There were fortunes to be made in coal and then oil, and now gas too. More than just fortunes are involved; modern economies depend on these fuels, and states only function if fuels are available to keep modern life going. Access to fuel has been essential to the security of modern states and their inhabitants. The rivalries of states and corporations, the struggles for dominance and control, the political arguments about who has access to what where matters. In other words, geopolitics are indivisible from fossil fuels in the modern world. Other resources have been involved in all sorts of conflict and imperial plunder through history (LeBillon 2012), but oil has pride of place in recent decades.

A sustainable future now requires dismantling these systems and replacing both the technologies and their social and economic arrangements with ones fit for a small vulnerable biosphere. No longer can assumptions of a big world as a stage for geopolitics operate if the long-term future of humanity is to be secured. Numerous peoples have long paid a high price for the struggles for power and space set in motion by European colonization and the expansion of capitalism through the Earth system (Grove 2019). Now even those who have benefited most from these colonial arrangements and their subsequent evolution into the global economy are beginning to feel the impacts of sea-level rise and climate disruption.

The large oil companies are truly global companies with holdings and infrastructure in many countries. Crucially in many places they held the rights to exploit petroleum and their wealth was tied to the valuations of these reserves. This is often still the case and stock values are linked directly to gaining access to what lies deep underground. States have struggled to exploit these resources and enrich themselves in the process too. The case of the Gulf States, sheikdoms sitting on oil fields, emphasizes the point that there are vast fortunes to be made. But fuel resources are unevenly spread around the globe, and while some states and corporations have gained enormous wealth others have had economic disruptions because of their dependence on fuel from abroad.

The Promethean moment

Since life first emerged from oceans and plants started growing on land surfaces fires have had fuel. It's so obvious that we don't often think about it, but stuff that was once living is what burns. Trees provide firewood. The paper we use to start fires in our coal or wood burning stoves comes from trees. If we use fire starters instead of paper most of them are petroleum based. And petroleum is in fact a deeply buried residue of former life.

Mostly we burn fossil fuels. Coal, petroleum and natural gas all come from the remains of decayed living things. Organic material, stuff that was once living, has lots of carbon in it, and burning it produces carbon dioxide gas. Once it collects in the atmosphere it traps heat and warms the world. Oxygen is a by-product of life too, and it is also what is needed to make fire. That and a spark to start a flame so that the process of combining the carbon from organic stuff, things that were once alive, with oxygen in the air, can happen.

We will never know exactly how the human use of fire started, but it is a reasonable guess that it started in various places in different ways. What matters, as fire historian Steven Pyne (2021) makes very clear, is that, unlike any other species we learned to start fires. Yes, we have language, and culture, and tools, and religions and lots of other things that we think separate us from other species. But beavers are great hydrological engineers; elephants have complicated communication systems; whales too. Ants and other insects build complex structures. Only us humans start fires.

Once we learned that “ignition trick” in Pyne's apt phrase, we could have fires pretty much where and when we wanted them. It is difficult in the rain for sure and fires are hard in a desert or on Arctic ice sheets, far from plants to use for fuel. But nonetheless we could have heat where we needed it much of the time, and that made a difference, a very big one as it turned out.

It would be a mistake to argue that fire explains all human history. It is not the only thing we need to focus on in trying to think through the implications of the Anthropocene for how we need to live in coming decades. Other things matter too: culture, politics and the new innovations of digital technologies. But when you dig into these other aspects of human accomplishment, somewhere in there fire has historically played a key role.

We are an urban species now; the majority of us live in cities and towns, and even those of us who don't live in cities rely on all sorts of things that urban civilization provides. Humans live scattered all over the planet, mostly on land, although a few of us are on the water on in the air at any one given moment! But wherever we live we rely on cooked food for our subsistence, and until the invention of microwaves, cooking relied on an external source of heat, and most of that heat was a matter of fire of some form or other.

Food is key to cultural life for most of us. Kitchens have stoves, and these places are key to social life. Fireplaces in many homes have long been the source of heat, the focus of family life. Hearth and home go together. Rituals of food preparation, family recipes and shared meals are all tied into the apparatus of heating to cook food. Cooking, as Stephen Pyne puts it, has changed us in numerous ways because it has dramatically altered what we can digest, allowing us, unlike most other species, to become omnivorous, able to eat all sorts of things.

Simple fires offer warmth and the ability to cook food. These two key parts of human life have effectively been moved from our bodies to the surrounding habitat. Our digestions are extended by cooking, allowing us to eat things from which we would otherwise have trouble gaining nourishment.

Stephen Pyne's (2015, 2021) accounts of fire history show that we have been changing the way we engineer fire. From the early days of open fires, we added furnaces for smelting, fireboxes for steam engines, and then the pistons and cylinders of internal combustion engines. All of these are about constraining and controlling the forces of combustion to make it serve our needs. Recently we have added fire engines, hoses, and preventative measures in terms of building codes, sprinkler systems, and fire hydrants to city streets too so we can better deal with things when they burn where they should not. Now we need to constrain fire still further so that we can control the large-scale consequences of our use of combustion. If we do so, in turn we will have a better chance of tackling the wildfires.

Can we, as Naomi Klein (2014) suggested a decade ago, reimagine our cities in ways that take their energy consumption seriously and allow us to regain control of it from fossil fuel companies? Some cities and municipalities, faced with rising tides, damage from storms and citizens demanding action, are starting to declare states of climate emergency. They are beginning to think long and hard about how to both adapt to changes that are unavoidable, and act in ways that don't make things even worse. Can industrial societies also curtail the exploitation of resources from the lands of conquered peoples, and in the process rebuild energy systems that can give them economic futures and a life within their ecological contexts? This should help with the extinction crisis that we all face.

Reworking our financial institutions to invest in sensible buildings, energy systems that do not require burning things, and remaking cities that are much healthier both because they have less pollution and can better cope with extreme weather, is a future worth working hard for; the Greta Thunberg generation deserve no less. Babcock Ranch in Florida, the community designed to run on solar power and to deal with extreme weather, which survived Hurricane Ian in 2022, points the way to building and planning sensibly for a climate-disrupted future.

In November 2018 wildfire destroyed Paradise. The town in California, that is. The so called “Camp Fire” killed 85 people in the town and surrounding area. That year also, fires burned large parts of Siberia, New Zealand and Canada, killed motorists in Portugal and Greece and eradicated crucial ecosystems in Tasmania.

These forest fires are getting hotter and bigger and are burning more places. More than ten million acres of forest burned in the United States for the first time in 2015, and then again in 2017, and in 2020. By late June in 2023, halfway through the fire season, more forest area had burned in Canada than in any previous complete season. The smoke from these wildfires in Canada caused air quality health alerts in New York and elsewhere in the United States.

In July 2023 media reports of wildfire on the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean showed tourists struggling to escape the flames. A record-breaking hot summer in the region set the scene for wildfire. Heat records were also being broken widely elsewhere, notably in Iran and in India. In August wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui the other side of the world becoming the deadliest blaze in modern US history.

The power of these fires when they get going is staggering; temperatures get so hot that trees explode and timber-framed houses and their contents are vaporized (Vaillant 2023). Temperatures over 500°C loft smoke into the stratosphere, generating pyrocumulonimbus clouds and fire-driven weather systems. The level of destruction, of trees, houses, and whatever else gets in the way of these fires is increasing. Fighting fires requires larger and larger efforts; insurance costs for lost property are rising too.

Climate change is clearly making those wildfires worse as droughts and extreme temperatures extend fire seasons. The winter of 2019 was unusually hot and dry in Australia; its wildfires have become an ever-increasing hazard. The following year brought even more extensive wildfires and a terrible toll on wildlife and property. Dramatic pictures of people being evacuated off a beach grabbed the world's attention.