Thorny devil

Moloch horridus

Twenty-ninth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 20: Thorny devil

page 298: remarkable Australian native.  Here is charming short paper on the Thorny devil.

page 299: Life is a pure flame. Olivia Judson compares fire to an animal like sheep a slug because it eats plants. But unlike a normal animal, it’s a shape-shifter. Francis Ponge (1942):

Fire's gait can only compared to that of an animal; it has to leave one spot to occupy another; it makes moves like both an amoeba and a giraffe, lunging forward with the neck, trailing along with the foot.

Italo Calvino (1985):

models for the process of formation of living beings “are best visualized by the crystal on the one side (invariance of specific structures) and the flame on the other (constancy of external forms in spite of relentless internal agitation).”

Picture below, by Tim Holmes, added 9 Jan

Added 18 Jan: Australian inferno previews fire-prone future.

Animal fire

Without wanting to get mystical about it, fire is, in many respects, a kind of animal, albeit an ethereal one. Like any animal, it consumes oxygen. Like a sheep or a slug, it eats plants. But unlike a normal animal, it’s a shape-shifter.

-- Olivia Judson. Mystical? No. A comparison of limited value? Yes. Still, the idea grips the imagination: fire as a 'vital spark' has a long history.

In the Anthropocene, fire is the tool and weapon of Man, an animal which has extracted millions of year's worth from the Earth in two or three centuries. See Fire and Fire creature, fire planet.

Fire creature, fire planet

Reviews by Saswato Das and Christine Keneally of two books on how fire 'made us human' focus on cooking. [1]

But it's not just food, and thereby ourselves, that we have transformed through fire. It's also the planet -- through what Stephen Pyne calls 'second fire', the deliberate use of fire by Man to foster ecological regimes to its [his] benefit. If we are 'the cooking ape' then it is more than food we cook.


In Fire: a brief history, Pyne writes:

It is particularly true for agriculturalists: the saga of first contact takes the form of a great fire. The Malagasy call it afortroa. Maori myths record how the first arrivals lit fires everywhere, burned off forests and wiped out moas. Madeirans preserved the legend of a Seven-Year Fire that drove the first settler into the sea for protection and then, smoldering, let the isle as malleable as a lump of white iron drawn from a furnace. The cosmology of the Stoics was built around a recurring world conflagration. The Aztecs performed a New Fire ceremony, symbolically rekindling the world, every 52 years. Modern myth-making has continued the trope. Star Trek's Wrath of Khan features a "genesis device" capable or remaking planets. The "genesis effect" begins with a fiery blast and spreads its "new matrix" over cold-dead rock with a flaming front. More slowly and bumptiously, that is precisely what humans did with the Earth. [2]

Footnotes

[1] Fire: The spark that ignited human evolution by Frances D. Burton and Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham. Seed has an interview with Wrangham. See, too, blog post in this series The raw and the cooked.

[2] See earlier post Fire.

Fire

Fires are obviously one of the major responses to climate change, but fires are not only a response -- they feed back to warming, which feeds more fires...The scary bit is that, because of the feedbacks and other uncertainties, we could be way underestimating the role of fire in driving future climate change.

Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona, in a press release for the review Fire in the Earth System.

In The Republic, Plato likened the human condition to life in a cave, illuminated only by flames. But the allegory is deeper than Platonic idealism. In Swartkrans, a South African cave, the oldest deposits hold caches of bones, the prey of local carnivores. Those gnawed bones contain the abundant remains of ancient hominids. Above that record rests, like a crack of doom, a stratum of charcoal; and atop that burned break, the proportion of bones abruptly reverses. Above the charcoal, the prey have become predators. Hominids have claimed the cave, remade it with fire, and now rule. That, in a nutshell, is what occurred throughout the Earth. What has happened with early prey relationships happened also with fire. As humans successfully challenged lightning for control over ignition, the whole world has become a hominid cave, illuminated, nurtured, warmed and controlled by the flame over which humanity exercises its unique power and through which it has sought an ethic to reconcile that power with responsibility.

-- from Fire: A Brief History by Stephen Pyne.