Fire: A Brief History - Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books by Stephen J. Pyne | Wildfire Science, Environmental Studies & Natural History | Perfect for Students, Researchers & Nature Enthusiasts

This book discusses fire as a critical dimension of the global environment, explaining that “fire has become a selective force and an ecological factor that guides evolution, organizes biotas, and bonds the physical world to the biologica” (p. 15). Little wonder that the progress of humanity is dependent on increasing control of fire regimes and innovative uses of fire: “without [dominating] fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night's terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches” (p.25).But the interaction between the crucial roles of fires in shaping “nature” and the increasing domination of fire by humanity, enclosing it in combustion machines, raises serious problems. These include environmental dangers posed by massive use of oil and coal as fuels and degradation of landscapes likely to cause wilder large scale fires.Such dangers are aggravated by lack of understanding of essential functions of fires, both “wild” and anthropogenic ones. As well put by the author “It is possible to live years in a modern house without ever seeing the fires that once, almost by definition, made a house a home … Urban residents—and most citizens of industrial countries live in or around cities—can pass years without seeing a fire except as a disaster or an image on a TV screen” (p. 161).As repeatedly emphasized in the book, accepting foresters and forest managing institutions as in charge of fire management adds to biases fire regimes.The overall conclusion, as summed up in the book, is that “Humanity's deliberate choices then are two. We can either convert those fuels [living biomass] into less combustible forms or begin a program of controlled burning. The default option is to suffer bouts of wildfire and to watch the landscape slide and lurch into something very different from that which a program of protection set out to preserve” (p. 167).From the perspective of my concern with comprehensive Homo sapiens policies, human fire regime errors are not fatal, but impose avoidable costs and contribute to dangerous global climate changes. Therefore, appropriate global fire regimes should be a distinct component of an urgently needed comprehensive “humanity-craft” (in line with the term “statecraft”).This book provides necessary insights for doing so. Therefore I recommend it to all who worry about the future of humanity, as well as readers interested in humanking interfaces with fire as such..Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem