Six on Geography and Science: Firenadoes, ember attacks and megafires: Australia is seeing sci-fi weather; Dying Fish Revealed Congo Is World's Deepest River; Puerto Rico earthquake aftershocks again rattle coastline as residents deal with disaster
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Thanks John and Gary
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"A Boeing 737 crashed on the outskirts of Tehran not long after taking off for Kyiv. All 176 people aboard, at least 57 of whom were Canadian citizens and 138 of whom were headed to Canada, were killed. Many of the dead were young – 15 children, and university and college students returning to school after the Christmas break. Entire families.
For every Iranian-Canadian this was horror experienced through the prism of five days of accumulated shock, exhaustion, confusion and fear. This is the kind of gut punch that comes at you before you’ve had a chance to catch a breath after the first punch has already landed.
My Iranian friends and I, who hadn’t slept Tuesday night as we waited to see if the United States would retaliate against the bombing of the Iraqi army bases, now found ourselves checking in with friends and family to see if anyone we knew was on that doomed flight. So many of those on board were Iranian-Canadian, we were bound to know at least one person. And even before details about the victims emerged, most of us knew what had been lost, because we know our people: hard-working, dedicated individuals whose contributions to society are indispensable. And they were: doctors, PhD students, engineers, business owners, from Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia – this was not just an unfathomable part of the Iranian-Canadian community that had disappeared in an instant.
This was Canada.
Now we are told, as many of us had fearfully suspected, that evidence shows the plane was accidentally shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. If you ever doubted it, take note: This is what war looks like. There are accidents and missteps, rogue missiles and unintended explosions. Generals, Presidents and Supreme Leaders spew vitriol and hate. They put up fronts and affectations to feed some kind of latent ego, but they’ve chosen a life of power, of bullying and violence. Ultimately, in the entanglements and uncertainty it’s the ordinary people who suffer – the newlyweds from Edmonton, the mother and her teenage daughter from North Vancouver, the two friends from Halifax."
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"So there does exist a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, and one that has defined our distinctive ecological agency. It’s the story of fire. Earth is a uniquely fire planet – it has been since life clambered onto the continents. Equally, humans are a uniquely fire creature, not only the keystone species for fire but a species monopolist over its manipulation. The fires in the Arctic testify to the planetary antiquity of fire. Nearly all are kindled by lightning and burn biotas nicely adapted to fire; many could be suppressed, but extinguishing them will only put off, not put out, the flames. By contrast, the fires in the Amazon bear witness to a Faustian pact that hominins made with fire so long ago it is coded into our genome. They are set by people in circumstances that people made, well outside ecological barriers and historical buffers.
This is a narrative so ancient it is prelapsarian. Our alliance with fire has become a veritable symbiosis. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geological force because we have begun to cook the planet. We have taken fire to places and times it could never have reached on its own, and it has taken us everywhere, even off world. We have leveraged fire; fire has leveraged us.
How this happened is a largely hidden history – hidden in plain sight. Fire disappeared as an integral subject about the time we hid fire into Franklin stoves and steam engines. (The only fire department at a university is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm sounds.) It lost standing as a topic in its own right. As with the fires of today, its use in history has been to illustrate other themes, not to track a narrative of its own.
Yet how the present scene came to be is clear enough in its general contours. How, outfitted with firesticks early humans could take over select biotas. How, with axes and plows and livestock as fire fulcrums, societies could recode the patches and pulses of vast swathes of land for agriculture. How, hungering for ever more firepower, we turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones – once-living biomass converted over eons into oil, gas, lignite, and coal. Our firepower became unbounded."
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