© Blackwell Publishing 2004 History Compass 2 (2004) WO 069, 1–4 Fire Planet, Fire Creature Stephen Pyne Arizona State University Abstract Earth is a uniquely fire planet, humans are a uniquely fire creature, and the story of the fire that joins them is one of the great epics of global history. Fire has existed on Earth since the Devonian, some 400 million years ago. Fire happened because life made it possible by pumping the atmosphere with oxygen and lathering the land with hydrocarbons. The burning that resulted, however, was lumpy in space and time, varying according to rhythms of wetting and drying and the caprice of lightning. Much of the Earth doesn’t naturally burn. Much of the historical Earth so failed to combust that vast quantities of biomass were simply buried. Nature’s economy, in brief, lacked a broker that could match flame with fuel. 1 That changed with the arrival of the later hominids. Homo erectus could tend fire, and could keep it alive in caves or hold it in torches or slow matches. Probably not until Homo sapiens, however, could humans start fire more or less at will. Still, it was easier to keep fire alight than to continually rekindle it (the perpetual fire is a very old and very practical habit) and so the sputtering flame became constant, accompanying people wherever they went – and they went everywhere. 2 Since the first tread of Homo sapiens, fire ecology has thus meant human ecology. People burned for their own ends, and they sought out particu- larly those landscapes where flame could take readily. They inscribed lines of fire along routes of travel and fields of fire where they paused to hunt, forage, or cook. The hearth and the firestick became the paradigms of their technology, which further tweaked the land to their will and whimsy. It was these anthropogenic regimes to which biotas would have to adapt. Under the right conditions, their flame-mediated manipulation could resemble an intensive cultivation, famously characterized by Rhys Jones as “fire-stick farming.” 2 Yet that power had limits. Not every spark took, not every fire could propagate. Mostly, people could only work with what nature presented to them by way of weather and fuels. They could not often bring fire where nature would not allow it. They thus sought out places with vigorous wet- dry cycles that could crack open a biota the way a frost-thaw cycle could