NOVA Online: Fire Wars | How Plants Use Fire
NOVA Online: Fire Wars | How Plants Use Fire
by Stephen J. Pyne, Professor
Arizona State University
PBS.org
How Plants Use Fire (And Are Used By It)
The Earth has known fire for over 400 million years. The reason is simple: Life made it possible. Marine life pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen; terrestrial life lathered the crust with fuels. When oxygen and fuel meet a spark under the right circumstances, a fire kindles. (Lightning is an ancient and ample ignitor.) The fundamental chemistry of combustion lies at the core of the living world. When it happens within a cell, it's called respiration. When it happens outside organisms, it's called fire. It's that basic.
Rhythm of the heat
So fire happens. Because it does, living systems adjust to its presence, just as they would to sunlight or frost or flooding. This process of accommodation, however, is complex. Organisms do not adapt to fire in the abstract but to particular patterns of fire, what we call fire regimes. A regime is a statistical concept that assimilates many rhythms of burning and often many kinds of fires. An individual fire is to a fire regime as an individual storm is to climate.
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