Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
retard fire's spread; they countered wildfire with backfire. Industrial fire has
changed that, however, and has removed fire even from firefighting, just as
it has removed flame from houses. For industrial countries firefighting has
ceased to mean the clash of one flame against another, and means instead
the suppression of free-burning fire by the engines and pre-burned bricks
and cement of industrial combustion.Two fires cannot, it seems, both claim
the same niche. If a new species of burning arrives, it somehow means the
old ones must depart.
CYCLES OF PYROTECHNOLOGY
HOW FIRE HAS COOKED THE EARTH
Just as fire turns the gears of ecological cycles, so it has cranked the cycles
of many of the things people do to make that ecosystem habitable. Con-
sider three examples, all of them variants of cooking: the cooking of food,
the “cooking” of rough biomass, and the “cooking” of rock. For each, fire
is the great enabler. Remove it and the cycle collapses.
COOKING AS PYROTECHNIC PARADIGM
Let us begin with cooking, which is where the technology originates. In
many fire-origin myths, a proto-humanity laments as a cruel hardship that
it must eat food cold or raw and has no means to preserve food other than
by drying it in the sun. The capture of fire changed all this. Cooking
became the very emblem of the domesticated fire. Out of the campfire and
the hearth arose the kiln, the furnace, the forge, the crucible, the oven, and
the metal-encasing combustion chamber. From cooking food it was a short
step to cooking other matter—stone, wood, clay, ore, metal, the air, even sea
water, whatever fire could transmute into forms more usable to people. In
effect, humanity began to cook the Earth.
Cooking was, in fact, only one phase in a long-wave cycle of food prepa-
ration for which people might resort to fire at nearly every stage. Fire
helped pluck or massage the food out of the larger biota; fire cooking fol-
lowed fire hunting, fire foraging, fire-based farming and herding. Fire
helped ready meat, grain, or tubers for eating, improving taste, leaching
away toxins, and killing parasites. Fire—its heat, its smoke—then helped
preserve for the future what was not instantly eaten.
