The Blazing World

On 1 May 2016, a wildfire sparked into life in the forest approximately eight kilometres southwest of Fort McMurray in Alberta. Around 45 minutes after the smoke was sighted, firefighters arrived and were immediately shocked by the intensity of the blaze. In just two hours the fire had grown fortyfold, expanding from a little over 1.5 hectares to 60 hectares. By the next day it had grown to more than 800 hectares; over the next 24 hours it continued to grow, until finally, on 3 May, fuelled by rising winds, it leapt the Athabasca River and, shortly afterwards, swept over Fort McMurray. By now a vast apocalyptic firestorm, the conflagration razed entire neighbourhoods to the ground and left scenes resembling the aftermath of a nuclear explosion in its wake. By the end of the disaster more than 2,400 homes and private and public buildings had been destroyed, and while – astonishingly – the only casualties were two people killed when their vehicle collided with a truck, more than 100,000 people were forced to flee their homes.

As John Vaillant explains in his expansive and utterly gripping study of the Fort McMurray blaze, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, fires are not unusual in the boreal forests of northern Canada. These forests, which still cover much of inland Canada, are part of what is known as the taiga, a wooded band that encircles the planet between the Arctic tundra and the temperate forests and grasslands further south, and is dominated by fir and spruce in North America, and spruce, pine, birch and larch in Europe and Asia. By some calculations the boreal forest is the largest biome on the planet, and the heavy influx of melting snow from the Arctic and sub-Arctic means it contains more sources of unfrozen freshwater than anywhere else on the planet. To borrow Vaillant’s resonant formulation, it is:

This abundance of water, and the density of trees it supports, is one of the reasons the region remains largely empty of human beings: once one leaves roads and trails behind, the forests often become confusing and almost impassable. Vaillant tells the story of the discovery of the world’s largest beaver dam, several hundred kilometres to the north of Fort McMurray in Wood Buffalo National Park. Close to a kilometre long, the dam was only identified in 2007 after scientists noticed it on satellite images, and Rob Mark, the first person known to have seen it, didn’t make it there until 2010, when he hiked through the forest, pushing through thick foliage that gives way to muskeg and finally ‘complete bog swamp… The mosquitoes… are absolutely horrific.’ (Mark’s story also reminds me of a conversation I once had with an old friend who had just spent his summer camping in a mosquito-ridden permafrost bog in Saskatchewan while his then-girlfriend did fieldwork for her PhD. ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds,’ he told me. ‘But it was almost as bad.’)

This sheer volume of water might suggest the boreal is resistant to burning, but in fact the opposite is true: its dense stands of trees store as much carbon as tropical rainforests in the Amazon, West Africa, and elsewhere combined. This immense repository of carbon is constantly in flux, as the trees absorb it from the atmosphere and transform it into leaf and wood, only to release it once more when they die and decay, or are burned by the fires that intermittently sweep through the region, in an ongoing cycle of destruction and renewal.

The scale of some of these fires is staggering. In 1950 the Chinchaga Fire, the largest wildfire ever recorded in North America, consumed around 1,700 square kilometres of forest, creating a plume of smoke that rose into the stratosphere, lowered temperatures by several degrees, and blocked out so much sunlight that some people thought a nuclear attack had taken place and birds were observed roosting at midday. In 1987, some 6,500 square kilometres of forest was destroyed by the Black Dragon Fire in China and the Soviet Union, a calamity that wiped out around a sixth of China’s timber reserves and accelerated the seemingly relentless expansion of the Gobi Desert. And that is just individual fires. Across fire seasons even larger areas can burn: in 2003 fires ravaged more than 200,000 square kilometres of boreal forest in Siberia, while across the northern summer in 2014 almost 35,000 square kilometres burned in a series of fires in Canada’s North-Western Territories.

Despite their destructiveness, these fires are part of the life of these northern woodlands, moving through them in long cycles that help shape the distribution of different tree species. As in Australia, many of the trees that make up the taiga are adapted to fire, and are quick to recolonise burned areas. But while fire is an integral part of the ecology of the boreal forest, things have begun to change in recent years. Temperatures in upper latitudes have risen higher and faster than anywhere else on the planet: over the past 45 years temperatures in the Arctic have risen four times the global average, while in Canada they are rising at twice the global average. As they have elsewhere, rising temperatures have affected weather patterns. This was especially true in 2016 when the Fort McMurray Fire broke out. The 2016-2017 El Niño had dramatically reduced snowfall and pushed temperatures far higher than normal, transforming the once moist forest into a tinderbox. In May average temperatures in Fort McMurray are around 14 degrees, but on 3 May 2016 the temperature reached 32.8 degrees, with relative humidity dropping to a mere 12 per cent. As climate scientist Simon Donner tweeted two days later, “Why the #ymmfire? Temperatures ~20 C above normal. Charts running out of colours.”

The convergence of climactic factors that turbo-charged the Fort McMurray Fire will be uncomfortably familiar to Australians. Global heating in Australia has consistently outpaced the global average, contributing to an escalating series of heatwaves, fires, and floods. It was against this backdrop that the Black Summer Fires of 2019-20 took place. As the contributors to Peter Christoff’s The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, make clear, these fires were on a totally unprecedented scale. Against the backdrop of the hottest year on record, more than 15,000 fires burned close to 25 million hectares of bushland, releasing more than one and a half times Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions, and causing the largest change in stratospheric warming since the catastrophic eruption on Mount Pintaubo in 1991. Thirty-five people were killed in the fires themselves, and more than 400 died from the smoke that covered much of the eastern seaboard for several months. This human toll was dwarfed by the number of animals killed, which researchers put at close to three billion. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed, and the wider economic cost has been placed at somewhere between $64 and $110 billion.

Nor were the scars all economic and environmental. Bronwyn Adcock’s Currowan: The Story of a Fire and a Community During Australia’s Worst Summer powerfully captures the effects of lingering trauma and uncertainty on the communities and individuals devastated by the fires, and Lorena Allam has written of the psychological impact on First Nations people, declaring ‘we know what it feels like to lose everything. And we know the rage of helplessness in the face of government indifference’. Similarly Danielle Celermajer’s remarkable Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future grapples with the emotional scars left by the fires and the urgent need to find new intellectual and affective frameworks with which to make sense of our culpability for what she dubs the omnicide taking place around us.

The fires in Canada and Australia are only one part of a far larger shift. Over the past 20 years the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled globally. This increase was disproportionately concentrated in temperate coniferous forests in the western United States, which saw a more than elevenfold increase, and in the boreal forest, where extreme events increased more than sevenfold. These fires are also becoming more intense, with the average intensity of the 20 extreme fires of each year rising 2.2-fold over the same period. Although there is considerable variation at a more local level, a similar pattern is visible in Australia, where some fires are occurring so often entire ecosystems are at risk of collapse. These fires are so intense they are shifting the world’s climate, as the massive amounts of carbon dioxide liberated from the burning trees and melting permafrost erode efforts to reduce anthropogenic emissions, and increase the possibility of a feedback effect where emissions from forest fires drive temperatures higher, thus causing more fires. Parts of the boreal in particular are already burning faster than they can regrow.

The evidence for this is all around us. Over recent years a series of unprecedentedly savage blazes have torn through forests in the United States, Europe, Africa, and South America, as well as across the tundra in the Arctic and grasslands in Africa and South America. In the second half of 2023, the largest European wildfire on record ripped across Greece, and fires ravaged Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Bolivia, North Africa and Siberia. Fires destroyed Lahaina, on Maui, killing more than 100 and tearing the heart out of the old capital, in an inferno in which temperatures reached more than 500 degrees, hotter than the Venusian surface. Canada experienced one of its worst wildfire seasons on record, the smoke from which choked cities in the United States and spread as far as Europe. In late January 2024 fires ravaged Columbia and neighbouring Venezuela and Ecuador, after record high temperatures and a climate-change-fuelled El Nĩno transformed the usually-lush rainforest into a tinderbox. Shortly afterwards fires tore through Valparaiso in Chile, killing at least 112, and destroying thousands of homes, in a fire event one resident described as ‘more like a nuclear bomb than a fire’. By mid-year the vast wetland at the heart of the Amazon known as the Pantanal was also ablaze, months earlier than usual. The world, in other words, is burning.

In 2015 the pyrohistorian Stephen J. Pyne dubbed this new age of fire the Pyrocene. The term, which Pyne proposes as an alternative to the more familiar notion of the Anthropocene, redefines our current era by reference to ‘humanity’s primary ecological signature… our ability to manipulate fire’. But the term does more than just describe the world humans have made – it integrates that world-making into a narrative about the human relationship with fire over the past million years, and offers illuminating new perspectives on both deep and more recent environmental histories. Perhaps most powerfully of all, however, it resists the idea that we are, as many believe, headed into a future in which the bonds of knowledge and experience that bind us to the past are being shredded, sending us careening into a ‘no-narrative, no-analogue tomorrow’. Instead it argues ‘fire’s past remains its prologue, offering both narrative and analogue’. Or to put it another way, by integrating the historical forces that have led us to this point into itself, a fire-centric perspective grounds us, situating the present in relation to the past, and providing us with tools for conceiving a liveable future.

Pyne identifies three distinct phases of fire. The earliest, which he dubs ‘first-fire’, is natural fire, which has been part of life on Earth since plants first colonised the land almost half a billion years ago. Although fossilised charcoal testifies to their existence, the exact nature of these early fires remains mysterious – while conifers have existed since the tail end of the Permian, about a quarter of a million years ago, the deciduous trees and grasses that sustain so many wildfires today did not become widespread until the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, and eucalypts arrived even more recently. Separated from them by the immensity of geological time, we can only speculate what they might have been like. Maybe they swept through the ancient ferns of the Paleozoic, or leapt between the crowns of the towering lycopod forests that spread across the landscape of Pangaea in the Carboniferous. Or perhaps they smouldered in the swamps and wetlands as the world grew warmer and drier during the Permian. Certainly different fire regimes existed in different epochs – Pyne argues that just as the Earth oscillates between periods of relative warmth, when it is largely ice-free, and periods of intense glaciation, when ice covers much of the land, it has also cycled through higher-fire states, when fuel and ignition was widely available, and lower fire states. One of the latter seems to have existed during parts of the Paleozoic when – whether because much of the world’s biomass was locked away in swamps, or because climactic conditions militated against ignition and sustained burning – this immense mass of fuel did not burn, but was instead laid down into the body of the planet, its combustive potential transferred through time in the form of coal, oil, and gas.

Pyne’s ‘second-fire’ phase begins when humans learn to manipulate fire. Humans are not the only animals that have transformed fire into a tool – in Australia black kites, whistling kites, and brown falcons use fire to flush out prey by picking up burning branches and dropping them elsewhere to start new fires, and crows also seem to have the behavioural and cognitive capacity to understand and interact with fire. But primates seem particularly adept at thinking about and with fire. Monkeys that encounter flames will sometimes gather around them, and chimpanzees in the wild will poke fires with sticks, while those in captivity are capable of lighting cigarettes, extinguishing unwanted fires, and using tools to avoid being burned when handling heated objects. In Senegal chimpanzees are able to understand and anticipate the behaviour of forest fires; elsewhere baboons and other monkeys engage in similar behaviour, and rely upon the ability of fires to open up the landscape so they can exploit food.

It seems likely early hominins interacted with fire in a similarly opportunistic way, long before they learned to control it or direct it. Exactly when that shift occurred is not clear. Changes in size of the teeth and guts of Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago have been interpreted as evidence they were cooking meat, although the first concrete evidence of hominins using fire comes from Kenya, where archaeological remains suggest the early hominins were building fires 1.5 million years ago, and the oldest direct evidence of cooking comes from stone tools and animal remains uncovered in Israel that date back 800,000-1,000,000 years.

The discovery of fire altered us, helping to make us human. Cooked food is far easier to digest, leading to a rapid increase in caloric uptake. This spurred physiological changes: most importantly it kickstarted our cognitive development, contributing to a tripling in the size of our brains, but it also altered our digestion, caused a reduction in the size of our teeth, and even led to genetic changes that reduce the toxic effects of smoke. The abundant energy unlocked by cooking slashed the amount of time that had to be spent gathering and consuming food, which increased leisure time, while hearths created communal spaces that further encouraged social development. The relatively unusual sleep patterns of human beings also seem to be connected to the use of fire: with darkness banished we evolved to remain alert in the evening, further accelerating cultural development. Fire opened up new forms of toolmaking, as well as making it possible for us to expand our range geographically by protecting us from the predators that roam at night and enabling us to colonise regions that would otherwise be too cold for us to survive. Its protean power is encoded in story and song and cultural practice, and celebrated in myth.

But the human discovery of fire also altered the planet. As humans spread, we used fire to transform the landscape in ways that benefited us, such as burning to open up grasslands for hunting and agriculture. This altered the distribution of animals and plants, favouring those our ancestors found useful, and disadvantaging those they did not. These patterns of burning underpinned the development of new social structures, contributing to understandings of seasonality. Nowhere was this more evident than in Australia, where the use of fire was a fundamental part of many Indigenous cultures, and used to shape and sustain the landscape with incredible precision and sophistication. The historian Bill Gammage describes fire as Aboriginal Australians’ ‘closest ally’, arguing:

As agriculture developed, burning became part of its cycles as well, whether in the form of the slash-and-burn methods still practiced in many parts of the world, or in the use of fire to control trees and restore fields in many forms of sedentary agriculture. It also – importantly – altered the fire ecology of the planet, creating fire where there had been none and suppressing it in places where it had long been a part of the natural cycle.

Crucially, however, second-fire was limited. Although forests were gradually cleared, for the most part, our fires could only consume what was grown: burning a tree liberated twenty or fifty or a hundred years of energy stored in the form of biological carbon, but the amount released was limited to human, or at least human-adjacent timeframes. Yet as European nations expanded their productive capacity through conquest, colonisation, and slavery, their hunger for new frontiers grew ever-larger.

The solution came with the invention of the steam engine and the growing use of coal. But whereas the ghost acres of imperial expansion, colonisation, and slavery were ways of annexing space, this new form of resource exploitation was fundamentally a way of annexing time. Accessing the vast stores of combustible fossil fuels beneath the planet’s surface broke through the ecological limits that had once constrained human societies by liberating energy from the geological past and transferring its energy into the present.

This process, which Pyne dubs ‘third-fire’, inaugurated an entirely new phase in planetary history. The energy embedded in coal far exceeds that embedded in wood, meaning it burns hotter and faster. Together with the steam engine, this combustion soon begat more combustion, accelerating not just industry, but also the extraction of more coal and metal. The mechanisation of industry increased the power of the factory owners, allowing them to regulate the lives of their workers. Temporality was unhinged, as first gaslight and then electricity banished night, and farming broke away from natural cycles through the introduction of machines and fertilisers. As it accelerated, this third-fire also unlocked new forms of extraction: the collapse of fisheries can be traced to the development of refrigeration and mapped onto the spread of ships powered by fossil fuels; likewise the control of oil has driven global history for more than a century, and played an integral role in the patterns of unequal development that shape our world.

No less importantly, however, third-fire did not just liberate new forms of fire, it disrupted the patterns of fire that had helped regulate the planet’s cycles. Fire was banished from cities and towns, while older patterns of burning were fatally disrupted by the dispossession of indigenous societies. Here in Australia European invaders used fire to open up the country to grazing and agriculture, but their methods were uncoordinated and sporadic compared to the careful management of the original inhabitants. As historian Tom Griffiths observes in Christoff’s The Fires Next Time, this loss of traditional Indigenous land management and the ‘unravelling [of] ecological and cultural rhythms’ created a break with the past, laying the foundations for the firestorms that have periodically consumed the Australian landscape since the mid-19th century.

There is something seductive about Pyne’s formulation that goes beyond its explanatory power. Fire has its own language, a mesmerising vocabulary of rapidity and risk, metamorphosis and destruction. Flames smoulder and sear and crackle and burn. Slow-moving spot-fires and ground-fires consume ladder fuels that allow them to ascend into the treetops, at which point they become crown fires that not only leap quickly from tree to tree, but begin to generate their own wind by sucking up oxygen, creating a form of pyroconvention. As fires grow more intense, less familiar words come into play. Exposed to the sorts of conditions experienced in Fort McMurray, where temperatures exceeded 1,000 degrees Celsius, steel melted and granite statues were reduced to pebbles, concrete ‘spalled’ – essentially fracturing and crumbling – and houses and other buildings experienced the lethal phenomenon known as ‘flashover’, or sudden and total combustion in an enclosed space: the heat of the fire volatilises the fuel contained in materials nearby, releasing it into the atmosphere and allowing the fire to grow exponentially more intense. Petroleum-based materials such as vinyl, plastic, artificial fibres, paints, glue, or any of the myriad products used in housing and everyday life are particularly dangerous in such situations, because the combustive chemicals within them volatise at relatively low temperatures. Then there is ‘ashification’, in which temperatures reach a point where entire houses vaporise, a process that took as little as three minutes in some parts of Fort McMurray (as Vaillant notes at one point, ‘“ashification” is another of those words […] that doesn’t enter the conversation below 500°C’).

As the world’s pyrogeography grows increasingly unhinged, it is also spawning new words. In his politically uncompromising and often nakedly emotional Firestorm: Battling Super-Charged Natural Disasters, former Commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, Greg Mullins, describes the Black Summer as Australia’s first gigafire, noting that while the scale of the fires and the severity of the disaster were genuinely unprecedented, it was also just ‘a taste of what we can now expect during our periodic worst fire seasons’. There is also the phenomenon of pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms, in which intense heat and smoke create vast, roiling storms in the air above a fire, producing lightning and powerful winds. These storms were once so rare that in Australia they had only been encountered sixty times across the forty years leading up to 2018. At least twenty-nine such storms, according to Mullins, were unleashed in a matter of months across the Black Summer.

Perhaps most terrifyingly of all, however, is what is known as pyro-tornadogenesis, in which fires reach such an extraordinary scale and intensity that they generate wind vortices powerful enough to cause a tornado. First observed during the fires that ripped through Canberra in January 2003, and since then seen with increasing frequency, pyro-tornadogenesis is also sometimes referred to as a fire whirl, a firenado, or a fire tornado, and is an event of almost unimaginable, annihilating ferocity: winds in excess of 200 kilometres an hour create a column of fire up to a kilometre high in which temperatures can exceed 1,500 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt steel – for twenty minutes or more. As a Californian fire chief who witnessed a fire tornado during the Carr Fire in 2018 observes to Vaillant at one point, ‘fires are making their own behaviour’.

The idea of the Pyrocene also has considerable metaphorical power. Fire is a reaction rather than a living thing, but as Pyne observes, it shares many of life’s characteristics, not just feeding on biomass, but growing and reproducing. Indeed, like that other form of almost-life, the virus, it is dependent upon life, evolving and changing in symbiosis with it, and spreading through contagion, leaping across barriers, infecting and igniting new reservoirs of fuel. Little wonder those who encounter it in the wild tend to imbue fires with agency, speaking of them as something baleful and malefic, a monster or demon. More deeply again, thinking with fire captures something essential about the behaviour of capitalism and the other historical processes that have led us to this point. As Vaillant observes:

But Pyne’s notion of the Pyrocene also underlines how intrinsic fire is to life on our planet. Although water is the signature we seek when we search for other worlds capable of sustaining life, water is present on moons and planets through our solar system and beyond, and fire is only known to exist on one: Earth. Three things are necessary for fire to exist: oxygen, fuel, and a spark. Other worlds may have lightning, some have fuel in the form of hydrocarbons, a handful even have small reserves of oxygen, but only Earth has all three. Fire is an integral part of the cycles of energetic transformation that sustain life, releasing the solar energy trapped in living matter by photosynthesis and helping regulate the atmosphere. Pyne goes so far as to suggest life itself is a kind of fire, in which the process of respiration that oxygenates cells is a form of slow combustion.

Equally importantly, the Pyrocene reframes the human relationship with fire. Fire is no longer an external force, ally or enemy, but what Pyne describes as ‘an informing principle of terrestrial life and human culture’. As a historical perspective this can refocus our attention on the role of combustion in shaping the development of societies. But it is equally illuminating when brought to bear on our present predicament. The Fort McMurray Fire wasn’t important merely because of its appalling destructiveness. It was also significant because Fort McMurray’s history is inseparable from the fossil fuel economy, and in particular the tar sands beneath it that are the source of its wealth. The conditions that created the fire, and made it so uniquely destructive, are the result of the reckless burning of fossil fuels. The same is true of the Black Summer fires in Australia, which were the culmination of two decades of inaction and policy negligence by governments across the country. This was most obvious in the failure of successive Commonwealth governments to introduce effective mechanisms to reduce Australia’s domestic emissions, and in the Morrison Government’s disgraceful refusal to heed warnings from fire chiefs prior to the disaster and disavowal of responsibility during and after the fires. But as Peter Christoff observes, this litany of failure was also ‘tragic testimony to limited preparation across different layers and domains of government and society’. The stubborn refusal of Australian governments to begin transitioning away from being one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, or to dial back their ongoing attempts to delay international action on climate by frustrating climate negotiations behind the scenes, makes this unpreparedness all the more visible.

The idea of the Pyrocene also makes visible the tentacular nature of the fossil fuel industry, and its connection to other histories of extraction and their social and environmental costs. As Vaillant notes in Fire Weather, Fort McMurray was established as part of the fur trade, and only later became part of the oil industry. Today it remains a frontier town, a place people do not come from, but rather come to, usually with an eye to getting rich. Ironically many of those who fetch up in the city come from economically depressed communities in the maritime provinces on the east coast, many of which have yet to recover from the collapse of the cod fishery several decades ago. For many of these workers the opportunity to get rich comes with a price tag – while wages in the town are high, so are rates of drug and alcohol abuse, violence and suicide, a phenomenon powerfully captured in Canadian comic-writer Kate Beaton’s memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the Pyrocene repositions us in relation to the future. The disasters of recent years are the leading edge of an accelerating transformation of the planet’s pyrogeography. Some of this is a result of changes in the distribution of fire – Pyne points to what he dubs ‘missing fire’, noting that in industrial countries fire is now almost unknown in cities and urban areas, and even in rural areas the cycles of burning that were once an integral part of agriculture have also largely disappeared. But it is also a result of the transformation of the planet’s climate through the uncontrolled consumption of fossil fuels. Study after study makes it clear that global heating is driving longer and more dangerous fire seasons, allowing places that have never burned before to burn, and increasing the severity of fires, in a process that will only intensify if temperatures continue to rise.

Here in Australia there has been considerable emphasis upon a revival of pre-1788 fire management techniques. In an essay whose reticence and circumspection underline the emotional impact of the Black Summer on Indigenous communities, Bruce Pascoe argues the patterns of destruction and – even more importantly – recovery revealed ‘how the old people… designed their forests’,  as the denuding of the upper canopy by the fires sparked ‘a resurgence of the grasses beneath the burnt trees. Redleg, speargrass and others returned to the forest because they had access to the light and carbon’, and made it possible to ‘see the facility Aboriginal people made of the forest prior to the invasion’. In his fascinating and deeply personal Fire Country, Indigenous author and filmmaker Victor Steffensen also writes eloquently about the centrality of fire to Indigenous cultures, describing the ways in which fire teaches ways of reading and understanding Country. As Steffensen’s careful explication of the use of fire in different contexts makes clear, it is not a simple process, but part of a continuing conversation with the land. Similarly the revival of Indigenous fire practices is not simply about restoring the soil or undoing the damage inflicted on Australian ecosystems since European invasion; it is a process of cultural restoration as well, a way of centring Indigenous knowledge and care for Country.

Yet despite the ecological and cultural benefits of a revival of Indigenous fire practices and the ongoing importance of hazard reduction, these processes alone will not be enough to hold back the fires that will ravage the Australian landscape in a hotter world. New research makes it clear that logging radically increases the susceptibility of forests to burning, and results in far more intense fires when they do occur. This shift in fire regime persists for up to 70 years, meaning that even if logging in native forests were to cease tomorrow, many Australian forests would remain at greater risk of burning for decades to come.

Similarly, the highly nuanced way in which Indigenous cultures used burning means not all of Australia’s pre-1788 woodlands were maintained with fire – ecologist David Lindenmayer argues it is unlikely tall, wet forests like Victoria’s Mountain Ash forests were ever subject to burning. Most importantly, however, the most powerful driver of fire is no longer fuel loads but climate change: in The Fires Next Time Mullins quotes the 2019-2020 bushfires Royal Commission’s finding that ‘as conditions deteriorate, fuel reduction is of diminishing effectiveness’, and argues that on the worst fire weather days the scale and severity of the fires had more to do with weather conditions than fuel loads. As temperatures grow more extreme, this problem will grow ever more severe: speaking recently Mullins described the new phenomenon of ‘flash droughts’, periods of concentrated heat that dry out landscapes in a matter of weeks such as that which preceded the Maui fires, and which can radically alter fire conditions in a very short period.

These positions are not necessarily at odds. Pyne talks about fire as an integrative idea capable of transcending the reductivism of science, and demanding new ways of thinking and acting that draw upon both science and traditional forms of knowledge. But the reality is that without a rapid reduction in greenhouse emissions, the fires of the future will outstrip our capacity to manage them. In Mullins’ bracing assessment:

The scale of the effort needed to alter that trajectory is immense. Environmental activists often talk in terms of a transition to a war footing, arguing the time for incremental change has now passed, and the only way to make the economic and technological transformation necessary is through a whole-of-society effort. But perhaps we might also think about the climate crisis itself in terms of violence and war, an attack perpetrated on the living world by the world’s wealthiest, and a continuation of the long history of colonial extraction and destruction. If nothing else it does not seem to be coincidental that Vaillant discovers the best analogy for what happened to Fort McMurray in 2016 not in previous natural disasters, but in Operation Gomorrah in 1943, when Allied forces dropped almost 8,000 tonnes of bombs and incendiaries on Hamburg over nine nights, creating a firestorm in which more than 37,000 people died – mostly immolated or baked alive in shelters – and injured 180,000 more.

Fire is also a catalyst, however, igniting change and transforming the materials it encounters. That process has been visible in Australia, where the voting public rejected the environmental and moral vandalism of the Morrison Government at the ballot box by voting decisively in favour of climate action in the 2022 election. And while the Albanese Government’s climate agenda falls far short of what is demanded by the science, it has made real attempts to improve disaster management and rapidly implemented the recommendations of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. But as the climate crisis transforms societies around the world in coming decades, that process is likely to accelerate, as the transition to a more sustainable world drives fundamental changes to social and economic arrangements.

Usually these changes are imagined in negative terms, with an emphasis upon breakdown and collapse. But as David Schlosberg and Danielle Celermajer argue in The Fires Next Time, there are other sorts of climate imaginaries that draw upon communities and local knowledge to envision pathways to a sustainable future. These ways of thinking about our relationship with each other and the world we inhabit do not just reject doomism and denial, they also emphasise resilience and care, and empower communities and individuals with the tools to participate in building their own future. The tools necessary to create a more sustainable world, in other words, are the same tools that will help us build a better and fairer world.

Thinking about fire, its capacity for creation and destruction can help with this process. But perhaps we also need to think with fire. Steffensen writes of the capacity of fire to act as a form of continuity for Indigenous Australians, a connection to Country and culture, but also – vitally – its capacity to heal and offer hope for the future. As Pyne’s notion of the Pyrocene suggests, something similar is true for non-Indigenous cultures – imagining ourselves through the prism of fire reveals that it is as much a part of us as we are a part of it. Fire has shaped us as a species in the same way we have used it to reshape the planet.

But it also makes it clear that we must reimagine our relationship to fire. First and foremost this means we must stop the uncontrolled and destructive transfer of combustibles from the deep past into the present. But we also need to find ways to live with fire that do not frame it as an enemy, but instead recognise its role in the planet’s cycles. The problem is not fire itself, it is that we have suppressed fire in places that should burn and – by transforming the Earth’s climate systems through the burning of fossil fuels – changed the nature of fire and made new places burn. Part of this process is practical, and involves a shift in patterns of urban development and better fire management and improved firefighting capabilities. But it also requires us to begin to think about ways in which fire’s making and unmaking connects us not just to our deep past, but also informs our future, by revealing the limits of our power as a species. This shift might seem impossible, but ultimately we have little choice, for if we cannot learn to recalibrate our relationship with fire’s elemental nature, it will consume us.