Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
boiled-off steam could drive a piston.They burned cordwood (or charcoal),
which left combustion ultimately at the mercy of what the countryside
could grow and operators could glean from it. Those engines could con-
sume staggering quantities of wood; they could rapidly burn up whole
landscapes.That set in motion the search for a more robust fuel, a quest that
ended with coal.
Fossil fuels had long been burned, but locally and specifically. They suf-
fered from the lack of a place in which to combust usefully.They could not
be spread over fields like branches, or be rolled like smoldering logs, or be
loosed as flame could over once-living fallow. The steam engine thus gave
coal what it most lacked: a combustion context. In return, coal granted to
the new fire engines what they most hungered for: abundant fuel. They
soon worked on one another, coal encouraging better designs and engines
seeking more refined fossil fuels. Together they revolutionized power
machinery and transport, and through transport, all the landscapes internal
fire could touch.The steam engine soon spawned other combustion-driven
prime movers that could burn more portable fossil fuels like petroleum and
natural gas. Each innovation bred others. Eventually this swarm of fire-
breathing machines forced fire ecology into another order of being. They
made possible industrial fire.
Even oblique means can sometimes yield awesome ends. That is what
steam did to fire. Combustion no longer flowed from living source to liv-
ing sinks: it burned biomass from the geologic past and released its outflow
to a future Earth. The ancient chain of combustion no longer resembled
anything in its past. Industrial combustion added fires in the form of its
prime movers and the machines they in turn goaded into being. It sub-
tracted fires by substituting its closed fires for open ones and by attacking
free-burning fires seemingly wherever it found them. And it relocated fire
ecologically by breaking down and rearranging landscapes, helping decide
what might burn and when it should burn and by what means. Although a
robust ecological understanding of industrial combustion still eludes us, its
effects everywhere surround us. Through its engines, industrial fire has
become the prime mover of Earth's fire regimes.
THE FUTURE OF FIRE
The future promises both more and less. It looks different for fire as tool,
as domesticated technology, and as captured ecology.
