Pyric Other, Pyric Double

Editors' note: Meteorologists are telling us that La Nia will soon loosen her grip on Australia, and as El Nio gathers strength, we are likely to be entering the period of drought and-inevitably-fire. With this in mind, we asked Stephen Pyne to write an essay about fire in both its loved and unloved personae. Fire is not animate. Most scientists would define it simply as a chemical reaction shaped by its physical surroundings. To regard it as an 'other', loved or unloved, or to speculate accordingly about its survival or extinction would seem preposterous. One might as well contemplate the lovedness of carbonic acid or the extinction of rust. Yet, while not living, fire is a creation of the living world, and shares many of life's traits. Life creates and sustains fire's existence: life supplies the oxygen it breathes, life furnishes the fuels that feed it, and life, in the hands of people, overwhelmingly applies the ignition that sparks it into existence. The core reaction itself is a central bio-chemical process that takes apart what photosynthesis puts together. When that occurs within a cell, it's called respiration; when it happens in the wide world, fire. Because it is an event, not a substance, fire takes its character from its context. It is what its circumstances make it. Those circumstances are largely biotic, pruned by considerations of terrain and weather, and increasingly, they are cultural

Biology · Geography · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Ecology

• Wildfire bureaucracy

  Open Access•Lachlan Beggs, C Dalley•Geoforum•2023

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• Pyropolitics and the Production of Territory

  Open Access•Michael M Cary, M Cary•Environment and Society•2023

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