5
Our intent entered the world as combustion.
—Wendell Berry, Horses
A fire’s beginnings are always humble, and any future beyond the uncertain present is dependent on a tripod of factors over which—at first, anyway—a fire has no control: heat, fuel, and oxygen. These are the ingredients of fire, but a fourth ingredient—a catalyst—is needed to unite these disparate elements into a dynamic, unified whole. Frankenstein’s monster needed a jolt of lightning, and so in its way does fire. Absent lightning, a cigarette will do, and so will the hot muffler of an ATV. Under the right conditions, such as a domestic gas leak, even static electricity from a house cat can set it off. Any number of things can ignite a fire, as long as they are, at least for a moment, over 451°F. But ignition—that singular poesis when fire springs into being from nothing, from nonbeing—isn’t the true moment of origin. This falls to the chemical reaction that precedes it.
The notion of fire as chemistry does not come naturally because fire is so itself—almost a “thing,” but not quite. Our experience of fire occurs in the realm of the visible, but it is made possible by the invisible, and there is a world of energy in those vaporous, unseen realms. It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit. This is what the heat is for: to liberate the flammable gases from their solid or liquid prisons by transforming them into vapor. In fire’s world, everything relevant is breathing, emitting, vaporizing, volatile—not just the air, but the trees, the neighborhood, the house, the Formica countertop, the bag of cat food sitting on it, and, if conditions are favorable enough—hot enough—the cat itself. The higher the temperature, the broader fire’s menu; under the right conditions, even a bulldozer will burn.
It is the same process whether it’s a pine tree, a plastic chair, a pool of kerosene, or a living room curtain: just as we cook our food to more easily release its nutrients, fire “cooks” its fuel to do the same and, just as a compelling scent draws a bloodhound through the woods, so volatile gases draw fire. In this sense, fire is pulled through space. It is here—in the invisible gaseous interface between the thing and its ignition—that fire becomes mobile. This molecule-thin frontier, known as the “reaction zone,” enables or denies, from moment to ignescent moment, the promise of fire’s limitless, unimpeded growth. This phenomenon—pyrolysis—is the key to understanding the motives and behavior of fire. Simply put, the goal of fire—its threefold objective—is to string these pyrolytic moments together for as long as possible, as broadly as possible, as intensely as possible.
Fire occurs frequently in Nature. Volcanic eruptions start fires, and falling rocks can generate igniting sparks; under certain circumstances, coal seams are capable of spontaneous combustion. Animals can start fires, too: there are species of hawk and kite that will pluck burning twigs from the margins of bushfires to drop them elsewhere, starting new ones. In 2004, a red-tailed hawk burst into flames after getting electrocuted on power lines near the Southern California town of Santa Clarita. The resulting wildfire burned six thousand acres, injured several firefighters, and forced a mass evacuation. Lightning, by far the most common cause of natural fire, strikes Earth millions of times per day. While only a fraction of these bolts actually ignite the landscape, they still result in thousands of new wildfires. That sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the number of fires humans make.
If we have a superpower—besides our brains and thumbs and speech—it is fire. Without its light and its explosive, directable energy, we would not be who or what we are today. For as long as there have been hearths to gather around, cook over, and see by, fire has been, literally, central to our lives. The gap between a million-year-old fireplace in a South African cave and a gas lamp, an engine, a gun, a rocket, or a laser beam is merely one of focus and fuel; all find their beginnings—their world-changing power—in combustive energy that originates in Nature and is guided and refined by hominids—by us. Virtually everything we have accomplished on our increasingly rapid journey of differentiation from other apes, and from our own ancestors, can be traced in direct relation to our ability to focus and concentrate this fierce prosthetic energy—“heat” seems far too soft a term for what it has wrought in us and in our world.
Especially now.
The degree to which we have mastered fire borders on the magical and, in this way, with minimal training, we have all become casual wizards. That we are, each of us, firemasters, has become a kind of birthright, and our ability to summon fire at will is ancient. There are Indigenous people across the globe from the High Arctic to sub-Saharan Africa who, using two sticks, or chips of quartz and pyrite, can produce a flame as quickly as the reader can with a Bic lighter. There is no reason to suppose this hasn’t been the case for dozens, if not hundreds, of millennia. Today, it is easy to overlook the fire-powered miracles that we daily perform, but they are real, unprecedented, and too many to list. Whether we’re boiling tea or crossing an ocean, fire is right there with us. Without it, we really are dead in the water.
It is fire’s nature to strive upward—in other words, to aspire, which means, literally, “to breathe desire into,” and also “to rise.” Fire, it can be said, is aspiration in its purest form: desire burning, and burning desire—to exist, to consume, to grow, to flourish—all as fervently as we do. Fire does not have consciousness, but it does have character, and there are internal and external factors that motivate, guide, deter, and defeat it. One of those factors is us: there is no other natural force or element over which we have such a compelling illusion of control. Fire is the only “natural” disaster that can be initiated by a gesture as casual as dropping a match, and this complicates our relationship to it in some profound ways. Since the dawn of the Petrocene Age just a century and a half ago, we have given fire exponentially more opportunities to engage in all those behaviors we seem to emulate and excel at. But like Ariel to our Prospero, fire is a begrudging servant. Selfish and willful, it yearns, above all, for freedom, which it will take at any opportunity and at any cost.
And it has enabled the same impulses in us. Never in Earth’s history, or in ours, have so many fires been ignited in so many places on such a continuous basis. At the most basic level, consider every candle, lantern, and cook fire across the globe: approximately 3 billion people around the world still cook and/or heat their homes with open fires. Then, consider every gas stove, furnace, and water heater; every coal-fired and biomass-burning power station; every generator; every human-caused brush and field and forest fire. Already, we are into many billions of fires per day, worldwide, and that is not even counting matches, lighters, or pilot lights, or more rarified sources like oil refineries, incinerators, and war. Nor does this tally take into account automobiles.
A single four-cylinder car engine turning at an average of 2,400 rpm—driving-to-work speed—will generate around 10,000 combustions per minute—more than half a million per hour. There are well over a billion cars on the road today, along with a quarter billion trucks, buses, and vans, and 200 million motorcycles. Add to this a conservative estimate of 25,000 passenger and cargo jets, more than 50,000 cargo ships, and the unknown but certainly huge number of construction and earth-moving machines, tractors, lawnmowers, motorboats, private planes, helicopters, and weapons. If you ran all of these engines for just one minute, the number of combustions occurring inside them would number in the tens of trillions—each one an individual fire generating heat, energy, and exhaust. Were you to run the world’s engines for just one day, the number of individual combustions would elicit an error message from your calculator. Were you to transpose this impossible number to stars, these man-made bursts of heat and light would comprise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of galaxies—every day. In just the past hundred years (a blink in geologic time), our planet has become a flickering universe of fires large and small.
Imagine being able to see them all.
Were these fires and their makers and tenders observed by visitors from another planet, humans could easily be mistaken for a global fire cult—the dutiful keepers of a trillion flames. Were these extraterrestrial visitors to observe us over time, they would marvel at our pyrolatric devotion, how with every additional building, house, and vehicle, we add thousands of new fire shrines and temples every day. And if, through the flicker and glare of these innumerable flames, they could see Fort McMurray, with its sixty-story flare stacks flying hundred-foot banners of burning gas, they might conclude that, as remote as they are, these night-blinding beacons must indicate one of the fire cult’s most sacred sites. Between full-time residents and temporary workers, well over 100,000 devotees toil in that place, their sole purpose to keep those fires burning, or support those who do.
Even though we use the terms “oil” and “gas” in casual conversation, as if they were familiar to us, few of us ever actually see them. For most of us, they are abstractions, code words for what we’re really talking about, which is fire and money. Whether it is a teaspoon of butane in a pocket lighter, fifteen gallons of unleaded in a car’s gas tank, two thousand tons of heavy oil in a freighter’s fuel oil bunkers, or five thousand gallons of Jet A in a 737’s wings, its ultimate purpose is to burn—to be transformed into fire and the energy that combustion represents. Until then, it waits patiently for one of us—a smoker, a driver, a captain, a pilot, a cook, an arsonist—to summon it forth. Most of us never even see the flames we’ve conjured up: the car just drives; the plane just flies; the shower just gets hot. The stove burner is not “on fire” but a blue flower blooming—day and night, all year round—so simple and safe and, above all, contained, even a child can use it.
These everyday feats become still more impressive when one considers what we’re actually burning: even the youngest viable fossil fuels are millions of years old. The French call gasoline “essence”—and that is truly what it is. According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground. One way to visualize a tank of gas is to imagine a mass of ancient plant matter weighing as much as fifteen blue whales crammed into a tank next to your spare tire, just behind your child’s car seat. A typical driver can burn that in a week, often for the most trivial of reasons. All those distilled plants were grown by the same sun that grows our food today, so what we’re burning is, in essence (that word again), ancient, super-concentrated solar energy.
Today, crude oil—liquid sunshine—is the world’s most widely traded commodity (though coffee is right up there). It has been found on every continent and under every ocean where it has been sought, often in unfathomable quantities. According to another energy historian, Daniel Yergin, the world economy was worth around $90 trillion in 2019, and nearly all its energy (84 percent) was derived from fossil fuels. We are burning through this energetic trust fund like there’s no tomorrow: on any given day, the human race consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil, while another 40 million barrels are in transit around the globe via tanker, pipeline, truck, and train. More than a third of global shipping is devoted to transporting petroleum products. From this ocean of petroleum are derived the fuels used to power most of the world’s cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships, as well as key ingredients in plastics, fabrics, and fertilizers. Crude oil touches every aspect of our lives, and most parts of our bodies—inside and out.
While bitumen, crude, and all their derivatives are known collectively as petroleum, they fall under the broader umbrella of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are not just oil and gas, they are truly the stuff of life: without hydrogen and carbon, Earth would be a lithic sphere and nothing more—uninhabitable, unrecognizable. Simpler, perhaps, than describing what hydrocarbons are, is describing what they aren’t: water, air, rocks, and metals—in other words, things that are not, and never were, alive in the biological sense. But even with 99 percent of Earth’s constituents off the table, an awful lot of things remain unaccounted for. “Hydrocarbons” is an awkward concept to wrap one’s head around because they take such wildly different forms. As dissimilar as they may seem on the surface, Kentucky coal and Kentucky bourbon are both full of hydrocarbons; so are Irish peat and Irish whiskey. Hay bales, cow farts, library books, and extra-virgin olive oil are all hydrocarbons, too. Likewise, Big Wheels, Barbie dolls, LEGOs, Lululemon, Trojans, Vaseline, WD-40, and every tree on Earth are also hydrocarbon based. So is human fat. Fats—lipids—are the organic precursors to all the petroleum we burn. They occur in plants, too, including algae and phytoplankton. Long after other components of these creatures have decomposed or been reduced to inert sediment, the lipids endure, thus confirming a suspicion held by many people attempting weight loss: fat lasts forever.[*1]
Whatever form they take, hydrocarbons represent potential energy—specifically, fire. We are, in every sense, and by every metric, inseparable from hydrocarbons and the phenomena that make them possible. We owe them our lives because they are our lives. It is thanks to the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere that all hydrocarbons will burn. Fire, it could be said, is a hydrocarbon’s ultimate expression: young or old; alive or dead; solid, liquid, or gas—fire unites them (and us) in an all-consuming ecstasy of chemical reaction.
For our purposes, oil and gas represent both a commodity and a Promethean superpower that could be called “fire in waiting.” Fire in the wild is a beast, dangerous and unpredictable: it is lightning and lava and forests laid to waste. Oil, on the other hand, is fire brought to heel: cool and contained, it awaits our signal and does our bidding. Or at least that was the original plan. There is a strong case to be made that there has never been a better time to be a human than right now. Some might argue this point, but one thing is for sure: in all of human history, there has never been a better time to be a fire.
The fact that our relationship to fire has become so intimately symbiotic has profound implications—for humans, and also for fire. At this point in our shared history, we are almost totally dependent on fire, and the products it facilitates, for food, shelter, heat, transportation, medicines, and every object we use. Given how mutually enabling our shared existence has become, and that we are both such avid burners, it should come as no surprise that we share an elemental ancestor.
Fire, as far as we know, is unique to our planet. A relative newcomer, it has occurred on Earth for about half a billion years. That might seem like a long time, but if the planet’s history were expressed as a century, fire’s presence would occupy only the past decade or so. Fire, to be clear, is not the same as heat, which is abundant in the universe. The sun radiates heat, but it is not “on fire” in the earthly sense. Earthly fire—our fire—is different; it is not a thing, or a gas, or an element as Aristotle defined it. It is a chemical reaction. But before there was life on Earth this reaction was not possible here. Life—specifically, plant life and the oxygen it generates—is the sine qua non for fire as we know it, and most of Earth’s history has played out in an atmosphere hostile to both. When life first appeared, shortly after the formation of the oceans around 4 billion years ago, the young planet’s atmosphere contained only trace amounts of oxygen. Earth’s first colonists were anaerobic microbes: not only did they not require oxygen to live, it was lethally toxic to them, just as it is for their descendants who inhabit Earth’s airless realms to this day. Feeding, yeast-like, on organic compounds unimaginable as food, these anaerobes produced methane and carbon dioxide as waste products (just as we do).
What unites us and fire is oxygen. Oxygen is a chemical element born in the forges of Creation, the godlike heat and pressure found only in the cores of stars. Abundant and mercurial, oxygen could be described as the most promiscuous element in the universe, reacting to, or bonding with, just about everything it comes in contact with.[*2] Under the right conditions, it is extremely combustible.[*3] Chemists call fire a “rapid oxidation event,” but here on Earth, almost everything is oxidizing all the time, just in different ways and at different rates: a steel I-beam rusts almost imperceptibly for decades; a hibernating frog absorbs oxygen through its skin all winter; a Molotov cocktail explodes instantly. As disparate as these things are, they are all reacting with oxygen. Of course, we are oxidizing, too, thanks to photosynthesis—the alchemical transubstantiation of sunlight, water (H2O), and carbon dioxide (CO2) into living things that strip oxygen from water molecules and release it in quantities sufficient to fuel our cells, and also fire. Because of this, it is fair to say that both of us—fire and humans—owe our existence to plants, specifically, cyanobacteria. This spectacularly successful phylum of single-celled creatures was the first to perform photosynthesis on a planetary scale, starting around 2.7 billion years ago. For these pioneering “solar cells,” sunlight was more than just a heat source, it was a catalyst for life, and their success had a catastrophic effect on Earth’s atmosphere.
All photosynthesizing organisms generate oxygen as a waste product (just as we generate methane and carbon dioxide), but we associate oxygen so strongly with its life-giving properties that it is hard to imagine it as pollution.[*4] Cyanobacteria’s prodigious oxygen production contaminated Earth’s atmosphere so thoroughly that most anaerobic creatures—the founding colonists of life on our planet—were gassed to death. Into these voids evolved new species able to survive in a lethally oxygen-rich environment. Enabling these early aerobes to flourish and evolve into more complex creatures was yet another gift of photosynthesis: the ozone layer, a by-product of the massive oxygen build-up in our atmosphere. Without it, Earth—its life, oceans, atmosphere, and all—would have gone the way of Mars.
Fire is possible because oxygen is so reactive, but the secret to its continued success is that there is the “right” amount of it relative to other atmospheric gases. Fire has a hard time sustaining itself when oxygen levels fall below an atmospheric concentration of 15 percent. Meanwhile, in concentrations above 35 percent, dinner by candlelight would be ill-advised. Currently, atmospheric oxygen sits in the Goldilocks zone, just shy of 21 percent: exactly what we need to live and prosper, and exactly what fire needs to burn in ways that have proven extraordinarily beneficial to us—most of the time. We evolved to accommodate these conditions, but fire didn’t; fire’s behavior is determined by immutable laws of chemistry and physics. So, it is a fortuitous coincidence that we find ourselves overlapping in space and time under such mutually rewarding circumstances.
Long before we climbed down from the trees, fire was climbing up into them. Not only would photosynthesis provide the gas required for the first ignitions, its agents—plant life—would provide storehouses of additional fuel (i.e., hydrocarbons) in the form of wood, stems, leaves, and grasses to keep these fires going. “Going” is the operative word here: oxygen is the gas that powers the engine of motility. Any complex creature that moves for a living does so thanks to oxygen, and the reason animals move is, first and foremost, to find more food to consume and, ultimately, to oxidize—to “burn” in the form of energy transmitted to and through their blood. Fire is driven by the same need. In this sense, fire is not an “element” or a “reaction,” it is a hunter. Just like us.
The roster of fellow travelers who share this motivating appetite is a diverse one: bedbug or barn owl, octopus or oil baron, white shark or wildfire, oxygen is our trail boss, driving us through the world on an endless quest for action and reaction, for energy to burn. As much as we may prize individual agency and autonomy, we are, in fact, oxygen’s terminal hostages. If in doubt, don’t inhale for thirty seconds and notice how you feel. Suffocation is a grave risk faced by all burners and breathers, above and below the surface. Every step we take may break a fall, but every breath we take staves off imminent death. With this barely conscious rhythm of self-resuscitation we save our lives about twenty thousand times a day. Consider the effects of an unplanned blockage to your airway: in the first forty-five seconds of stifled breath you will lose your manners, your language, your loyalties, your love, and, with them, 10 million years of evolution, winding up wide-eyed and flailing, somewhere lower than an ape. In the next forty-five seconds, your evolutionary clock will spin back even faster—perhaps 200 million years—until you resemble a lizard: a savage, soulless vehicle for raw impulse focused with all your being on one immediate and crushing need. And in your final seconds, with your lungs ablaze and not a thought left in your head, you might be reduced to something even more basic—something a lot like fire: an appetite for oxygen, the animating gas, with nothing left of your self, or even your life, but a chemical reaction dying to happen.
Breathing, a biochemical analog to hope, which is just a human expression for “oxidizing,” is our single most critical interaction with the outside world—the first and final thing we do. Fish or fowl, our last mortal act is not to move, or eat, or procreate, but to strip oxygen molecules from our environment. Then, like a smothered fire, we flicker and die.
This begs the question: Is fire alive?
After all, it meets so many of the criteria:
- Fire is animate.[*5]
- It can be propagated by others of its kind.
- It can generate offspring.
- It grows.
- It breathes.
- It travels in search of nourishment.
- It persists with the opportunism and single-mindedness of all successful life forms.
- It can lie dormant for long periods awaiting more favorable conditions.
- It can adapt to changing conditions.
- It can die of starvation and/or suffocation.
- It can be killed.
- It can be revived.
And it can turn on its master—who might not be its master at all. Lately, it seems as if fire, our constant, if fickle, companion, our most potent and ready enabler, has been biting the hand with a frequency and viciousness for which we are ill-prepared.
Fire may not be alive or conscious in the sense that we are, and yet its behavior manifests a vitality, flexibility, and ambition often associated with intelligent animals. Likewise, we may not appear as flickering sprites composed of light and smoke, and yet, distilled to our essence, we are fire’s kin—gas-driven, fuel-burning, heat-generating appetites who will burn as bright and hot as we can, stopping at nothing until we’re fully extinguished.
To aspire—to breathe desire into ourselves and into our world—is what oxygen empowers (and condemns) us to do. If you look at how humans—undisciplined and unregulated by education or culture—use resources, they tend to consume whatever is available until it’s gone. Of course, fire does this, too. A key difference between us is that fire has no control over its appetite or rate of consumption, but we do, even if it’s hard to tell sometimes. Because of this capacity for self-awareness and self-control, science has generously named our species Homo sapiens, or “wise man.” In Latin, sapiens means not only “wise” but also “rational” and “sane.” However, given the degree to which our character and culture are now determined by our relationship to fire, and its avatar, the petroleum industry, there is a case to be made for a revised nomenclature. The energy historian Vaclav Smil suggested “hydrocarbon man.” I propose Homo flagrans. Flagrans is Latin for “ardent, fiery, passionate, outrageous.” In other words, “burning man.”