Humans must find a new relationship with fire to control global warming

Rather than end wildfires, humanity’s challenge is to restrain destructive fire and reduce the amount of combustion driving climate change

David Dodwell

Published: 8:30pm, 21 Jun 2024

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In recent months, we have watched wildfires blazing across northern California, Alberta and British Columbia in Canada and New Mexico as the northern hemisphere’s summer wildfire season has barely begun.

This is a reminder of an increasingly aggressive fire-climate feedback loop that is threatening communities across the world. It reminds us almost daily of the urgent need to restrain global warming, and the reality that we are at present failing.

Wildfires have generated an average of more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year during the last decade, with emissions from wildfires rising to almost 6.7 billion tonnes last year. Estimates suggest this means wildfires account for 20 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, making them a troubling contributor to global warming which must be restrained.

Reactions to this news should be tempered with the knowledge that wildfires have been around for millions of years and have survived every ice age the planet threw at them. For most of that time, wildfires have been important contributors to climate stability, not just global warming.

What is different today is that so much of the wildfire we see is “bad fire” – the kind that kills people and destroys communities and landscapes. As we try to distinguish between good and bad types of fire, the troubling reality is that we are the key contributor. Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne, a historian whose research focuses on fire, wrote in Scientific American that humans “became unique fire creatures. We used fire to remake ourselves, and then we and fire remade Earth”.

From his point of view, our Anthropocene age could as easily and accurately be called the Pyrocene age. “We went to the top of the food web because we learned to cook landscapes for hunting, foraging, farming and herding. And we have become a geological force because we’ve begun to cook the planet. Becoming the keystone species for fire made us the keystone species for Earth.”

04:36

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Pyne identifies three ages of fire. The first, “nature’s fire”, was driven almost exclusively by lightning. Humans shaped the second age, in which we tamed and domesticated fire to create a more comfortable world for us to thrive.

The third began with Joseph Priestley’s discovery of oxygen in 1774, when for the first time humans were able to deconstruct fire into a chemical process and turn it into “a subdiscipline of physics, chemistry and mechanical engineering”. We learned to control this fire to turn mud into bricks and pottery, limestone into cement, sand into glass, coal into electric power and ores into metals.

This significant shift to the third age only really became noticeable to ordinary people in the middle of the last century, when fire as we had known it began to disappear from our lives. As a child in England in the 1950s, we had candles and coal fires with monthly deliveries from the coalman and exciting visits from the chimney sweep every six months.

My father burned garden rubbish on fires at the bottom of the garden. Ahead of Bonfire Night on November 5 every year, I and other local kids scoured the local woodlands to build the bonfire and saved up for fireworks. Every year at harvest time, farmers set alight wheat fields which burned for days and filled the countryside with smoke.

Participants in costume take part in one of a series of processions during Bonfire Night celebrations in Lewes, southern England, in 2012 with an effigy of Guy Fawkes. The processions and bonfire mark the uncovering of Fawkes’ “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. Photo: Reuters

By the mid-1970s, almost all evidence of untamed natural fire was gone. Working fires “were housed in machines”. As Pyne notes: “Fire has disappeared in many domestic settings, sublimated into electricity … Modern cities are designed not to burn, made of materials that have already passed through flames to become cement, glass and metal.”

Alongside this accumulation of control was a parallel effort to eliminate wildfires, which instead made the wildfire problem worse. As award-winning journalist Charles Mann wrote in National Geographic: “Connoisseurs of unintended consequences will appreciate the irony that practices intended to reduce fire damage instead have increased it dramatically. Every year, more of the West burns.”

Alarm and media attention have risen of late because wildfires have become common around communities that have encroached into forest areas. Meanwhile, the cost of wildfires has soared because of the increasingly uninsurable cost of damage to properties in wealthier parts of the world.

02:01

Australia state swings from bushfires to flash floods in 24 hours

Pyne observes that “We have too much ‘bad fire’” – the kind that arises from mistaken forest management practices and the loss of “thousands of years of empirical fire experience, coded in lore, story, song lines and oral wisdom”. He adds, “In trying to abolish fire, we killed off many of the good fires that make bad ones easier to fight.”

The challenge is not to abolish wildfires. We live on a fire planet and thrive today because of our millennia-long success in capturing and exploiting the potential of fire. The true challenge is to restrain “bad fire” and reduce the combustion that is built on fossil fuels and sits at the heart of the multitude of industrial processes that drive global warming.

As Amory Lovins, physicist and head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, argues in his book Reinventing Fire, “Fire made us human. Fossil fuels made us modern. But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.” Amen to that.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades