Episode 130 - Fire

Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

Curious Overthinkers already know that I literally record our episodes from my closet. Yes. Almost five years into the podcast. I am still doing this. David and I are trying to figure out an alternate setup. We're trying to get to a place where we can afford not only new mics, but hopefully more in-person recording opportunities. So, if you wanna help us on that journey, go to patreon.com. But I'm actually here just to apologize for my audio in this upcoming episode because I accidentally messed up my mic and the audio quality is terrible. So mea culpa on that. Thank you so much to our audio editor, Aaron, and actually to our software's AI, I have to admit, for helping improve things to make it listenable, But I still wanted to apologize 'cause it is not quite up to our normal standards. That said, I love this episode. It was so much fun and it spans all kinds of overthinky topics, so we hope you'll still listen. I just wanted to warn you about that. Thank you all. This has been Ellie. Welcome to Overthink.

David: 1:10

The podcast where two philosophers go after big ideas, like a moth to a flame.

Ellie: 1:16

I am Ellie Anderson.

David: 1:18

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 1:19

As many of you know, at the beginning of this year, my home city of Los Angeles was devastated by a series of major fires that all happened around the same time. We had the Eaton Fire that destroyed Altadena. We had the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades. We had a number of other smaller fires that while small, still wreaked havoc on the city. And you know, David, we talked at that point about doing an episode on fire. I had spoken in particular to my friend Annabel Graham, hi Annabel, who lost her childhood home in the fires, as did a number of my friends and she runs a magazine called the Panafold and wanted us to write an article about it for that, which sounded super interesting, but we didn't have time. And our production schedule is always like, a few months behind anyway. And so we decided to do an episode on fire, but then it turns out that we weren't able to do it now, and we decided to do it in tandem with what are traditionally the three other elements. So this is our first episode in a series on the four elements.

David: 2:23

Fire is such a fascinating element. In fact, some people say it's not an element at all because it's not really a substance like earth, air, and water, but it is traditionally classified as one of the four elemental forces of the natural world. And one of the things that separates it from the other elements, at least in our imagination, it really is, its destructive power. Of course, the other elements can also destroy things, like water, but we do associate fire with destruction largely because it is an unmanageable element.

Ellie: 2:55

Yeah, and when you think about it, I mean, this was something that was brought home to our community, especially those who actually lost their homes in the fire. Everything goes up in flames In that situation, obviously there's so many ways that the things that humans love and care about can be destroyed. But the way that fire reduces things to nothing, everything goes up in flames and then literally nothing is there, I think is unique to fire. And that was something that I heard over and over again from my friends who lost their homes in the fire. My friend Grant, for instance, I was trying to contact him for days. I was like, why isn't he responding to my text? It's probably just because he is overwhelmed with grief and he doesn't have the bandwidth right now. It turned out he just forgot his phone. He didn't bring it when he had to evacuate, and then there was nothing left of it. Just truly going back to the home where he had lived in Altadena. It was an empty lot.

David: 3:43

Well, and I think you're speaking to the finalism or the finality of fire damage where things burn and they become ash, and I think that gives the loss that we experience in fires a very unique psychological and emotional profile. It's very different to lose your home and your possessions in a fire than say, in a flood or in an earthquake, precisely because from one moment to the next, you go from having a world that makes sense to you. To that world not even being recognizable. And I don't know if you and I have talked about this, but the family of my ex, from the time that I was in grad school, lost their house in a fire. And one of the things that I learned about how his family lived that loss was that not only did their relationship to their possessions obviously change, but their relationship to memory, to family memory. Because of course they lost everything that meant anything to them, like family albums, jewelry, furniture, the house itself. But over time, they could only rely on the memory of what their home life had been. And as time progressed, they also became increasingly aware of the fact that they couldn't rely on their memory. They were worried that maybe what they now remembered their life was like, was not really what it was like because memory confabulates, memory adds things, memory edits. And so it created this really interesting sense of loss coupled with an inability to articulate what was lost. There was no way to compare the memory with the past event, with, you know, something like a track record or a trace.

Ellie: 5:26

Yeah, and I think we're in an interesting moment for this culturally too, because so much of our lives is increasingly becoming online. And so when your ex's family lost his home, that was before we had iCloud, for instance. And even now, like for many of us, our photos are uploaded to the cloud, but many of our childhood photos are not. I mean, and so that was something that I talked to friends about who lost their homes as like their childhood photos, their letters, their journals, all of that, is just gone because it wasn't digitized. Yeah, and I mean, we'll come back later to sort of the uniqueness of this moment with respect, particularly to climate change, but I think that's one thing that what you just mentioned brought up for me as well, this sort of in-between space that we're currently living in where a lot of our lives have become digitized, but then there are still like so many things that haven't, and also that couldn't truly be, you know, I digitized my journals a few years ago and I'm really happy that I did that, but if I were to lose those in a disaster, like there would obviously still be something major lost.

David: 6:29

Today we are talking about fire.

Ellie: 6:32

Why have both the metaphor and the materiality of fire captured the human imagination?

David: 6:37

How has fire shaped human culture and history?

Ellie: 6:40

And how are climate change and the rise of major wildfires shaping the future of humanity?

David: 6:52

We humans are fascinated by fire. It's something that appeals to our imagination and to our sense of possibility. In 1938, the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, who wrote a number of books about the elements, actually something that we might be talking about for the next couple of episodes. Ellie, he wrote this book called The Psychoanalysis of Fire, where he argues that for reasons having to do with human social development, how we grow up in cultures that have certain attitudes about the elements in the natural world, but also for evolutionary reasons, you know, because of the trajectory that we have followed as a species, we have a certain experience of fire that he argues is primordial and that gives rise to a series of beliefs about the nature of fire that become valorization. We become attached to these ways of understanding fire that then explain why fire has been not only a material force in human history. But also important fuel for the history of philosophy, literature, poetry, and science. And I had a lot of fun revisiting this book. I read it back in the day when I was in grad school for my dissertation,

Ellie: 8:06

You were talking about it way back in grad school. I always associate this book with you. I haven't read it yet, but I need to.

David: 8:10

Oh yeah. I'm a  Bachelard girly, and Bachelor talks about fire as a privileged phenomenon that historically has been capable of explaining anything and everything under the sun because we think of fire as existing literally everywhere. There is fire in the natural world because of natural wildfires. There is fire in the super lunar realm with the stars and the sun. There is even fire inside of the human subject. When we talk about, for example, the emotions or the fire in our heart that explains why we are alive. That's why for bachelor fire can be a universal metaphor. It can be a metaphor for anything that is natural or supernatural for anything that is good or bad. There is a quote in the opening chapter of the book where he says, it shines in paradise. It burns in hell. So even if you think about the Hebrew Bible fire, of course, is the element of hell where souls burn for their self distancing from God. But fire is also one of the primary ways God reveals himself to humans, right? Yahweh presents himself as a burning bush, as a pillar of fire in the desert, and so there is this inherent ambiguity about the metaphorical possibilities and meanings of fire that kind of reflects the variability and instability of fire as a material phenomenon. The fact that it kind of flickers and it doesn't have a constant shape.

Ellie: 9:50

Okay, so I have three thoughts here. First, do you know that I recently dressed up as a burning bush for a party? Did we talk about this on overthink already?

David: 10:00

No, I don't think so.

Ellie: 10:01

Okay. A short version of the story is that I went to a friend's birthday party. Recently it was a 33rd birthday party. And so it was like Jesus theme'cause that's when Jesus died. It was a musical theater bar in Hollywood and the task was to dress as biblical characters. And Trevor and I took this very seriously and we just, oh wait, no, sorry. He dressed up as a boarding bush. I forgot.

David: 10:22

Oh my gosh.

Ellie: 10:23

You know, I have the worst memory in the world. Okay. So, yeah. So basically. We were like, okay, let's go as Moses in the burning bush. But Trevor thought it would be funny if I went as Moses and he went as the burning bush and I was like, no, I'd rather go as the burning bush. But then he won out because he was the one actually making our costumes. He like spent all day going to Michael's and making our costumes. So I dressed as Moses and he dressed as the burning bush.

David: 10:45

Did you have a wig? Did he have a wig? Oh wait, who was Moses

Ellie: 10:49

I I was Moses, he was the bush. So he had like this, he had all this fake ivy around him and like these flames. It was actually awesome. Maybe for the episode we'll post a photo of it on social media, but then we roll up to this bar in Hollywood. We are like among the only people who took the dress code very seriously. It was like there was this really cute girl there who was like, I'm dressed up as a red sea, which meant like wearing a red dress. And so I roll in wearing a beard and oh no, I didn't have a wig. I had a beard. I had a beard.'cause my hair like already looks Moses like enough, you know, it's like long and whatever, wavy. So I roll up literally wearing a beard and a bathrobe to this bar in Hollywood with like tablets and Trevor's wearing a burning bush costume.

David: 11:34

If you had invited me, I would've gone as Mount Sinai. Sinai. How do you say that in English? Sinai, okay. In Spanish is that, that way we could have like closed the circle of the scene, the biblical scene, but I was not invited.

Ellie: 11:48

It wasn't my party to invite you. It was somebody else's birthday party. Okay.

David: 11:52

And I also don't live in LA.

Ellie: 11:54

Okay. So yeah, that, sorry, that was meant to be like a one second detour. It ended up becoming a full story. I'll tell you my two substantive points in response to what you said though. So one is, I mean, I think this idea of fire as central to who we are also brings up our favorite pre-Socratic Heraclitus who refers to the world as ever living fire and is sometimes interpreted as thinking that like the essential element is fire. There's some debate about that among scholars, but it also makes me think that, I don't know, I haven't read this Bachelard, but it seems to me in what you described, that there's an ambiguity between fire as metaphor for everything and fire as like everything. Because you said fire is within us. Technically speaking, that's not true. I mean, our digestive systems have combustive processes that are in some way, like the combustive process of fire. I read about this in preparation for this episode, but its not technically fire. Right? So I guess I'm curious like where do we draw the line between fire as metaphor for everything and fire as actual element beneath every other physical phenomenon?

David: 12:59

So I think that's a really good question, and it's a question that is at the center of the Bachelard book because that's exactly the concern that Bachelard has. Just to let you know what the stakes of the book are sort of ahead of time, Bachelard is concerned that when we use these valorization that we take from the past or from early childhood experience where we think, "Ooh, it feels warm inside when I eat, therefore, there must be a fire in my stomach," that it leads us to fallacious thinking that then gets in the way of a truly rational explanation of fire as a phenomenon. So he calls these valorizations, these ideas, these beliefs, epistemological obstacles, and he's trying to clear the way for them. But he does believe that if we want to understand human culture and human imagination, we do have to go to those associations that we make between the fire above and the fire within. And so for him, what unites all these associations is the fickleness, the instability of fire. The fact that fire is something that moves like the flame flickers, as I said, and that I think for Bachelard would explain why, for somebody like Heraclitus, fire becomes an elemental principle. That is the starting point for metaphysics because to say fire is everything or is in everything is to say that movement is in everything.

Ellie: 14:21

Mm. Yeah.'Cause it is a weird claim to make about fire as an element. As you mentioned earlier. It's sort of weird even to say that fire is an element because technically speaking it's not a substance, but rather a reaction. But maybe, and I mean this would certainly go along with Heraclitus' idea that all is strife, all is movement. Maybe it actually makes sense if we are to choose one quote, unquote element as a basis for everything that it would be, movement and not a substance.

David: 14:49

Yeah, and it's because if you imagine our ancestors living in the wild, what experience of movement do they have from the natural world? Certainly they can see water running, they can feel the sky blowing, but those are kind of regular smooth movements.

Ellie: 15:06

I love to feel the sky blow.

David: 15:08

Yes, you know, like you, you don't really get a sense of unstable, chaotic movement except in fire. And so it's our first experience of chaos, of a movement that is beyond human control. And that's also why once humans master fire, fire becomes the first object of repose and reverie. So he paints this picture of human beings at the dawn of modern humans sort of sitting in front of the fire that they have now mastered and sitting almost like Rodin's, the thinker, you know, with their hand under their chin.

Ellie: 15:47

Our logo.

David: 15:48

Oh my God. Yeah, you're right. Like the Overthink logo, sitting around the fire, looking into the flame, and he thinks that in those cases, fire becomes an invitation for reverie, for imagination, for thinking. And so fire becomes in Bachelard's writings the philosophical element. It's the element that incites philosophical thinking.

Ellie: 16:13

Well, yeah, I mean, they didn't have books or Netflix back then, so they had to watch something.

David: 16:18

They had to watch the light.

Ellie: 16:20

Yeah, that's really interesting. We'll come back later to the way that Humans' mastery of fire shaped us culturally, but I like this invitation to sit and rest for a moment in repose contemplating fire, and namely in thinking about our literal physical experience in relation to fire, especially when it is tamed. Obviously there's a totally different relationship to fire that we have when it's threatening our communities, our properties, ourselves. But when it's like a campfire, I mean it's fun to sit around. We love to tell stories around the campfire, but you're also talking about a sort of solitary fire experience. I don't have enough historical context to know whether Bachelard's write about that. I would guess that he's probably speculating too

David: 17:04

Well, he is speculating. That's because he's not giving us a vertical evolutionary history. He's giving us an account of how we think about fire in the present based on these stories that we tell ourselves.

Ellie: 17:17

But if he's saying it's the first object of repose and reverie, he is giving a veridical account, right? Like that's an empirical claim.

David: 17:24

But again, whether he means that exclusively evolutionarily or developmentally, or just logically insofar as, for example, in order to engage in acts of philosophical thinking, you need to be comfortable and where are you comfortable? In a place where there is heat and there is light. And so it could also be a conceptual point that he's making about fire being a precondition for philosophical thinking in solitude. But at the same time, because it gathers, it's a kind of thinking in solitude that happens in conjunction with others, right? Like you're never truly alone by a fire. Like at the camp, you're there with other people at camp. What about

Ellie: 18:02

Robinson Crusoe?

David: 18:04

okay, fine. And yeah, like me, I'll also be like my fireplace. So yes. But yeah, I think fire can also be a principle of communal life.

Ellie: 18:12

I mean, definitely I think that goes without saying. I just think it doesn't follow from that, that we can never be alone with.

David: 18:18

No, fair. Fair

Ellie: 18:19

In fact I went through a phase of watching that TV show alone, which is about like people out in the wilderness trying to survive and it's always one of the biggest sources of drama in the season for them to figure out how to create and sustain their fire.

David: 18:36

Interestingly, I think that is one of the reasons why fire holds this sway over human thinking. Bachelard says at one point, throughout most of human history, the first thing that humans had to do as soon as they woke up, was tend to the fire and the last thing they had to do before going to bed was put out the ashes. And so our everyday experience was bookended by our management of fire. But Bachelard says that fire is not really a natural event, or at least it's not that only. He says for humans, fire is, first and foremost, a social reality. And that's because our first experience of fire is not our literal contact with it, like reaching out and touching fire, having empirical contact with it, but rather the generalized social prohibition against children getting close to hot things. And so he argues that from the very beginning we associate fire with the law with that which is sacrosanct or untouchable. He refers to this as our Prometheus complex that we experience fire as the thou shall not, you know, making a reference to the Titan Prometheus, who famously stole fire from the Olympians in order to give it back to humanity.

Ellie: 20:06

Was it to give it back to humanity or to give it to humanity?

David: 20:09

To give it back to humanity because humans already had fire, but then Zeus took it away as a punishment, and Prometheus decided to give it back to the humans.

Ellie: 20:19

Wait really

David: 20:20

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellie: 20:21

Dude I didn't know that. Not us recording the fire episode and me not even knowing the real Prometheus myth. Wow. I thought it was just like he stole fire from the gods. And that was like a for the first time.

David: 20:32

Well, I think that is the first time he stole it from the Olympians.

Ellie: 20:35

No, the first time that we had it.

David: 20:36

oh, no, no, no, no. We had already had it because, you know, in Greek mythology, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus are the ones who made humans. And, uh, the whole story is that they created all the animals, but then by the time they got to humans, they ran out of things to give us like claws and teeth and fur. So Prometheus felt bad and was like, well, we need to give humans something so they can live in the world. And he gave us fire.

Ellie: 21:01

whoa, wait. So Prometheus wasn't even a human. He was a

David: 21:04

titan? No, Yeah, he's a titan. Yeah. Prometheus is a titan that is fundamentally treacherous, hence his association with fire.

Ellie: 21:13

I think I conflated the Prometheus myth with the Icarus myth where Icarus is a human and flies too close to the sun and then dies, so, wow. I didn't know this about Prometheus. This is fascinating. In part because I feel like the way that the Prometheus myth gets utilized is to talk about how. Fire has been a double-edged sword for humans. How our capturing of fire has been, what's allowed us to be the kinds of creatures that we are. Again, we'll talk about that a little bit later, but also that it has endangered us because fire is such a dangerous element, and so it's like we're punished for capturing that from the gods, and I feel like this is actually pretty different accounts. It's not even a human who captured it for us.

David: 21:55

So the interesting point here, I think about treachery in danger though is that Prometheus in the titanomachy when they're fighting for power, the Titans versus the Olympians, he betrays his own people. He is an unreliable titan and he supports the Olympians. Then he goes and works with the Olympians and creates humans under Greek mythology when the Olympians are in power, but then betrays the Olympians by giving fire back to humans after it had been taken away by Zeus. So he is the universal trickster, and I think that trickery, when now attributed to fire, would explain that duality that you're talking about, that we need it, but it burns.

Ellie: 22:37

Thanks for this history lesson about the Greek Gods, David. Speaking of the duality of fire, I think it's time to talk about fire and human culture. Humans have always had a special relationship with fire. Our ability to capture fire, create fire, manipulate fire for our own purposes has allowed us to cook, which in turn allowed our brains to be as big as they are because we didn't have to have such large masticators in order to be able to chew raw food. It's allowed us to see in the dark and explore in the dark, right? It's allowed us to burn landscapes in order to cultivate agriculture and so much more, and so there's a way that humans have a really essential relationship to fire, but also something that came up in my research for this episode in particular, I read this book called The Pyrocene by Stephen J. Pyne, is that our relationship to fire has changed over time. So that's something I wanna get into a little bit now, David, like how has Fire allowed us to become the kind of species we are and how has our relationship to it changed over time? Pyne suggests that for much of human evolution, fire has been our friend for some of the reasons that I just mentioned. He distinguishes between first fire, second fire, and third fire In his book, where first fire is basically the fire that happens naturally. You know, lightning strikes a forest and the forest catches on fire. Second fire is the fire of human culture. The fire that humans use as a tool through fire sticks that are used for lighting and or burning particular areas. The fire that's used for cooking. So basically open flames that humans use as tools. Then third fire, which we're gonna talk about later in the episode, is the fire that humans create through burning fossil fuels. So instead of an open flame, we have a coal burning steam engine. This is fire, not just for domestication, which was the case in the second fire, but fire for large scale energy and power. So again, we'll come back to that, now we're mainly talking about second fire in this portion of the discussion. And there he talks about, yeah, things like fire sticks, campfires, et cetera.

David: 25:06

Okay, so this distinction between the three kinds of fires I think is very helpful. So what does he say about second fire in particular? What's the use of that for the advancement of human civilization?

Ellie: 25:18

Yeah, I mean, he goes to the point of saying that second fire is an archimedean lever that, given a favorable fulcrum, they use to move the planet.

David: 25:28

Oh my God.

Ellie: 25:29

yeah, I mean it allowed us to create the kind of civilizations that we have. And again, that's because of the cooking, because of the agriculture and so on and so forth. And so this helps inaugurate what he calls the pyro scene. He thinks that basically we move from an age of ice, like the ice age to an age of fire. And that started with humans, domestication of fire, but there fire was a tool for us. And so even shelter has a special relationship with fire. We tend to think about shelter as something that humans need to create in order to be away from the elements. Right? To be preserved from the elements, not to be exposed to them,

David: 26:02

Oh, but it's to preserve fire.

Ellie: 26:05

But equally, at least, it's to preserve fire.

David: 26:09

Oh my God, that's so cool.'cause it is an inverse of the traditional narrative of this combative relationship to the elements. And here it's actually about cultivating and protecting and nurturing fire, which you can only do within closed walls. The story of the history of cooking also I find quite fascinating because it's implicated in all sorts of debates about various human habits from literally the practices of cooking to the practices of meat eating, right? One of the common arguments in evolutionary theory is that once we learned to domesticate fire, we were able to burn the flesh of animals in order to consume it more easily and digest it without as many problems.

Ellie: 26:50

Which gave us bigger brains'cause we had less, we didn't have to have as robust mandibles as he says.

David: 26:56

Robust Mandibles. And well, there's a section in Bachelard's, the Psychoanalysis of Fire, where he talks about this and he makes a point that I really like. He says that most people who look into the history of fire focus on fire as useful. So they look for kind of utilitarian functional explanations of our relationship to fire i.e. cooking. But he says that we also have to recognize that fire is fundamentally agreeable in some ways, and especially in connection to cooking. He says, it not only helped us cook things in order to digest them, but it also helped deodorize food because fire is a deodorant.

Ellie: 27:37

Yeah, deodorant.

David: 27:39

Yeah. So like it makes odors disappear. And he has a quote where he says, cooked meat represents above all the overcoming of putrefaction. And so for him, cooking is not really so much about digestion, it's about making food more tasty because it's no longer putrid. You know, if you imagine eating raw like bison or whatever that's been sitting in the camp for two months, it sounds pretty gross.

Ellie: 28:07

It wouldn't be raw anymore if it's been sitting there for two months, my friend.

David: 28:11

Well, I mean, yeah, it would be kind of like cooking in its own juices, but he says that along with fermented drink. Fire for cooking makes possible the banquet, which is the starting point of primitive society, the eating together and the sharing together of what we drink and eat.

Ellie: 28:27

Let's pursue this agreeability of Firepoint for a moment, because we can also say that fire by generating heat made our lives much more pleasant. It also made it possible for humans to live in environments that otherwise would be inhospitable because they're too cold. It made possible conversations around the campfire. It also enabled us to create a lot of the tools that we have, like we learned how to cook clay and that then led to having clay cups, right? And like eventually we could talk about steel and all kinds of materials that we bake in order to make tools. I'm also curious about the social aspect of fire, because you know, whether it's the banquet or just people sitting around a campfire, fire has been such an amazing cement of human social bonds that it's no wonder given that, plus the fact that it enables all of these other like physical things that we're talking about, that a lot of religions have fire gods or even like their first God as a fire, God as in the ancient Vedic religion that then led to Hinduism.

David: 29:27

And in connection to those old religions, sometimes there's an ambiguity about whether fire is how the God is represented or whether fire is itself the God are a lot of these early rituals for fire or just using fire. And I think that's a really interesting ambiguity because it means that in some early religions, fire was both the means of expressing idolatry and also the God that received the idolatry itself. And even though we tend to think of modern civilization as having superseded the superstitious thinking of ancient religious systems, in fact there is still, because of all these metaphors of fire, because of all these like phantasmagoric appeal that it has over our minds, there's still a secret idolatry of fire that defines the present.

Ellie: 30:19

Okay, so this is, I think. Our pivot to how fire went from being friend to foe, because this is something that Pyne talks a lot about in the sense that just falling on, especially the first part of what you said, we tend to associate fire or at least, Europeans, especially starting in the Enlightenment, did to associate fire with the primitive and to move away from fire. And so second fire enabled us to become the kinds of creatures that we are. But then eventually he says around the enlightenment, fire started to be seen as not friend, but foe, and people started to have a much more mediated relationship with fire. So developed countries, quote unquote, are actually considered to be those countries that don't use open flames, but that have say. Electricity systems or furnaces or whatever, and a big hallmark of industrialization starting as far back as the enlightenment has been the removal of open flame from public spaces. And you can see why that would be appealing in a lot of ways. If you think about the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, that led to a ton of fires because people had candles everywhere that completely destroyed the city. There was earthquake, fire, and tsunami, and the fire was perhaps the most destructive of those three. It makes sense that Europeans would want to start removing fire from the public space, and Pyne says that with European colonization, you get all these Europeans, who by the way come from one of the few climates on Earth that is not naturally very prone to fire, especially if we're thinking about Northern Europe, maybe Portugal less so, but a lot of the Northern European countries are far less prone to fire than say, you know, Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America or the southwestern United States. And so in vilifying fire, in associating with primitive cultures, the Europeans impose this new relationship to fire, where fire was just something that was meant to be managed rather than as something to be directly related to, and I was talking to one of my colleagues about this last night named Leland. So brilliant. And he told me, he was like, isn't there an irony in the fact that Europeans were suppressing fire by using their fire power?

David: 32:33

Oh my God. Yeah.

Ellie: 32:34

‘Cause they brought guns.

David: 32:35

Yeah, of course. And you know, this vilification of fire. I think also we have to trace it to the scientific enterprise, to modern science and especially physics and chemistry. Although I haven't read the book by Pyne that you mentioned The Pyrocene. I did read an article that he wrote, so it's a shorter version of the argument. And there he talks about how the rise of modern science led to a transformation in the very notion of fire, where fire went from being an element to just being another physical phenomenon for which scientists give rational explanations and think they can make absolutely reliable predictions about, and the way Pyne articulates this in that article is he says that fire went from being a principle, like an elemental force that explains the world, to illustrating fundamental principles in physics and chemistry like combustion. So there is a kind of reduction that happens where fire goes from being this all encompassing Heraclitian metaphysical fire to it just being a little candle inside of a laboratory that's being studied by a chemist.

Ellie: 33:46

And it maybe has like glass surrounding it, so it's not even open.

David: 33:50

No, exactly. That's exactly right. And so this cognitive mastery over fire meant that fire lost its spark, first and foremost. But secondarily, it also means that it was catapulted from being a partner with whom we had to learn to cohabitate this planet and to have a back and forth with to being an enemy that we try to master and keep at bay at all times.

Ellie: 34:15

Yeah, and I happen to have just a couple days before this recording. To have a conversation with a firefighter who's part of the Burbank Fire Department here in LA because I was at a fundraiser in which my dad was performing in a fashion show, which is a different story, wearing firefighter themed clothing. It was a fundraiser for the LA County fire

David: 34:34

A lot of fire and costumes in your life recently, Ellie.

Ellie: 34:38

Not me being like, oh my God, how convenient that my dad's firefighter fundraiser fashion show is happening days before we record this episode. So I talked to the Burbank firefighter and he was telling me that fire is an antagonist for him. He was like, look. I don't have the luxury as a firefighter of like reflecting in that way that Bachelard talks about on fire as element fire for me is simply an obstacle. It's something that is threatening people's lives and threatening people's things, things that they care about. And so when I'm faced with fire, I'm treating it as a math problem. He said, fire needs three components in order to exist. Heat, fuel, and oxygen. And so all I'm doing when I'm faced with a fire is trying to figure out how to eliminate one of those elements in order to make the fire stop. And I think that really speaks to the way that fire is foe here. And that's not to be like, oh, this firefighter is part of the legacy of colonialism by treating fire as foe rather than as friend. What it's speaking to is actually the importance, at least in this case, like it's very important. It's essential to his job that he treat fire as an antagonist. And so there's really something to the idea that fire is foe because it is so threatening. And also I think the broader point that I'm getting from Pyne is that, over time, we have developed an exclusively antagonistic relationship with fire as opposed to it being once upon a time, our friend.

David: 36:00

Yeah, and I think that conversation with the firefighter also speaks, at least for me, to the inconceivability of a different kind of relationship to fire, right? Like what would even a non antagonistic relationship to fire be? Because where do we encounter fire? The only mundane examples that I can think of is the few of us who still have an open flame stove, highly controlled.

Ellie: 36:23

That's me. Might gimme cancer someday, but it's cute as hell. My 1940s Merit and O'Keeffe stove.

David: 36:30

There's also like smokers who carry their lighter with them. Beyond that, I don't see any kind of meaningful relationship to fire that we have that is not a version of this antagonism. Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you’d  prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair  wage.. Our world has witnessed an Fire prone areas are seeing longer fire seasons and many non-fire prone areas are becoming suddenly fire prone, where they weren't before. Now, I looked up a couple of statistics about fires from the Environmental Protection Agency while it's still around under the current administration and the EPA notes of the 10 years with the largest acreage burned. All have happened since 2004, and on top of that, the peak of us wildfire season is happening earlier and earlier. in the eighties and nineties, it peaked in the month of August, but more recently it has been peaking as early as July.

Ellie: 37:57

Yeah, and the devastating wildfires I was talking about actually happened in January, which is unusual for LA as well. This is what Stephen Pyne considers the culmination of the pyro scene. This fact that what humans have inaugurated on earth is an age of fire. And he actually makes an analogy with the Ice Age. And he says, we've moved from an ice age to an age of fire thanks to third fire. So as I mentioned earlier, third fire involves not just the domestication of fire, but actually the creation of new fires, thanks to dredging up fossil fuels. And so maybe I can say a little bit about the difference between second and third fire here, since we were just talking a bit about second fire, and then we can think about what that means for wildfires. After the enlightenment, especially with industrialization, Pyne points out that we replaced burning largely with wood and peats. So living biomass with fossil biomass such as coal in our furnaces and forges, and the steam engine initially used wood, then we ran out of that pretty quickly, so then we switched to using coal and this move from living biomass to dead biomass to fossil fuels such as coal meant an unbounded burning. Whereas wood and peat have internal checks and balances. There's weather, for instance, like a rainy season, you can't really burn the wood, there are drier and wetter seasons, fossil fuels don't have that same kind of checks and balances system because all we have to do is just take them out of the earth. We just have to dig into the earth to find more. And so he calls this lithic because lithic means pertaining to stone, or in this case, like pertaining to the earth. We're taking this stuff out of the earth and. Our use of fire, as I said earlier, also then becomes indirect. We're using these processes of combustion to create fuel, but it's like by the time the power generated by that fuel comes into our homes, into our cities, we're not relating to it as fire. We're not even recognizing it as such.

David: 39:56

I think we just would call it energy. Right? Um, and that's a point that he makes also in the article, that energy came to replace fire as the all-encompassing principle of activity in the universe with the scientific revolution. And I would say that not only are we, I. Dealing with fire indirectly in the era of the third fire, this lithic fire. But we're also trying much more feverishly to suppress fires, especially natural fires wherever they happen because we don't have any framework for understanding the ecological value of fire.

Ellie: 40:32

This has been a huge topic of debate, not only in the US and other places, but especially in Australia recently, this way, that part of the reason we're seeing such intense wildfires is because we haven't done controlled burns. We've completely suppressed that.

David: 40:45

And this speaks to the history of forest management in the West. Pine does say that at the same time that the scientific revolution and the enlightenment take off, that's when Forest services in Europe and North America start pedaling this narrative. That's embodied, I think of, you know, smokey the bear. Like, if you see something, say something or whatever he says, I don't remember, that fire is always the enemy, that wherever there is smoke, there is fire. And where there is fire, there is always death. And part of the problem here, of course, is our relationship to fire, but it is also our understanding of forests because most of us think that a healthy forest is a forest with a lot of trees, right? Like we tend to think that if a forest is particularly luscious and there is a lot of shrubs and grasses and a lot of trees of different sizes, and there is no open spaces between the trees, that that forest is ecologically healthy, that it is robust, and that it is a sign of the wellbeing of the planet. But in fact, whenever you have those really luscious forests, that's a sign of a forest that is susceptible to destruction by fire. And the reason that we want those luscious forests is purely aesthetic. It's because it looks beautiful to look at it's photographic, and it makes us believe that we are in contact with Unperturbed nature. But one of the things that foresters have learned in the last a hundred years or so is that in fact, when you have a forest with a lot of shrubs and a lot of little trees that are packed too closely together, what you have is a recipe for disaster. Because when a fire happens in that forest. Those shrubs and those little trees will feed it and will make it grow out of proportion and the fire will consume the entire forest. Whereas if from the beginning you had a forest with fewer trees and you had done those controlled burns, Ellie, that are meant to get rid of those shrubs that are on the ground, paradoxically, the forest would be healthier because the forest would be able to withstand a natural fire whenever it happened, which is of course an inevitability if you just have a long enough timeframe in mind.

Ellie: 43:06

Yeah, and this is something that has been getting a lot of attention, especially in Australia recently because Aboriginal Australians did a lot of cultivation of the land using fire. There's a 1969 essay that's been especially influential here by Rice Jones, which describes the importance of fire stick farming among Aboriginal Australians and Jones talks about how thousands of bushfires were lit each year. From people taking fire sticks on what's known as a walkabout, where they're going and doing small controlled burns of the bushfire. And Pyne, in describing this research from Jones talks about how this kind of controlled burning really did what religious ceremonies devoted to fire have been suggesting that fire does for millennia, which is promote the good and purge the bad, right? Controlled burns promote new growth, and they purge landscapes of dangerous tinder. Fire fellow farming has also been really important for humans. From Thailand to Finland, to India, to the Philippines, to Russia, to Madagascar, and many, many more places. And with the rise of forestry, which obviously wasn't all bad, but there was so much of that indigenous knowledge that was lost and in fact treated as superstition.

David: 44:17

Yeah, and I think the wisdom of these indigenous traditions was to recognize the life giving power of fire, where fire really appears almost like a vaccine for the forest, where you give the forest a small dose of fire so that it can be able to withstand the larger, more dangerous. Version of that thing that you give it in a small proportion and focusing on the ecological value of fire, the fact that it returns nutrients back to the soil that would otherwise be trapped in shrub, that's just laying around. The fact that it does promote the habitats of various species, somewhat counterintuitively, and the fact that it allows a forest on a large scale to be healthy is one way for us to begin moving away from the vilification of fire that we have seen since the enlightenment, but even more recently with the official position of the Forest Service being all fires are always unconditionally bad, and as long as we maintain that attitude towards fire, we're gonna continue to see those mega wildfires that are not only contributing to climate change through the burning of wood, but also through the destruction of forests that help maintain our planetary ecosystem in balance.

Ellie: 45:34

When we're thinking about the rise of these mega wildfires, one thing that Pyne talks about is that this age of third fire has shifted the locus of the most fire dangerous places from the cities to rural areas. So rural areas, at least in places that are fire prone, such as Australia and the southwest of the United States, have always been fire prone. A lightning bolt, strikes grasslands in Australia, and because of the dry conditions it sets off a wildfire. With the rise of cities, we started to have extremely fire prone conditions. In the age that was dominated by second fire because of the use of candles, open flames, and homes, and the density of the cities. So cities were at major risk of fires. However, pine points out that now city buildings are equipped with all sorts of fire protection, and they're often made of non-combustible materials. More and more American homes are being built outside of an urban core that is potentially at risk from wildfire. He says 97% of non-urban homes are potentially at risk of wildfire.

David: 46:44

Whoa.

Ellie: 46:44

I know, I know. And part of what third fire does is it sets new conditions for fires in places where the third fire isn't even happening. So the danger with second fire is that it can set further fires. A candle can light a house on fire, but third fire changes the conditions for fires worldwide. So, coal plants in China and India can lead to conditions that set off wildfires all the way in Australia, for instance.

David: 47:12

Well, and this is me just spinning my wheels here on. The spot, but it seems like this third fire is a fire that has become a lot more like air as far as the elements are concerned. Because when we think about air pollution, right, like we know that factories that throw particulates into the air in China can affect the air quality in the Caribbean, in North America, in Europe, because those particles float through the air. Here, what we're seeing is a fire that is, almost like teleported across very vast distances through the manipulation of the very functioning of the ecosystem, right? Where it's not that it's literally traveling.

Ellie: 47:55

Yeah, I would say the teleportation metaphor, that’s too far. The STEM girlies are like, no, come on.

David: 48:02

yeah. No, but what I mean is that actions in one place are causing, or maybe like the butterfly effect, , are causing highly

Ellie: 48:09

Or spooky action at a distance.

David: 48:11

Yeah, like there is something

Ellie: 48:13

No, I'm joking

David: 48:14

Well, no, what I think is correct about us playing with these concepts is that it is putting pressure on our understanding of causality, uh, where it's not as if we go from A to B in a direct and linear and highly predictable manner, but we actually have to think about clusters of causes susceptibility, probability and then you end up with the situation where suddenly areas that were not prone to fire are not because of anything they did, but because of actions on a global scale all over the world.

Ellie: 48:44

Well, and that definitely resonates with what Pyne says about us now living in a fire age. And so I mentioned earlier that he analogizes the age that we're currently living in, which he calls the pyro scene to the ice age, and he says, we've brought about an entirely new age through the human use of fire. And he notes that there are some pretty important differences between ice and fire that might make that analogy limited. He also notes that landscapes that are marked by ice are marked by them for much longer than landscapes that are marked by fire. Right? So the Arctic Circle has ice year round. Australia only has fires periodically. The fire can also be fed by other conditions in a sort of strange and scary loop. So, so one thing that happens when there are giant wildfires is that the conditions are set for invasive grasses, such as what is literally known as cheat grass. And cheat grass comes in after a big wildfire, but then cheat grass is also really fire prone. And so then there's this relationship that gets developed where a more fire prone area is likely to have more cheat grass. And then cheat grass also makes an area more fire prone. And that's different from the Ice Age where it's just like ice comes, ice stays. Of course there are like other knock on effects. That's part of what it means to be in an ecosystem, but I think Pyne is suggesting that. Fire can really trade on other aspects of the environment for its periodic conflagrations more than, you know, just this like element of ice, which comes over the landscape and stays for a period and then leaves.

David: 50:18

This is making me think of a possible return of animism in relationship to fire. The reason for this is because one of the arguments that Bachelard makes in his book is that for a long time, because fire was movement, especially quick movement, and also a self-generating movement. We experienced fire as a living being. We would project a kind of animism onto fire, what you just said, Ellie. Makes me think that maybe there is value in thinking about fire in this way because fire, once it spreads to an area that previously was not fire prone, creates the conditions for its own sustenance, right? It creates wild grasses that are fire prone so that there is more fire later. So there is a logic of self replication at work in the operations of these large scale third generation fires that almost makes it seem as if fire is an agent and it's an agent that we have to contend with in ways that maybe we haven't had to in the past.

Ellie: 51:23

Do you think that point is consistent or not consistent with the idea that controlled burns prevent fires from happening though? Because like one thing that Pyne does a lot is he talks about good. Versus bad fires. And I'm not saying, I mean, I'm no scientist, I'm not saying it's inconsistent, but I, I think what you just said was maybe generalizing the point a bit too much and may, maybe what I said actually before that was as well. But I think Pyne would probably wanna distinguish the kinds of fires that are enabling the conditions for cheat grass to proliferate, which is then enabling the conditions for further wildfires from the fire stick controlled burns. Because what's happening there is that there's like space created for new growth, and it's actually creating less likelihood that a fire would devastate this place again.

David: 52:07

No, that's correct. I think we should hold onto the distinction between good and bad fire. Where good fire is fire that returns nutrients to the soil and takes away that dry rot that then can become fuel for a mega fire. And that's what we do with controlled burns. What I'm talking about now is the bad fire that devil fire, the fire that burns an entire forest, and to say the reason I

Ellie: 52:31

The way you said devil fire was such a straight face.

David: 52:34

I know. Well, it's because it's connected to my point that I think it would make perfect sense for us to think of that mega fire that is dangerous and that is bad as self-replicating for the ecological reasons that you mentioned. And that brings it very close to it being an agent. An agent that creates the conditions for its own survival, which in biology is how we sometimes define what an organism is. I'm not actually saying that fire is a living being, but the third fire gets a lot closer to that definition of a living being than either the first or the second fire.

Ellie: 53:15

It also returns us to the idea that fire has this double-edged sword kind of quality to it. Double-edged flame kind of quality to it. It's Devil Angel, good, bad Titan and Olympian.

David: 53:30

Ooh, I love that. And also human.

Ellie: 53:35

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David: 53:50

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Ellie: 53:56

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