Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword: Small Book, Big Story William Cronon xi
Introduction: Kindling xv
1 Fire and Earth: Creating Combustion 3
How Fire Came to Be 4
Fire and Life 14
First Fire Today 20
Touched by Fire 24
2 Frontiers of Fire (Part 1): Fire Colonizing by Hominins 27
What Made Early Fires Effective 29
First Contact: When Fire Arrives 34
Lost Contact: When Fire Departs 38
3 Aboriginal Fire: Controlling the Spark 46
Why They Burned 47
Where and How They Burned 51
Dying Fire: When the Firestick Leaves 57
4 Agricultural Fire: Cultivating Fuel 65
The Fire in Agriculture's Hearth 65
How to Cultivate Fire 67
What They Meant to Each Other 82
Rites of Fire 85
5 Frontiers of Fire (Part 2): Fire Colonizing by Agriculture 87
How Conversion Leads to Colonization 88
Stories from the Fire Frontier 90
Comings and Goings of Agricultural Fire Today 97
6 Urban Fire: Building Habitats for Fire 102
Hearth and House: Making a Home for Fire 102
Built to Burn: A Fire Ecology for the City Combustible 106
The Eternal Flame Invisible: Fire in the Industrial City 115
7 Pyrotechnics: Fire and Technology 119
Prometheus Unchained 121
Cycles of Pyrotechnology: How Fire Has Cooked the Earth 129
Fire Powers: Controlled-and Not-So-Controlled-Fire as Mover and Shaker 133
Fire in the Mind 137
8 Frontiers of Fire (Part 3): Fire Colonizing by Europe 139
How Europe Expanded Fire's Realm 140
How Europe Contained Fire's Realm 144
How Europe Redefined Fire's Realm 151
9 Industrial Fire: Stoking the Big Burn 155
How Industrial Combustion Has Added Fire 158
How Industrial Combustion Has Subtracted Fire 160
How Industrial Combustion Has Rearranged Fire Regimes 167
10 The Future of Fire: Burning beyond the Millennium 172
As the World Burns: What Is and Isn't Burning, and Where 173
Still the Keeper of the Flame 182
11 The Pyrocene: A Brief Future 187
Powering the Anthropocene 187
Tending Fire: Earth's New Pyrogeography 188
Minding Fire: The Rekindling of Fire as Idea 195
Pyromancy 201
Selected Sources and Further Reading 203
Index 211