"A patient comes to see his friend who is also a doctor, 'Friend, I have a problem. I keep forgetting things.''How long have you had this problem?' asked the doctor.Silence for a moment, the patient said, 'I beg your pardon, what problem?'""Humans became the keystone species in fire’s ecology. They commandeered fire where it naturally thrived, took it to places that had never known it, and everywhere changed the patterns through which it flourished," said Jasmine while examining Mount Bromo's caldera with a diameter of up to 800 meters stretches from South to North, approximately 600 meters when measured from West to East, and was formed by the eruption of Mount Tengger. The name Bromo is taken from the Hindu god, Brahma, the four-faced god facing the four cardinal directions."Johan Goudsblom argued that man’s control of fire produced the first transformation in human life. Early man was now no longer a predator: control of fire enabled him to corral animals and to clear land. Without this, agriculture – the second transformation – would not have been possible. Control over fire also introduced the possibility of cooking, which distinguished man from animals and may be regarded as the origins of science. (The use of smoke may also have been the first form of communication.) Control over fire, of course, also led to baking, ceramics, and smelting (the ‘pyrotechnic cultures’), which enabled metal daggers and then swords to be constructed. But the third great transformation, and the most important, after agriculture, Goudsblom said, was industrialization, the union of fire with water, to produce in the first instance steam, harnessing a new form of energy which enabled machines of unprecedented size and power to perform certain routine skills much better and much faster than was possible by hand.Claims have been made for the use of fire as far back as 1.42 million years ago. At least thirteen African sites provide evidence, the earliest being Chesowanja in Kenya, which contained animal bones alongside Oldowan tools and burnt clay. As many as fifty pieces of burnt clay were found and, to some paleontologists, the layout of certain stones suggested a hearth. Tantalizingly, no burnt clay was found outside this narrow area and tests on the clay itself showed it to have been fired to about 400°, roughly typical of campfires. Stone tools have been found in association with burnt animal remains at several sites in China dating from one million years ago. Johan Goudsblom has pointed out that no animal species controls fire, as humans do. Some prehistorians believe that early humans may have followed fire, because roasted animal flesh is better preserved (chimpanzees have been observed searching for afzelia beans after bush fires; normally too tough to eat, after a fire they crumble easily). The archaeologist C. K. Brain advanced the idea that it was man’s control of fire which helped convert him from being the prey of the big cats to being a predator—fire offered protection that earlier man lacked. And in Spain there is evidence of the use of fire as a way to corral elephants into a bog, where they were butchered. Later, keeping a fire alive continuously would have encouraged social organisation. The latest evidence reports a campfire, with burnt flint fragments, in tiny clusters, suggesting hearths, dated to 790,000 years ago, at Gesher Benot Ya|aqov in northern Israel. The control and use of fire may therefore count as the idea of primitive man first learned.We are uniquely fire creatures on a unique fire planet, says Stephen J. Pyne. Other planetary bodies in the solar system have elements of combustion—Jupiter has an ignition source in lightning; Mars has traces of free oxygen; Titan has a methane-based fuel. Only Earth has all the essential elements and to combine them—only Earth has life. Marine life pumped the atmosphere with oxygen, and terrestrial life stocked the continents with carbon fuels.Fire and life have fused biotically ever since, a relationship aptly symbolized by the ponderosa pine, geminated in fire's ashes, pruned by fire's heat, fed by fire's liberated nutrients, and perhaps consumed by fire's final flame. So the earth-its lands stuffed with organic fuels, its atmosphere saturated with oxygen, its surface pummeled by lightning-is metastable. More disturbing, the planet possesses a creature not merely adapted to fire's presence, or even prone to exploit and encourage fire, but one capable of starting and stopping it. A fire creature came to dominate a fire planet. The history of the planet is unintelligible without the history of fire.The concept of a world fire has, like almost all fire practices and fire beliefs, a basis in ecological reality. The earth is a fire world, but even more, for humans fire has made possible a special relationship to that world. Fire and humans have coevolved, like the bonded strands of a DNA molecule. The prevalence of humans is largely attributable to their control over fire; and the distribution and characteristics of fire have become profoundly dependent on humans. Fire and humanity have become inseparable and indispensable. Together they have repeatedly remade the earth.Fire has given environmentalism a vivid iconography of wide popular appeal. Whatever their message of destruction, activists have sought to animate it with fire for television or photojournals. The predictable result is that associating fire with various kinds of devastation has identified fire itself as a devastator. The new world order of fire appears to be an order set on fire.Fire is an end as well as a means. Accept that neither the earth nor humanity can shed fire and be what they are, and the contemporary geography of fire assumes a different interpretation. Fire results from a special biochemistry—at times a catalyst for anthropogenic practices, at other times the product of human-catalyzed reactions. Too much fire is as likely as too little, and too little can be as damaging as too much. The earth's fire problem is one of maldistribution. There is too much of the wrong kind of fire in the wrong places or at the wrong times, and not enough of the right kind of fire at the right places and times. Probably there is too little fire and too much combustion. Almost certainly, contrary to popular belief, there is a lot less fire on the planet than when Columbus sailed.What we call fire is a chemical reaction, which makes it a shape-shifter. Fire is what its environment makes it. Unlike water, earth and air, it has no weight, cannot exist unchanged minute by minute, cannot be transported by itself and cannot be pumped or dumped elsewhere. You don’t carry fire as you can air, water or earth: you carry the stuff that makes its reaction possible. Change fire’s setting and you change fire’s expression. This can happen within a single event, as a fire smolders through organic soil, flares into dried grass and shrub, and flashes through the canopies of conifers. One fire, many forms.We rarely study fire for itself; rather, we understand fire within the context of other disciplines. Its oxidation reaction is examined in chemistry. Its heating mechanisms belong to physics or mechanical engineering. Its buoyant smoke and plumes rise out of meteorology. Its ecological effects descend from biology. Closed combustion belongs in engineering; open burning, in forestry. Our definition of fire thus depends on where we site the subject. In one context it is chemistry, in another physics, in still another biology, or even anthropology. We know it when we see it, but how we see it, shapes how we define what we think we know.Fire is not a stray chemical reaction free-floating around the planet that occasionally erupts into soaring flames. It is a process integrally embedded into life on Earth. Life created fire, life sustains fire, and life has progressively absorbed fire within its ecological webs.Fire’s behavior lies on a murky border between the physical and the biological. Life supplies the raw oxygen and the biomass, and the matrix of living— and dead—plants integrates the reaction; but wind, atmospheric stability, solar heat, gradients, ravines, mesas, and the physical geographies of a site, both tiny and huge, shape the zone of combustion as it lofts upward, rushes over hillsides, slows against gusts, smolders in peat or flashes through baked grasslands. Moreover, life does not control the source of ignition.The nature of life based on photosynthesis assures this will happen: fire will occur unless something blocks it. Everything that affects the evolution and ecology of life will thus shape fires. Yet a profound interdependence emerges out of all this, for even as life creates the conditions for fire, fire reshapes the living world. It selects for evolutionary fitness; it powers and cycles ecosystems. Fire can create conditions that promote more fire, or less. Much as its heat begins the process by which it spreads, so its history influences the conditions that allow it to propagate through time. Only one aspect remained outside life’s control, ignition. But eventually that too would come within its realm, and the hybrid character of free-burning fire would nudge further from the physical to the biological.As fire and life accommodated one another, their inter actions assumed recognizable patterns—what has come to be called a fire regime. Fire, however, is not like a migratory species that returns seasonally to a place: it is constantly recreated at and by that place. It is more like a storm; and just as a given place may experience many kinds of storms and yet be different from another place, so it is with fire. A fire is to a regime as a storm is to a climate. Regimes and climates are thus statistical composites; useful, understandable and unstable.It is not fire’s presence or absence that matter, but the patterns of burning. An organism is adapted not to fire but to a fire regime. Change that regime and fires may harm rather than help. Fire’s removal in places that have long known it may be as ecologically damaging as its introduction to places to which it is alien. Paracelsus long ago observed, a poison depends on its dosage. Too much sun or too little or too oddly distributed—any can do harm. So it is with water. And so, too, with fire.A cultural conception repositions fire within a social setting—literally a landscape, a land shaped by the minds and hands of humanity—all reside in its relationship to people. Fire’s fundamentals, that is, are found in ideas and institutions. They reflect values and beliefs and the social mechanisms to resolve–all reside in society.Fire problems are thus cultural in nature: they represent breakdowns in how people live on a land. Large unwanted fires—‘unwanted’ being itself a social judgment—more resemble episodes of social unrest such as riots or insurrections than purely natural events. They can be best answered by cultural countermeasures; by reforms in policy, by better research or education, by sharper execution in agencies dedicated to fire management. What fire integrates is a social setting.Humanity did not invent fire. We discovered how to capture, tame and divert to our own purposes a process that has existed since the early Devonian, the Age of Fishes, as it spawned a remarkable variety of fish. Even granting a very generous span for hominin fire (say, to Homo erectus) amounts to less than half a per cent of the time fire has flourished on earth. Since that moment, however, fire and humanity have co-evolved in what looks very much like a symbiosis in which each amplifies the other.Yet ultimately the relationship is deeply unequal. Remove fire, and humanity will soon wither away. Remove people, and fire will adapt and re-establish its own stable regime. The firepower of humanity depends on the power of wild fire; the properties of tame fire derive from its wild sire. People reshape fire and have leveraged its presence on the planet, but with or without people, fire will endure as a trait both intrinsic and unique to earth.Everywhere humans went, the fire went also as a guide, laborer, camp follower, and chronicler, but fire's danger matched its power. If untended, once domesticated, fire could go wild. The extraordinary pervasiveness that made the fire so universally useful also threatened humanity's ability to control it. The relationship was truly symbiotic. If humans controlled fire, so also fire controlled humans, forcing the species to live in certain ways, either to seize fire's power or to avoid its wild outbreaks. Fire's power could come to humans only by their assuming responsibility for fire's care. The danger of extinction was ever-present. The feral fire lurked always in the shadows.With power came choice, and with choice anthropogenic fire entered a moral universe. The human capacity for colossal power through fire lacked an equivalent capacity for control. Humans are genetically disposed to handle fire, but we do not come programmed knowing how to use it. Environmental conditions imposed some limitations on the ability of the land to accept fire, and human societies established still other parameters under which their cultures could absorb fire. But the range of options remained huge, and individual choices were neither obvious nor singular. Those choices reflect values, institutions, beliefs, and all the stuff of more traditional histories. The capture of fire became a paradigm for all of humanity's interaction with nature.We live in a time characterized by rapid, comprehensive, and often overwhelming change. Social, cultural, legal, and physical landscapes are changing. Ecosystems, economies, and even the climate are shifting in unimaginably vast and complex ways. In such a world, there is a marked tendency among human societies to deal counterproductively with these changes, to fail to cope with the uncertainty and variability that are inherent to our modern lives.Near the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Alvin Toffler described some of the causes of our societal impotence, 'In describing today’s accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.' The result of this chaos has too often been that humans fail to distinguish between the factors that we can and cannot affect in our lives. Faced with a confused flurry of insurmountable problems, we rarely manage to focus our attention on taking even the most basic steps toward mitigation. Instead of attending to the fundamental, approachable problems that we have the ability and knowledge to solve, we strive in vain to reverse inevitable natural forces. We respond to our fear of the normal cycles of flood and drought by building colossal waterworks that allow people to live and thrive in floodplains, deserts, and coastal areas, but we ignore the small-scale, long-term planning needed to protect those people when hundred-year droughts and floods overwhelm the system. We focus our medical system on avoiding death at any cost, even while many individuals in our nation live in ill health, falling prey to easily preventable diseases. We attack problems with billions of dollars, high-tech 'fixes,' and a determination to eliminate all risk, and in the process, we undermine more meaningful, realistic, and affordable approaches to solving them.Thus, in our confused attempts to solve each problem completely and eliminate all risks, we defeat our own interests. Our determination to solve a problem permanently and completely— which is often an unrealistic goal—can blind us to effective mitigation. Ultimately, we must admit that the forces and changes that plague us, cannot be completely prevented or solved.Humans have always struggled to live with fire and its inherent risks. However, everything has a limit. The sun has a limit, air has a limit, water has a limit, fire has a limit, hunger has a limit, food has a limit, life has a limit, patience has limits, and wisdom knows its limits. There is a balance. The lion has a particular balance in the sounds it can make. The elephant has a different kind of balance. You can not try to trumpet like an elephant or roar like a lion. If you exceed it, it will break you and bring you difficulty, sorrow, and illness. Without this balance your mind will be ruined, your eyesight will be lost, your hearing will be impaired, your tongue will blabber because the nerves malfunction, your body will be ruined, and your heart will weaken. The balance must be maintained.We'll proceed with our reflection in the next episode, bi 'idhnillah."Before proceeding, Jasmine then sang,Close your eyes, give me your hand, darlingDo you feel my heart beating?Do you understand? Do you feel the same?Am I only dreaming?Is this burning an eternal flame? *)
Citations & References:
- Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: Nature and Culture, 2012, Reaktion Books
- Stephen J. Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, 1997, University of Washington Press
- Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, 2005, PerfectBound
- Sara E. Jensen Guy R. McPherson, Living with Fire: Fire Ecology and Policy for the Twenty-first Century, 2008, University of California Press
*) "Eternal Flame" written by Susanna Lee Hoffs, Thomas F. Kelly & Wiliam E. Steinberg
