Fire
We have a small fire one every few years to get rid of fallen tree branches.
The ash contains a spectrum of trace elements and is rich in potassium, while low in phosphorus, so its useful for natives like banksias and grevilleas.
As soon as plants colonised land in the Silurian period about 440 million years ago, they burned. They have burned ever since, but with climate change are becoming ferocious. Stephen Pyne terms our new era ‘The Pyrocene’.
Hominids used fire early on, ash from the archaeological site known locally as ‘Dragon Bone Hill’ reveals caves were heated 750,000 years ago. And early humans cooked food because it tastes more delicious, and is easier to digest, providing more energy.
Wyn loves fire, despite savage mockery of forests being burnt in Siberia, Southern Europe and the Weest United States right now – lives lost, humans and animals and plants. And not long-ago devastating fires in this region. I visited bush recovering after these fires a few week ago.
20 July – A heatwave in one of the world’s coldest regions has sparked forest fires and threatened the Siberian city of Yakutsk with an ‘airpocalypse’ of thick toxic smoke, atmospheric monitoring services have reported. High levels of particulate matter and possibly also chemicals including ozone, benzene and hydrogen cyanide are thought likely to make this one of the world’s worst ever air pollution events.
9 Aug – Smoke from raging forest fires in Siberia has reached the north pole for the first time in recorded history,
20 Aug – Siberia’s massive wildfires are unlocking extreme carbon pollution. Things are getting worse. This year’s Sahkan fire is releasing twice as much carbon pollution as the fires last year.
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over
the Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
Gary Snyder
