SPEAKER_02: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_04: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford The canyons seemed to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar
SPEAKER_05: of a thousand freight trains. The smoke and heat became so intense that it was difficult to breathe. The whole world seemed to us men back in those mountains to be aflame. Many thought that it really was the end of the world.
SPEAKER_00: August 20 1910. Forest Ranger Ed Pulaski was caught in the middle of what would become known as the Big Blow-Up. Pulaski realised his task was no longer to save the forests of northern Idaho, but to save the firefighters.
SPEAKER_05: Trees were falling all about us under the strain of the fires and heavy winds and it was almost impossible to see through the smoky darkness. Had it not been for my familiarity with the mountain trails, we would never have come out alive. For we were completely surrounded by raging, whipping fire. My one hope was to reach an old mine tunnel, which I knew to be not far from us. We reached the mine just in time, for we were hardly in when the fire swept over our trail.
SPEAKER_00: Pulaski passed out. The next morning he couldn't see. His hands were burned, but he was alive. And so were all but five of his men. The Big Blow-Up had killed 86 people and consumed enough wood to build 800,000 houses. It also seared the national consciousness. The US Forest Service promised to douse all wildfires as quickly as it could. That was unwise. We'll come back to why. But you can understand it. Fire is terrifying. It's also fundamental to the modern economy. And its story goes back much further. Still, for the first 90% of Earth's history, there was no fire at all. There were volcanic eruptions. But molten rock isn't on fire, because fire is a chemical reaction, the process of combustion. It's life that creates both the oxygen and the fuel that fires need to burn. Fossil evidence suggests that flammable plant life evolved around 400 million years ago and, periodically, went up in smoke, due partly to those volcanoes, but mostly to lightning. In recent years, satellite observations have shown us how surprisingly common lightning is. There are around 8 million strikes a day. It's still responsible for more wildfires than ill-advised barbecues or carelessly discarded cigarette butts. Fire shaped landscapes and, with it, evolution. It enabled the spread of grasslands, somewhere around 30 million years ago, without fire, that have reverted to scrub or forest. And grasslands are thought to have played a role in the emergence of the hominins who evolved into us. Try to imagine the economy before our ancestors tamed fire. You can start by discarding any products made with metal or using metal tools. Metal starts life in a furnace. The same goes for glass. Now forget anything that involves burning fossil fuels for transport or electricity or that uses materials made in the heat of a fire. Think plastics or plants grown with artificial fertilizers made with the harbour-bosch process. No bricks or pottery. They're fired in a kiln. There isn't much left. Raw, organic food cut up with a sharp stone. We can hardly call it an economy at all. Exactly when and how our ancestors learned to control fire is a matter of some debate. But it's unlikely to have played out as famously imagined by Disney's Jungle Book with ape king Louie begging Mowgli for the secret of man's red fire. In fact, chimps appear to understand pretty well how wildfire will spread and other species are reportedly alert to the hunting opportunities. Some birds of prey have even been seen picking up burning sticks, dropping them to start a new fire and pouncing on the creatures who then make a run for it. It seems likely that our ancestors similarly harnessed wildfires for hundreds of thousands of years before they figured out how to make sparks from flint. Perhaps they kept the fires alive by adding slow burning animal dung. The primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that as cooked food provides more energy, it enabled humans to evolve bigger brains. Meanwhile, archaeologist John Gowlett links fire to the social brain hypothesis, the idea that we evolved bigger brains to navigate growing social pressures. Evenings around the fire will have given our ancestors more time to socialise. However much truth is in those speculations, economic development has seen us confine fire to various special chambers, from industrial plants to internal combustion engines to the gas oven in your kitchen. The historian Stephen Pyne calls this the Pyrrhic transition. And where that's not yet happened, it's a problem. In developing countries, millions of deaths are linked to air pollution caused by cooking on indoor fires. But Pyne argues that this transition increased our fear of wildfires. And with climate change, we can expect to see more of those fires. While satellite observations are helping us to understand them, changing patterns of weather and vegetation are making them harder to predict. It took half a century after Ed Polaski's heroics for consensus to form that quickly extinguishing wildfires isn't such a great idea. The problem is that eventually there'll be a fire you can't control. And that fire will be more devastating because it will burn through all the deadwood that would have been cleared by the small fires if you hadn't rushed to put them out. And in the meantime, complacency sets in. We're increasingly building in or close to wilderness areas where fires will break out sooner or later. When experts advise it might be wise to let those fires burn, you can bet that the people who live nearby aren't going to be too keen. As Andrew Scott argues in his book Burning Planet, our increasing scientific understanding of fire in recent years hasn't translated into greater public awareness. Some economists think that wildfires are just one example of a broader modern dynamic. That getting better at handling small problems creates a growing sense of safety, which paradoxically creates the risk of much larger problems. Greg Ip has applied this analysis to the financial crisis of 2007-08. Policymakers had got so good at extinguishing minor crises, people became overconfident and took silly risks such as betting the ranch on subprime mortgages. And when a crisis came along that couldn't be stamped out, those bad bets fuelled a global conflagration.
SPEAKER_03: Fire on Earth, an introduction, is one of several excellent recent books on the history of fire. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things.
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