Heat (12 page)

In chaparral, plant resins leach into the soils. When fire heats the soils, the resins coat soil particles. After a fire, soils will be water resistant for a time, hydrophobic. After a fire like this, water runs off bare hillsides, picking up volume and momentum as it flows downhill, ripping out patches of ground as it goes. Mudslides follow chaparral fires. From where we stand, we can see two mudslides that, in populated areas, would have destroyed homes.

Certain insects come to fires. Most famous among these is the fire beetle,
Melanophila acuminata,
known for detecting fires from miles away, flying in, and laying eggs in the dead but still hot skeletons of trees. Dead, the trees are defenseless. Burned trees do not exude resin to stop the beetle larvae as they feast on the dead wood.

To find fires, the beetles use receptors hidden in pits along the sides of their bodies. The heat warms tiny sacs in these pits, and the warmed sacs press against neurons that are sensitive to pressure, sensitive to touch. The fire beetle feels the fire not as heat but as pressure, and it flies toward that pressure, looking for a mate, looking for a place to lay eggs. The fire beetle sometimes successfully finds barbecues and smokestacks and stadium lights. It sometimes lands on firefighters.

The mechanism used by the fire beetle is so sensitive that it has attracted the attention of the military. Duplicated electronically, the mechanism may offer a new approach to infrared scopes of the sort used to see at night, to see through smoke-filled rooms, to find hot spots when mopping up burned-out fires.

Before the fire, deer, coyote, black bear, and an occasional mountain lion roamed the La Brea hills. Mice, kangaroo rats, and shrews would have been here in the brush, along with chipmunks, raccoons, and skunks. There would have been bobcats. There would have been fence lizards, king snakes, and rattlesnakes. The larger mammals, to the extent they could, would have fled before the fire. Some of the smaller mammals would have been baked in trees. Others, along with the snakes and lizards, would have hunkered down in burrows or rock piles, surviving or roasting as a function of wind direction and fuel abundance and moisture and luck.

Birds, once out of the nest, have the advantage of flight. Firefighters sometimes see birds fleeing fires and, on occasion, claim to see them ignite in midair.

Unlike plants, unlike fire beetles, mammals and birds and reptiles do not have special adaptations for surviving chaparral fires. They do the best they can. Because chaparral burns irregularly, skipping patches here and there, survivors find a place to live while the land recovers. Or not. Some of them, having survived the flames, will starve to death for lack of forage.

A government report on chaparral wildlife offers the following words of comfort: “From an evolutionary point of view, however, these deaths are inconsequential.”

Burned chaparral, recovering, supports different species than mature chaparral. In the first few years after a fire, cactus mice and harvest mice might come and go. Brush mice may become abundant only in later years. Young chaparral supports more deer mice and coyotes, but fewer dusky-footed wood rats and California mice. Parts of nature die while others thrive.

Predators are known to patrol fire lines, looking for game flushed out by flames or, after the fire, game that is looking for green forage.

In 1950, New Mexico’s Capitan Gap Fire took seventeen thousand acres. A fire crew, threatened by flames and heat, dug into the soft earth of a recent landslide and covered themselves with dirt. They later emerged alive. Also alive after the fire was a young black bear, a cub clinging to a tree, its hair singed, its skin burned in places. The bear’s rescuers named him Hotfoot Teddy. He was later renamed after the advertising bear, the cartoon Smokey. Hotfoot Teddy became the living version of Smokey Bear and as such lived in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. He lived until 1976, and when he died he was buried at Capitan, under a stone marker.

Smokey’s image was painted for a twenty-cent stamp. Restaurants and streets and a historical state park have been named after him. In a single week, Smokey Bear has received as many as thirteen thousand letters. Although he could not read his letters, he was given his own zip code: 20252.

All this notwithstanding, Edward Abbey, critical of Smokey’s campaign to control nature, is not alone as a detractor of Smokey. Smokey has been blamed for government policies of fire prevention, of wrongheaded efforts to stop the natural occurrence of fire. Abbey called the bear an idiot, but others have branded him a pariah and worse. Smokey has been blamed for accumulation of fuels in American forests. He has been blamed for the nearly wholesale burning of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, when years without fire resulted in the accumulation of enough fuel to lead to what some saw as an unnatural fire—unnaturally large and unnaturally hot, thanks to the bear.

The former firefighter and renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne described the Yellowstone fire in an article in
Natural History
: “Groves of old-growth lodge pole pine and aging spruce and fir exploded into flame like toothpicks before a blowtorch. Towering convective clouds rained down a hailstorm of ash, and firebrands even spanned the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Crown fires propagated at rates of up to two miles per hour, velocities unheard of for forest fuels. A smoke pall spread over the region like the prototype of a nuclear winter. Everything burned.”

But Smokey has his place. Some fires, sometimes, can be prevented, or at least delayed. Some fuel loads, sometimes, can be managed. The key to fire management today seems to rely on premature ignition, on setting controlled burns to manage fuel loads and to reset the chaparral. Had Smokey been on the job, the Tea Fire that burned the photographer’s house might have been prevented. Maybe, with the right funding and the right planning and the right amount of foresight and luck and unbounded optimism, the fuel load that let flames rip down the hill from the Tea House could have been burned piecemeal, a controlled burn done in manageable swaths to renew the chaparral without destroying homes and overrunning fire engines and melting a file cabinet full of irreplaceable photographs.

Back in Santa Barbara, I stop at the house of the photographer’s mother, an artist known for her mosaic murals. The county has commissioned her to create a mosaic commemorating fire survivors and first responders. It is to be a community participation mosaic, art as therapy for people who live surrounded by fuel, for people who live with fire.

The mosaic, under construction, is too big for her studio. She has moved it into her gallery, attached to her house. It is art under construction, laid out in rough form. Its substance comes from used fire equipment and fire. Half of a toy metal excavator sits near the bottom of the mural. It was salvaged from a fire and then sliced lengthwise using a plasma cutter. Now it represents the cutting of a firebreak, the sort of work that was going on at the Spanish Ranch Fire when the bulldozer operator was overrun by flames, the sort of work that forms the very basis of fighting wildland fires, the sort of work that is familiar to the residents of Santa Barbara.

A canvas fire hose stretches across the top of the mural toward a fire artifact figurine, a girl. The girl is surrounded by flames made from dichroic glass, glass that has been heated in the presence of metals, creating a metallic vapor that cools to form a crystal structure on the glass surface. Dichroic glass shimmers in surprising ways, playing with light. The fire artifact girl will be forever surrounded by dichroic flames, forever on the verge of rescue by firefighters.

In another part of the mural sits a glass bottle, deformed by heat, along with a wineglass, dented and twisted, perhaps from the photographer’s house, the glass that had been covered by ashes and was still hot four days after the fire.

Edward Abbey, reading Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
in his fire tower, looking out over a landscape that was not burning, would have come across a passage about urban fires. He may have underlined it because of his interest in fires, or he may have ignored it because of his place in the wilderness, far removed from cities. But here, in Santa Barbara, it is relevant. “How doth the fire rage,” wrote Burton, “that merciless element, consuming in an instant whole cities! What town of any antiquity or note hath not been once, again and again, by the fury of this merciless element, defaced, ruinated, and left desolate?”

Chapter 3

Cooked

I
am in Rio de Janeiro. Last week, mudslides closed streets. People died, their homes swept away in rivers of mud. But the rain has stopped. The pavement steams. The eroded remains of ancient magma—spires of straight-up rock—tower above buildings and bays and beaches.

In 1992, the United Nations met here. The meeting became known as the Rio Earth Summit. More than a hundred national leaders attended along with nineteen thousand others who tagged along to offer advice. In a two-page preamble, the delegates acknowledged that climate change was a common concern of humankind and that human activities enhanced the greenhouse effect. Most of the carbon emissions, they said, came from developed countries. They divided the world into haves and have-nots, the developed and the undeveloped. The haves would try to hold carbon emissions at 1990 levels. The have-nots would emit at will until they became haves.

Brazil was a have-not.

The twenty-four-page document that came from the Rio Earth Summit contained no binding requirements to reduce carbon emissions. The haves agreed only to provide detailed information on exactly what they would do “with the aim of returning individually or jointly to their 1990 levels these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

All of that is ancient history, part of the long confusion of climate change policy. Now I am here on business, attending an oil and gas conference for environmental professionals. It is a week of afternoon cookies and evening beers and endless presentations. The conference is hosted by the Brazilian national oil company, Petrobras. Petrobras is among the world’s largest companies, larger by some measures than Shell or Chevron or BP. And they have just found new oil, more than five billion barrels of it, expanding their reserves by 50 percent. It is oil that they would like to bring to the surface, to burn, to convert to carbon dioxide.

A high-ranking Brazilian official talks about climate change, about carbon emissions, and about the five billion barrels of new wealth. The world must cut carbon emissions, he tells the audience of five hundred, but the cuts must come in the developed world. Countries like Brazil need time to develop. They must have the freedom to emit at will.

John Tyndall, Faraday’s friend and biographer, working in the middle of the nineteenth century, could not have foreseen the level of concern that greenhouse gases would create. He could not have known that his work on greenhouse gases would interest a movement calling for sweeping changes in energy use. He could not have foreseen the Rio Earth Summit. Tyndall was merely curious about the manner in which air absorbed heat. He wanted to follow up on what was even then known as the greenhouse effect, on Fourier’s work showing that the earth was much warmer than it should be, suggesting that the atmosphere was a blanket, a comforter enshrouding the earth. Tyndall wanted to understand how it worked.

He published his findings related to the greenhouse effect in 1861. He started with a review of past work. “So far as my knowledge extends,” he wrote, “the literature of the subject may be stated in a few words.” In fact, his review of the literature required ninety-five words.

Tyndall’s idea was simple enough: compare the heat passing through a tube full of air with that of a tube filled with nothing, a vacuum. “The first experiments,” Tyndall wrote, “were made with a tube of tin polished inside, 4 feet long and 2.4 inches in diameter.” His heat source was a cubical bucket filled with hot water.

Tyndall could not detect heat absorption in air. “Oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen,” he wrote, “subjected to the same test, gave the same negative result.”

He tried hot copper and hot oil as heat sources. He tried a lamp. “During the seven weeks just referred to,” he wrote, “I experimented from eight to ten hours daily; but these experiments, though more accurate, most unhappily shared the fate of the former ones.”

He went back to the cubical bucket filled with boiling water. He tried what he called olefiant gas, known today as ethylene, a colorless gas as invisible as air itself. But it was not invisible to radiant heat. The needle on his instruments moved seventy times farther than it had moved for oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. He could not believe his results. He repeated the experiment several hundred times. “I was indeed slow to believe it possible,” he wrote, “that a body so constituted, and so transparent to light as olefiant gas, could be so densely opake to any kind of calorific rays.”

He tried other gases: bisulphid of carbon, iodide of methyl, chloroform, amylene, chlorine. In the end, he realized the importance of two gases. He wrote that carbon dioxide and water vapor “would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays and produce corresponding changes of climate.”

In this remark, he was not thinking of industrial pollution. He was not concerned about the burning of fossil fuels. He was concerned with what he called “the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.” He was concerned with the end of the Ice Age.

Before deforestation could become a problem, before climate change could become something more than a matter of intellectual curiosity, humans needed to control fire. It was a time before charcoal production, before coal mining, before oil and gas drilling, before whale oil lamps, before Faraday’s candle and Tyndall’s tube, before a gasoline-powered mower sparked against a rock and lit the Spanish Ranch fire that killed Scott Cox and Ed Marty and their two colleagues.

Humans needed the ability to strike a flame whenever and wherever they desired. Exactly when this happened is not known. When this happened is not even known in the approximate sense.

At Swartkrans Cave in South Africa, archaeologists found bones burned in a manner consistent with the use of a campfire. That campfire may have burned just over a million years ago. The owners of those bones may have been
Homo erectus,
a not-so-distant ancestor, an ancient human who, in the right outfit, would not look ancient at all.

Archaeologists have weaker evidence of controlled fires in Kenya, at a place called Koobi Fora, dated to just over one and one-half million years ago. There are other scattered sites and scattered evidence, bits of what seem to be fired clay, depressions with charcoal, with burned stones. The evidence increases at younger sites. From seven hundred thousand years ago, at the Bnot Ya’akov Bridge in Israel, evidence suggests butchering and cooking. By a few hundred thousand years ago, someone was laying out what appear to be fire rings, what archaeologists call hearths, burned stones in circles of the sort commonly made by Boy Scouts. By a hundred thousand years ago, both
Homo sapiens
and
Homo neanderthalensis
used fire. They used it for cooking and for warmth and perhaps for hunting and warfare.

But they did not have matches. Phosphorus matches, similar to what we know as matches today, appeared around 1832, and modern disposable lighters showed up in force in the 1970s with the Cricket, marketed by a friendly singing cartoon cricket, and the Bic, good for three thousand lights, three thousand flicks of the Bic.

I am back home, in a more comfortable climate than the deserts and burned-out chaparral of California, more pleasant than the humidity of Brazil. I am on skis, headed above the tree line in the Chugach Range above Anchorage. In my pack, I carry a fire-starting drill and bow, a block of magnesium and a striking plate, a disposable lighter, and fifteen storm-proof matches. For tinder, I have dried birch bark and fire lighter blocks. For fuel, I have dried and split sticks of birch. The plan is simple: start a fire as ancient man might have started a fire. The matches and the disposable lighter and the fire lighter blocks are backups, in case I prove less adept than
Homo erectus
and dumber than
Homo neanderthalensis.

I turn left and head up a treeless valley through deep snow, fresh and brilliantly white, an almost perfect reflector of sunlight and heat. The valley takes me gently higher until I am slowed by swollen hills of glacial moraine too steep to conveniently climb on skis. Near the top of one of these hills, wind has exposed bare rock, a rounded and windswept boulder. Next to the rock, I drop my pack and step out of my skis. Without skis, I sink thigh deep in snow.

From my pack, I take my fire-starting drill and bow. The bow is a branch of birch, still green, strung with a thick shoelace. The drill is a very dry and straight poplar branch, a foot long, sharpened at both ends. I have a base of dried pine, notched to hold the drill tip and to catch a hot ember. In the deep snow, I struggle to pin the base to the rock, ultimately leaning down on it with one knee, my body awkwardly stretched. I insert the tip of my wooden drill into the dried pine base, pushing the drill’s tip into the base’s notch. I wrap the bow’s shoelace around the poplar drill so that a sawing motion on the bow will spin the drill. With my left hand, I cup another piece of pine, pressing it down against the top of the drill, and with my right hand I saw, moving the drill back and forth. I move slowly at first, and then faster, seeking heat from friction.

“Savages,” wrote John Tyndall in
Heat: A Mode of Motion
, “have the art of producing fire by the skilful friction of well-chosen pieces of wood.” And he wrote of Aristotle: “Aristotle refers to the heating of arrows by the friction of the air.” And Tyndall wrote of Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford, who had noticed the heat generated by the drilling of cannon bores. In 1798 Rumford immersed an iron cylinder in water. He used a horse to turn the cylinder against a rod, generating friction, which generated heat. Tyndall quoted Rumford: “It would be difficult to describe the surprise and astonishment expressed by the contenances [
sic
] of the by-standars on seeing so large a quantity of water heated, and actually made to boil, without any fire.”

Rumford—a friend of Lavoisier, and the man who married Lavoisier’s widow—worked at a time when heat was still believed to be a mystical fluid, the fluid that Lavoisier called caloric. In the beginning, Rumford believed that the heating of one item by another came from the flow of this fluid. But Rumford’s experiments showed the cannon producing more heat than it could have held, producing more heat as more motion was applied. “I think,” Rumford wrote, “I shall live to drive caloric off the stage as the late Lavoisier drove away the previous theory. What a singular destiny for Madame Lavoisier!” Rumford laid the groundwork that would allow Tyndall to see heat as a mode of motion.