Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
As technology quickens and industrialization sprawls, the scope of con-
trolled combustion will explode. More fire appliances and more fossil-fuel
combustion may mean more fire broadcast over the planet than at any time
in history. Yet the counterpressures will also build. Advanced technology
will further separate the desired properties of fire from its free-burning
forms. Future prime movers may no more resemble open flame than does
the energy chain of the cellular Krebs cycle. In mature economies, energy
is becoming “decarbonized”: we are extracting more energy with fewer
hydrocarbons. If some forms of solar and nuclear energy develop, combus-
tion may have a powerful rival. In any event, the Big Burn that has charac-
terized the early phases of industrialization has led to a Big Dump that
threatens to overwhelm ecological sinks. It may even alter the overall cli-
mate.The trend will continue to disaggregate fire's effects from fire itself.
The big loss will be fire as domesticated technology. Open burning for
farming, for pastoralism, for rural life—these are being replaced by fire
appliances, or the chemicals distilled from fossil biomass.The pastoral land-
scape of agriculture, in all its varied forms, is vanishing before urban
encroachment and nature reserves. The one has no liking for open flame,
the other little desire for fire kindled by human artifice. Fire as a catalyst for
rural economies will slip away with those lapsing economies. The largest
domain of anthropogenic fire technologies will disappear along with the
family cow, the woods pasture, the fallowed wheat field, and the pruned
orchard. Biocentric philosophies challenge the very legitimacy of domesti-
cation as a model for the human relationship with the natural world; such
fires will share in that disdain, and that loss.
Fire promises to thrive, however, within the nature reserves that the
industrial world is amassing. Not all such sites crave fire; some shun it, and
will wither under the flame. But many have adapted to fire regimes and will
suffer from fire's withdrawal as surely as they would a shift in rainfall. The
fact is, fire can be as ecologically powerful when removed as when applied.
A fire drought can be as serious as a fire flood.Yet if fire is not directed in
some way, the outcome will be fire eruptions, fire in patterns different from
those to which the biota accommodated, wildfire. The alternative is some
kind of controlled but still freely burning flame.The domain of fire as a cap-
tured ecological process will likely expand.
What may be most curious will be the future's perception of fire and of
humanity's monopoly over it, the sense that we remain the keepers of the
planetary flame, whose ecological power and responsibility descend from
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