Future Fire: Into The Pyro-Verse

How many superheroes does it take to solve future fire?

Bitten by a radioactive spider in the subway, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales suddenly develops mysterious powers that transform him into the one and only Spider-Man. When he meets Peter Parker, he soon realizes that there are many others who share his special, high-flying talents. Miles must now use his newfound skills to battle the evil Kingpin, a hulking madman who can open portals to other universes and pull different versions of Spider-Man into our world.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is a fast-paced, visually striking, highly entertaining - and chock full of parallel universe fun. Superhero movies have been working hard to popularise the multiverse concept in recent years, and in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, we meet a whole cast of Spider-Persons from alternate dimensions, including Ghost-Spider (a woman), Spider-Man Noir (circa the Great Depression) and Spider Ham (an anthropomorphic pig). In movie world, the multiverse is first and foremost a plot device - a chance to practice variations on a theme, and ask What If, ‘Sliding Doors’ questions.

So what’s that got to do with future fire?

I’ve accepted an offer to give a lecture later this year on future fire for Introduction to Climate Change, an undergraduate course here at the University of Melbourne*. I was pondering inserting the word Pyrocene into the title, when the word Pyro-Verse materialised in my head, as if from another dimension. I’m not quite ready to change the title, but it did make me wonder: what would a fire-themed variation on the Spider-Verse theme look like?

Universe 1: No people

What would fire look like in a universe without people? We need only look back into Earth’s distant past. Fire reached the ripe old age of several hundred millions years old before it ever laid eyes on a humanoid. If you’ll pardon my rounding, of the one thousand 400,000 year epochs fire has been around, only the last one featured people. Imagine doing something 999 times, and then the thousandth time all hell breaks loose.

How has fire changed and evolved over endless eons? Was there dinosaur fire, divergent and convergent evolution of fire, extinctions of certain fire types? I may be stretching the analogy a little far, but that’s what we do in parallel universes.

There is so much to learn about the ancient (deep) history of fire. Throw a few bucks at those paleoscientists, please.

We might be tempted to call this No People Universe an experimental control, a standard or baseline against which to compare all the other kinds of fire we find around us. But is that the right baseline to use? Universe 2 might have something to say about that.

Universe 2: Indigenous use of fire

There is a really exciting renaissance in cultural burning happening these days. The “re” part of renaissance is necessary because of the widespread and brutal removal of Indigenous peoples from their land and suppression of their cultural practices, including cultural burning. But thanks to the remarkable strength and tenacity of generations of Indigenous people, knowledge and practices persisted. Today there is great interest in the Indigenous use of fire, whether at research conferences, in fire management meetings or in policy circles. When I tell people I research fire, the first response of many of them is to ask me about cultural burning.

I don’t feel particularly comfortable talking about it, because it is not my research focus, I have a huge amount to learn, and the last thing we need is more people spouting off about things of which they know little.

What I can say with some confidence is that cultural burning can’t just be shoehorned into the official paradigm of risk management. I suppose one could squint and argue that Caring for Country is a form of risk management, but that’s stretching it mightily, even for a piece on parallel universes.

How can we support Indigenous-led use of fire from within a system premised on control? How can we learn and benefit from sophisticated practices developed over thousands of years, without simply steamrolling them as we ‘incorporate’ and ‘integrate’ them into management, keeping the bits we like and tossing out the rest?

Luckily we don’t have to worry about any of those things in Universe 2, because cultural fire is the dominant approach.

Even the term cultural burning has a kind of rigidity to it, almost implying that there is one kind of Indigenous fire (e.g. low intensity ‘cool’ burns), rather than the many that exist in reality. And that’s just Australia, don’t forget the use of fire by Indigenous peoples all over the Earth.

Universe 3: Prescribed fire

I am a peace loving man and I don’t want to start any fights. Let’s just say there are some strongly held views, not entirely without justification, about where, when and how fire managers should be applying fires themselves, in an effort to prepare ourselves for inevitable wildfires, and achieve a bunch of other objectives while we’re at it.

Here in this universe, fire is a tool, carefully and systematically applied by well-resourced land owners and managers to reshape fuels, forests, grasslands and the environment. What would Prescribed Fire universe look like? Here as with Universe 2 we need to be careful in assuming there is one kind of prescribed fire. Who decides what is applied and how? This universe probably looks quite different to the first two, although practitioners may sometimes strive to emulate one or both.

I alluded earlier to the ‘command and control’ approach that is quite prevalent in government and fire management. I wouldn’t say that command and control necessarily implies intensive application of prescribed burning, any more than it implies the goings on in Universe 4.

Universe 4: Suppression and exclusion

There is a well documented history of this practice and its consequences, intended or otherwise, in parts of the US. In short, stomping out fires too early can backfire. Yet suppression is what we advocate and what we do when fire threatens the things we care about. As I write, there is a cool $11 million prize being dangled in front of fire tech people if they can develop autonomous suppression systems “able to spot a high-risk fire in a 1,000-square kilometer area in challenging terrain, and extinguish it within 10 minutes all while ignoring decoy fires intended to distract the system.” Piece of slightly burnt cake.

What would a world look like where suppression of any fire was within our means?

Universe 5: Four Degrees Warming

I don’t even want to describe this world, let alone live in it. We can expect many, many awful consequences for our fires if we do not head off climate change at the pass. Fire may be the least of our problems by this point.

I’ll end the potted tour there. What can we learn from these universes? What plot twists would unfold if fire were to escape from each universe and join forces with the other types? Would the waves of fire reinforce each other or cancel out? Did I get the breakup of Universes wrong? How would you do it?

*Full disclosure: the offer was made in response to my offer to give a lecture. I am in a ‘research-only’ position, which means I am not paid to teach. But if I ever hope to get a permanent job in academia it’ll most likely be as a lecturer, which means I’d better get some teaching experience. I really enjoy teaching, but perhaps I should be wary about doing it at a university.

Doughnut Pyronomics

And you thought I was done spinning variations on a theme? I recently came across a paper on Doughnut Academics - a riff on the Doughnut Economics concept (itself inspired partly by the Planetary Boundaries idea) which argues that we need to cut the endless growth crap, and focus instead on understanding

1. the necessary social foundations to a decent, possibly even thriving life and

2. the ecological limits we musn’t transcend, if we’re to keep this whole stable, life-supporting earth system thing going for a while.

Urai and Kelly did a nice job reimagining Doughnut Economics as it applies to doing science in the 21st century. As they put it,

Adapting the “doughnut” model of economics to the academic world enables us to visualize the inner social foundations that universities should provide, and the outer human and planetary boundaries that universities need to avoid overshooting.

Check out their concept figures.

Doughnut academia, (Source: Urai and Kelly, 2023)

Seven ways to think like a 21st century scientist (Source: Urai and Kelly, 2023)

So, Dear Reader, I leave you with the question: what is Doughnut Pyronomics? What are the social foundations of ‘good’ fire? What are the planetary limits we mustn’t let ‘bad’ fire overshoot?