It’s the climate equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve. It’s our hedge against the coming cold. We may need to burn a lot of it, and when the ice approaches, we’ll be glad for every particle of carbon-dense combustibles we saved when the world was warm. We will need to exercise our fire power of all kinds in perpetuity. We will remain the keepers of the flame until we end.
For more on complexity in forest management, see Rob Lewis’s recent post.
For Rachel Donald’s view on why the world is in crisis, see this piece.
For a deeper understanding of how human fire is a better response to wildfire than logging, see Andy Kerr’s analysis here.
Here’s Sarah Kendzior on the endangerment of truth.
And Julie Gabrielli on breaking out of human-centric thought and finding joy in our humanity as we confront the polycrisis.
Thanks to Jason Anthony, whose recent post on fire prompted me to finally crack open The Pyrocene.
Stephen J. Pyne, The Pyrocene. 2021.
Sandra Steingraber, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. 2011.
Catherine Shanahan, M.D., Dark Calories. 2024.
Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. 2019.
Kimberley Davis, et al., “Tamm review: A meta-analysis of thinning, prescribed fire, and wildfire effects on subsequent wildfire severity in conifer dominated forests of the Western US.” Forest Ecology and Management, 2024.
William Ripple, et al., “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” BioScience, 2017.
William Ripple, et al., “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth.” BioScience, 2024.
Oswald J. Schmitz, et al., “Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions.” Nature Climate Change, 2023.
Frank Zelko, “Toxic Treatment: Fluoride's Transformation from Industrial Waste to Public Health Miracle.” Oregon State University Origins, 2018.
A popular documentary on the topic of Yellowstone’s wolves and much of the press coverage oversold what Ripple et al’s papers actually said: wolves’ activities kickstarted a dormant trophic cascade that had the potential to restore a wide range of ecosystem functions in the park with potential for wider application elsewhere.
Keepers of the Flame