Like most people who understand our climate crisis at all, I breathe a sigh of relief when the U. Funds will be found to enforce fire bans, and no-camping ordinances will sprout overnight. Crazy as it might sound, wildfire is one of the more locally mitigable outcomes of climate catastrophe.
Unlike heat death at noon when wet bulb temperatures exceed humanly survivable limits outside or hurricanes that erase mile upon mile of coastline as seas rise and weather systems roil with more total energy , fire is something you can hold at bay locally. For a time. The mitigation-to-come will have its own, foreseeable but largely unforeseen knock-on effects: intensified regional nativism and dehumanization of unhoused people living in the forests, perhaps, or hastened local biodiversity collapse chains as anti-fire measures scale up before ecological impact studies can follow suit.
A person cannot live under intermittent threat of catastrophic fire without having some anxiety about it, though. And fire is a representative anecdote for our general situation of biospheric decay, not an exception to it. Here, during our current phase of widespread non -adaptation to climate change, whether the anxiety is felt directly, disavowed, or displaced as anger at scapegoats, in our Anthropocene that is also a Pyroceneβthis age in which human reshaping of the planetary system becomes an age of megafiresβit is part and parcel of a larger climate anxiety that increasingly shrouds all horizons.
Rightly so. In an essay in Journal of Anxiety Disorders , however, Susan Clayton pushes back against the assumption that climate anxiety or eco-anxiety is maladaptive. If we are anxious about fire, well, we should be. Without fire, it is not only frequently hellish carbon capitalism that would not exist, but humanity as such. Against the backdrop of fire as lifegiving, climate anxiety takes on a somewhat different hue. Anticipation of future threat, certainly, but also apprehension of a strange disjunct that is at once a point of terrifying and life-giving connection.
Fire comes to us from elsewhere, but becomes itself only in the consumption of life; and we live thereby. Lightning is a phenomenon of geophysics, not of life. It jolts out of biotic lethargyβa broad spectrum ecological catalyst. Small wonder that for all but the most intensively urbanized, fire continues to be understood by most human cultures as both threatening and life-giving.
