THE EARTH SEEMS ABLAZE. Each year, flames appear more savage, more far-ranging, and more inescapable. The prophecy of Ezekiel is coming to pass: “They shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them” (15:7). The planet is, as some see it, careening toward a secular apocalypse.
To be caught between two fires is an old notion. But a lot has changed since Ezekiel’s warning. Today, we do not have to cope with two fires but with three. The first is the fire that has burned as long as terrestrial vegetation has existed. The second is the fire that humans tamed from the first. The third involves burning fossil fuels. The three fires together are shaping our world, which makes humanity uniquely suited to serve as a steward, for we are Earth’s fire creature, the only one with the systematic capacity to start and stop flame.
Fire in the mind, fire in the spirit
WESTERN CIVILIZATION HAS a long heritage of fire myth, lore, religion, and science. Early Indo-Europeans seem to have worshiped a fire deity. Of the 12 ancient Olympians, two were gods of fire — Vesta for the hearth, Vulcan for the forge. Ritual fire became a fundamental practice of Zoroastrians, among the first of the monotheisms. New colonies or dislocated peoples would take fire from their mother city to literally “rekindle” its offspring. The hearth fire, most famously in Rome, stood for both family and state. Pyromancy, the practice of divining meaning in flames, is an old practice.
The ancient Hebrews did not make fire a deity: They made fire a manifestation of their singular deity. And in a burning bush on Sinai, they found perhaps God’s unsurpassed expression. Archaeology educator John C. H. Laughlin has observed fire as “the oldest symbol with which Yahweh is associated in the Old Testament.” The Deuteronomist wrote that “upon earth he showed you his great fire; and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire” (4:36). Those words were heard over and over amid many fires. The burnt offering; the fire from heaven as a means of accepting or rejecting ritual sacrifice; the perpetual fire as a manifestation of Yahweh’s immanence; the radiant fire as a symbol of God’s glory; the devouring fire as an expression of Yahweh’s power and anger — such fires illuminate scripture like candles filling a room.
Fire was granted a comparable power in secular thinking. Heraclitus, for example, considered it the essence of change: “All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things”; “this world ... was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.” Aristotle granted fire status as one of four fundamental elements, out of which everything was made. Stoics imagined a cycle of world-ending and world-renewing Great Fires. And while, to Plato’s mind, fire was a poor proxy for the purity of the sun, in his “Allegory of the Cave” fire was what illuminated the world humans occupied, which is to say, the “real world.”
First fire, second fire
WHETHER IN SCRIPTURE, epic, myth, or natural philosophy, the fires all had referents in everyday life. They were the fires of hearth and forge, of farm and field — working flames that people kindled, preserved, and extinguished as part of making their world habitable and endowing it with significance. Pliny the Elder marveled how “at the conclusion of our survey of the ways in which human intelligence calls art to its aid in counterfeiting nature, we cannot but marvel at the fact that fire is necessary for almost every operation.” These fires were a “second fire,” a taming of nature’s fire, perhaps even our first domestication. With this, people could make out of rude nature what Cicero termed a “second nature.”
These second fires were everywhere. A host of pyrotechnologies, based on cooking, were catalysts for turning raw nature into human habitat. Slashing and burning — putting flame to fallow, stubble, old vines, and thorns — is an essential part of farming outside floodplains. The assayer’s, refiner’s, and smelter’s fires separate the dross from the precious and test for the purity of metal. Ceremonies tied to the agricultural calendar all involved fire doing in symbolic ways what it did in nature — purge the bad and promote the good. Inevitably, too, fire was weaponized. But all such fires occurred within living landscapes, full of ecological checks and balances that determined how much could burn, when, and how.
Christianity baptized the rites, analogies, and symbols of fire into a new dispensation. John the Baptist proclaimed that, while he baptizes with water, the one who would succeed him will “baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” (Matthew 3:11). Votive candles substitute for altar fires. The fire from heaven appears as “tongues of flame” by which the Paraclete is manifest above the apostles (Acts 2:3) rather than the punishing conflagrations that threaten both chosen people and their enemies.
Still, elites tended to regard fire with suspicion. They saw flame as unreliable and often dangerous; they detested fallowing and the fires that fed on it; they distrusted the way that pastoralism and farming based on fallow required people to move around the landscape or abandon a significant fraction or leave it unused for a season. They sought ways to eliminate the need for flame, which they regarded as a stigma of primitivism, an offense to Reason, and a measure of social disorder.
Third fire, third nature
IN THE LATTER 18th century, three trends converged to fundamentally reshape both Europe’s understanding of fire and its capacity to project that understanding across the world. Fire was repurposed, redefined, and redistributed.
Inventors devised a working engine that could transform wood and coal into steam. A new category of fire — call it “third fire” — came into being that could compete with the others. Soon after, natural philosophers became aware of oxygen and proceeded to deconstruct fire into a more elemental combustion. Fire as fire disappeared as a category of inquiry, dispersed among mechanical engineering, the physics of electromagnetism, and oxidation chemistry. Fire in machines replaced fire on landscapes as an object of inquiry.
Meanwhile, northern Europe launched a second great age of expansion that led to massive colonization and took explorers to the ends of the Earth. Colonization disseminated Northern European notions of fire and became a vector for third fire. The gods of Mediterranean Europe had tended hearth and forge. Loki, the fire god of Northern Europe, was a malicious trickster.
Third fire had no natural antecedents: It was an invention of humans, and its demands were insatiable — far more than traditional fuels like wood could satisfy. Instead, it fed on the fossilized remains of former landscapes in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas (call them lithic landscapes). Not accidentally, the earliest steam engines were used to drain coal mines. Third fire thrived by taking stuff out of the geologic past, processing it in the present, and releasing its by-products to the geologic future.
If second fire ended, natural fire would persist. If people ceased to tend third fire, it would instantly extinguish.
Fire and European colonization
DURING THE FIRST era of European colonization — rooted in the 16th-century conquests by the Spanish and Portuguese — Indigenous fire could conflict with newcomers’ fires. In California, for example, burning for rabbits and acorns was out of sync with burning for cattle and wheat — and tended to seasonally disperse across landscapes the people the mission system wanted concentrated. But local customs were accommodated, hybrid fire practices were common, and living landscapes adjusted.
By contrast, temperate Europe had no natural basis for fire — no seasonal rhythms of wetting and drying, no dry lightning. Fire was abundant, but wholly because people put it there. Northern European elites viewed the American fire scene as they did that of Europe’s peasants: with dismay and scorn. As Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian forester and émigré to 19th-century America, put it, widespread fires were the result of “bad habits and loose morals.”
When Enlightenment Europe encountered India, Australia, North and South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, it found geographies awash with flame that needed to be quenched before a “rational” society could flourish. Worse, steam and imperialism colluded to trash landscape after landscape, as traditional fires bulked up on logging and land-clearing slash. Officials thundered jeremiads against those fires, and countered with a doctrine of state-sponsored conservation that established fire protection as a foundational principle. Fire control became a metric of modernity, a sign of how European rule could rationalize the messy realms of superstition and tradition.
Whatever their beliefs, officials could only abolish open burning if they had an adequate counterforce. The new machines powered by fossil fuels provided just that. Technological substitution and active suppression replaced the fire practices that had long sustained customary landscapes. But what worked in houses and cities failed in countrysides and wildlands. The greater the suppression, the worse the ecological insurgency it inspired. The elimination of smaller-scale nuisance fires led to megafires — a pathology that grew, paradoxically, out of the conversion to third fire that characterizes the developed countries.
Our great fire
NOT ONLY DID the European approach allow fuels to stockpile and stoke more-malevolent flames, but ecological dynamics unraveled. Living landscapes impose checks and balances on fire; fossilized fuel in lithic landscapes have no such constraints, and their fires are unbounded. Under the impress of third fire, Earth’s air, seas, and terrestrial life have been unhinged at a global scale. The sum of humanity’s fire practices is now creating the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age.
Touring the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, American historian Henry Adams meditated over the “dynamos” in the great Hall of Electrical Machines as an expression of an elemental power, analogous to that which the Virgin Mary had inspired at Chartres Cathedral. He felt the engines “as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” and eventually he “began to pray to it.”
This new Great Fire had no overt expression, its words not engraved on stone tablets, its power sublimated into steam and electricity. Yet it began informing and filling the world, its flames manifest as multiple upheavals that are catalyzing a new world, a third nature, into being.
This reconstructed nature has many names, but Anthropocene seems to prevail because it openly identifies humanity’s role. It seems the fires sent heavenward (and unmooring the Earth’s climate) are returning. This year it is Europe’s turn to burn. The Anthropocene, it would appear, also has its righteous wrath, which it is willing to visit upon a feckless people.
‘Revealed by fire’
TWO RIVAL CONCEPTIONS have mostly characterized the relationship between humans and fire. One, the Promethean (or in an updated version, the Nietzschean), envisions fire as power, as something that has to be ripped from its natural setting by stealth or violence and loosed to serve humanity. In Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Yes! I know whence I come! / Like a flame, unsatisfied / I glow and consume myself ... / Assuredly I am a flame.”
This is an old notion, put on afterburners by third fire, and it reminds us that there was a reason Prometheus was chained for his defiance, and why New Prometheans was a term applied to the inventors of the steam engine, and why humanity’s mutual-assistance pact with fire has come to look more and more like a Faustian bargain.
Against that view stands a conception of fire as a companion on our journey, intertwined with the rest of creation. In “The Canticle of the Creatures,” St. Francis of Assisi included fire with other beings. “Praised be You, My Lord, through Brother Fire, by whom you light up the night, and he is handsome and merry, robust and strong.” It is an understanding that reminds us that fire is not just a tool or an ecological process but a relationship and a duty.
That relationship comes with an ethics that reaches beyond geo-engineering, economic schemes to sequester carbon, and technological wizardry. It goes to the heart of how humanity expresses our unique firepower. Today, we have too much bad fire and too little good (and way too much combustion overall). The Nietzschean vision has proved selfish and ultimately self-immolating; we need a lot less of it. The Franciscan worldview is based on sharing and self-restraint; we could use a lot more of it.
As much as in the days of the apostles, Paul’s words still speak: “Every [one’s] work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall test every one’s work of what sort it is” (1 Corinthians 3:13).
Today’s great fire may be hidden and its words difficult to discern, but its effects are all around us, and it is revealing of what sort we are.
Stephen Pyne is professor emeritus at Arizona State University and author of many books on the history and management of fire, including The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire and What Happens Next. He lives on an urban farm in Queen Creek, Ariz.
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