Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
holds an axhead. Yet in other forms, it more resembles a domesticated
species. It must be birthed, tended, trained; it compels people to change
their habits to accommodate its own. Field fires have more in common
with dairy cows than with shovels.The hearth fire cannot be put on a shelf
as a hammer can. It has more akin to a draft horse that needs a barn, feed,
currying, and a bridle. Fire is a captured ecological process that people can,
broadly, harness. We can tap into the power of air and water to turn gears
and millstones, but we cannot call forth floods or gusts in the way we can
flame. In brief, fire roams across a wide spectrum of human technologies.
Moreover, fire is perhaps the ultimate interactive technology because it
makes possible other tools. Even where fire does not dominate—where in
fact it might seem absent—somewhere along the technological chain it
almost certainly serves as a catalyst or enabling device that allows events to
proceed, without which a link or two would break.
Its variants do matter, however.To the extent that fire is a simple tool, it
is possible for another tool to replace it. An acetylene torch can replace a
forge, an incandescent wire an oil lamp.This process has so progressed that
the industrial world has hardly any use for open flame at all, which it
regards as unacceptably dangerous. Much as early life incorporated oxygen
into the molecular machinery of the cell, constraining it to single, well-
controlled acts, so modern technology has absorbed fire, until combustion
has replaced fire altogether, and concentrated heat combustion. It is harder
to substitute for fire as a kind of domesticated creature because burning was
essential to the task. Fire did a variety of things, not easily replaced one by
one. But to the extent that it burns in a built setting (even one “built” of
natural materials), it is possible to reconstruct that setting, piece by piece,
with surrogates for fire at each point. This, for example, is the logic of
industrial farming. When fire serves its purposes as a loosely controlled
ecological process, however, no substitution is truly possible. What is
needed is fire, and fire as it burns freely in a roughly natural context. The
ability to start and stop this process is surely a technology, but it is not a
“tool” as commonly understood. One can break a campfire down into its
constituent parts to find alternative sources of heat, light, and social attrac-
tion. One cannot so break down a fire sweeping through a pine forest.The
range of its interactions with its surroundings is too complex and interac-
tive. To speak of such fires as “tools,” as though they were equivalent to
chain saws, tractors, and ammonia fertilizers, is to miss the point of their
presence.
