Articles tagged with: fire
The war with nature is over and we’ve won!
What happens when humans finally win the war with nature and end up in charge of ecology? A question for the future? Think again. In “Peak Wood: Nature Does Impose Limits”, John Perlin describes what …
Burning the biosphere before you were born
Millennia before humans discovered coal, indeed, millennia before there was civilization, Homo sapiens had discovered fire and was making extensive use of it. In a study just published by Bill Ruddiman and myself (Ruddiman and …
Guns, forests and carbon
Not only do humans burn away forests to enhance their food supply, they also do it when they battle each other! Or so says a study published by Zhen Li and his colleagues this week …
The human jungle
Are pristine rainforests the only ones that matter? We know that forests do change as they age, developing some unique characteristics when mature, and that some species cannot live outside of large swaths of ancient …
Campfires degrade local ecosystems
Humans have been using fire since prehistory- indeed, it is one of our defining characteristics -distinguishing us from all other species.
There is little doubt that burning of forests to attract game and later, to clear …
Guns, Germs and Carbon: post-Colombian pandemics drive global cooling
Diseases introduced by Europeans after 1492 are now known to have caused massive population declines in the Americas, and the failure of ancient agricultural systems across huge regions, many of which depended on the regular …
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