[Mei] Stephen J. Pyne: A Brief History of Fire, translated by Mei Xueqin, Niu Ruihua, Jia Jun, et al., reviewed and edited by Chen Rongxia, Sanlian Bookstore, April 2006
This is a distinctive work of environmental history. Taking “fire” as its theme, the author narrates the history of interactions among fire, nature, and human beings.
This book prompts people to rethink the relationship between ecology and humanity. How should human beings treat the environment in order to be “natural”? Whether in the eyes of technocrats or environmentalists, allowing a great fire to rage unchecked through forests and wilderness is by no means a good thing. To the former, it is backward foolishness, a waste of resources; to the latter, it is an act of destroying nature. Yet the author reveals to people the significance of “fire.”
The kind of environmentalism that hopes to free nature from human influence is naïve, because even if humankind could retreat to a prehistoric way of life, it would still not be able to separate itself from nature. In fact, ever since human beings came into being, people have already become important agents in the transformation of ecosystems. Because human beings can control fire—the ability to control fire is not proportional to population; very few people can exert a decisive influence on the ecological environment. For example, studies of Aboriginal Australians show that a single nomadic tribe can set 5,000 fires in a year. Since hundreds of thousands of years ago, human influence has spread across the globe, and human-made fire, together with lightning fire, has become one of the indispensable elements of the earth’s ecology. Fire burns away overabundant grass and shrubs, bringing renewed vitality to forests and grasslands. If there were no fire—for example, if modern forest fire brigades were able to prevent most human-caused and natural fires—forests, grasslands, and soil would lose their vitality.
Fire brings nature and the humanities together. The way fire is used is human culture, and it is also part of the ecological cycle. After the United States came to realize that fire is an indispensable element in maintaining ecological vitality, it once tried to restore natural fire within controllable limits. Yet the result was often ultimately disastrous. To restore the environment to its original state requires not only flames, but also the restoration of the original “fire regime,” this unique mode of combustion, which human beings once used for gathering, hunting, clearing, and reorganizing, and which was closely bound up with human modes of survival.
Modern civilization has replaced lightning fire and human-made fire with “third-generation fire” — industrial fire. This is an invisible fire, a fire that, once ignited, cannot be extinguished, a fire that no longer cycles but instead “progresses” without end, a fire of consumption. Modern people look down on blazing flames, thinking they represent backwardness or disaster. But people must not forget that from ancient times to the present, fire has always represented power — the power of Prometheus. When human beings control fire, fire is precisely the power that makes human beings human; when human beings cannot control fire, only then does fire become a “disaster.” Industrial fire is a hundred times fiercer than any other flame, yet it is easy for people to forget that it is still fire — like any other flame, it remains a force that governs humanity and nature, only its power is unimaginably greater than ever before. Like any fire regime, it too may at any moment slip out of control, burn down the human home, and even swallow up everything.
January 27, 2007, 20:51
CS
2007-02-11 08:06:00 Anonymous 218.22.21.24
In the future, we will very likely be able to control more “fire,” not only transforming the earth, but even changing the universe in which we dwell, intervening in the evolution of the cosmos; p
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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