This will keep happening. As the planet heats, combustible landscapes will dry and ignite. Less fire-prone lands, such as Greenland, will start catching fire, too. Environmentalists now urge us to imagine the whole world aflame. If our old picture of climate breakdown was a melting glacier, our new one is a wildfire. Its message is simple and urgent: the higher we crank up the heat, the more everything will burn – call this the “thermostat model”. With headlines reporting enormous fires from Sacramento to Siberia, it’s easy to feel that we’re already on the brink of a devastating global conflagration.
The truth, though, is stranger. Satellites allow researchers to monitor wildfires around the world. And when they do, they don’t see a planet igniting. Rather, they see one where fires are going out, and quickly. Fire has a long and productive place in human history, but there’s now less of it around than at any point since antiquity. We’re driving fire from the land and from our daily lives, where it was once a constant presence. What used to be a harmonious relationship between humanity and fire has become a hostile one.
Fewer fires burn today, but the ones left are formidable. Our pyroscape has become deranged, with fire taking on new shapes, visiting new places and consuming new fuels. The results are as confounding as they are unsettling, and our instincts are poor guides. Although we often hear about fires where rich people reside, such as in Australia’s south and the US west, fires kill the most – by far – in places where poor people live, like south-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The deadliest fires aren’t the largest and most spectacular ones, but the smaller, regular ones that are rarely reported by global media. They kill by smoke rather than flame, and their main cause isn’t global heating. Many are kindled by corporate-driven land clearance.
None of these conclusions should be particularly comforting. What they suggest, rather, is that fire is more complex than the thermostat model suggests. It’s shaped by how we grow our food and place our settlements as much as it is by how we fuel our cars. Addressing our fire problem will thus require more than managing the rising temperatures of recent years – though that’s still essential. It will also require us to confront a longer history that, since the Industrial Revolution, has thrown our relationship with fire out of whack.