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The Million Year Romance

by Howard V. Hendrix

In the forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where my wife and I live, we had a very dry winter. With snow pack at about a third of normal and streams drying up before the first of June, we’ve been thinking about fire.

We think a lot about fire anyway. We live on twelve acres of pines, oaks, cedars, and endless work. The endless work involves keeping brush cut back and trees limbed up to provide one hundred feet of defensible space around our house in the event of fire. We also derive about ninety per cent of the energy for our household heating from using the “short term carbon” of our property’s overcrowded second and third growth trees as fuel in our woodstove.

We know that the fire-adapted (though not fire-dependent) ponderosa pine would be the overwhelmingly dominant tree in our area, were it not for the same century of intensive fire suppression that now paradoxically contributes to intense wildfires throughout the West.
The ponderosa does not depend on fire for its survival, but periodic low-intensity burns clean out competing species and help it to thrive.

Here in the Sierra, we wonder if we too can learn to adapt to fire in our environment.

Watching the flames in the woodstove last winter, it occured to me that humans are already a fire-adapted species. Looking at human beings this way subtly changes how one looks at some very important issues, including global climate change.

Consider the following.

Our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee, has demonstrated impressive language use, tool use, and tool-making. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that the earliest technology used exclusively by humans was fire. It was also most likely the first thing our species shifted from the category “wild” to the category “domesticated.”

How early we pulled off that shift ranges from the more conservative figures of 430,000 years ago (Zhoukoudien in China) and 790,000 years back (Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel) to the more controversial figure of 1.5 million years ago (several sites in Africa, including Chesowanja in Kenya and Swartkrans in South Africa).

Split the difference. Say that humans have made controlled use of fire for one million years. That’s a long monopoly on the use of this technology. Even if fire use didn’t create modern humanity, a look at our genes suggests that we are at least a species very much adapted to fire and its consequences.

In the human genome, we find numerous adaptations allowing the gut to more effectively exploit cooked meat and vegetable products. By expanding the range of usable foodstuffs, such fire-assisted adaptations enhanced the survival of hunter-gatherers and provided an evolutionary advantage.

Pastoralists too have long made use of fire to clear land and emphasize pyrophytic species, particularly grasses, for use by their herds. A genetic change in favor of lactose tolerance enabled Homo sapiens to utilize, well beyond infancy, the milk products from their herds. Even today, genes for lactose tolerance are found most prevalently in people descended from fire-using pastoralists.

The value of fire for emphasizing the presence of grasses in the landscape also figured prominently in the domestication of those grasses better known as cereals. The fire-enabled transition to agriculture is today reflected in two genes -- one for angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), the other for apolipoprotein B -- whose prevalence correlates with the amount of time populations in different geographical regions have been eating grain-based diets.

Fast forward ten thousand years to the recent findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Place those findings in the context of Homo sapiens as a fire-adapted species and immediately the climate change baseline grows much longer. Instead of looking at a few centuries or millenia, we can now see that the challenges brought on by global warming are an unintended consequence of our million-year romance with fire. The application of the ancient technology of fire to the ancient sunlight of fossil fuels – and the global warming to which that contributes -- is at root only the latest intensification of our ancient love affair with flame.

Perhaps the resistance to moving “beyond carbon” is about more than just convenience, SUVs, oil company profits, “oil addiction,” or even the beauty of a fire in the woodstove. It’s always hard to end a long romance, even when it’s obvious that romance has become destructive.

Are we a fire-adapted species, or a fire-dependent one? The answer to that question will be determined in our lifetimes.

After a million years, it’s time for fire to stop monopolizing us, and for us to stop monopolizing fire. The blazes that may have made us can almost certainly break us. It’s time for a more reasonable relationship with fire, both locally and globally. From prescribed burning in our forests to real-time energy usage (wind and solar most prominently) in the world at large, these issues are all of a piece. Particularly in California, we need to act on all those pieces together.

All episodes were originally published in 2007 as a fire education series in the Mountain Press, the Sanger Herald, the Snowline Tiimes, and their sister publications covering the central California portion of the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains.

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