Planted

What we do to our surroundings mirrors our internal world. The same ideology that teaches us to fight, suppress, and tame nature ties us to the realities we are desperately trying to escape.

Priyanka Singh Parihar

Lighting the Good Fire

Long before California was California, Native Americans used fire to keep the lands where they lived healthy. That meant intentionally burning excess vegetation at regular intervals, during times of the year when the weather would keep blazes smaller and cooler than the destructive wildfires burning today.

 Jill Cowan, The New York Times (2020)

The enigmatic burning fire is a shape-shifter, blazing and moving from one life to another. Fire fuels itself by consuming the living world.

Isn’t it perplexing, after creating magnificent lights, how fire reduces everything it touches to darkness, leaving behind black ashes and residues?

Fire could ignite fear, and yet no spiritual culture in the world fails to revere it. It holds a governing power; flickering flames have brightened the history of human nights. We climbed down from the tree, and its warmth and light sheltered us from the ruthlessness of predators. Perhaps this is why we have welcomed it into our places of worship.

Across the natural world, plants and animals have formed their own union with fire. Many flowers are born from fire, with heat germinating their seeds. They invite pollinators back, promising a harvest of new life in the recovering landscape. Birch and Mediterranean cypresses are among the trees that have evolved to work with fire by remaining resilient. The seeds of Lodgepole pine trees need to be melted and released from their hard shells, collaborating with the warmth of fire.

Fire creates the breeding ground for firechaser beetles, mule deer, and black-backed woodpeckers.These species rely on, reproduce in, and nest in landscapes recently touched by a blaze. Firehawks carry burning sticks in their beaks to start fires, driving distressed prey toward them. Cheetahs, bears, raccoons, and raptors also feast on prey fleeing from the flames. American anthropologist Kristen Hawkes suggests our ancestors most likely followed the fire, much like these mammals, to forage from the burning ground.

Wildfires have danced across the Earth since the first forests sprang from the ground. Fires cleanse dead vegetation and rejuvenate the soil. Our human rituals of building a good fire, lighting a candle, or burning incense come from the cleansing properties of this sacred fire.

Fire has shaped the inner workings of the human body. We sleep less than our fellow primates; the light of fire has evolved our circadian rhythms. According to primatologist Richard Wrangham, cooking food played a crucial role in enlarging the human brain. Archaeologist John Gowlett suggests that by gathering around fire, our ancestors developed the “social brain.” In the darkness of night, the warmth of fire has illuminated human bonds.

Where has the good fire gone?

We have extracted fire, perhaps even colonised it.

We are digging and awakening the sleeping life force from the depths of the Earth, just to keep the fire burning. Fossil fuels from the geological past are driving our present climate conditions. The heat, the scorching land, and our current climate conditions are making the Earth more hospitable to raging wildfires.

The suppression of fire and the effort to fight it are remnants of the colonial past and its language. Indigenous communities from around the world—Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and others—have worked with fire, lighting the right kind of fire instead of fighting it. “When colonisation removed native peoples, disrupted their social structures around fire use, outlawed fire, and then used every construct in a militaristic way to suppress it, we created the conditions we face today,” says Frank Lake, research ecologist.

We have spent centuries inflicting and suppressing traumas. However, fire does not differentiate between the coloniser and the colonised. It simply does what it has done since the dawn of time.

What we do to our surroundings mirrors our internal world. The same ideology that teaches us to fight, suppress, and tame nature ties us to the realities we are desperately trying to escape. What seems like the darkness of the ashes now is the ember that has shaped our landscapes and our bodies. 

The Earth is heating, and we are walking into the age of fire. The choice is ours: we can either educate ourselves to fight it or sincerely light it.

Words by Priyanka Singh Parihar, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, written by Founder & Editor-in-Chief Priyanka Singh Parihar.

Planting seeds of thought that invite us to root and bloom despite the climate crisis. Seeds is a multidisciplinary writing practice that borrows its wisdom from spiritual, ecological, anthropological, and scientific sources.

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