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Episode 1: The Geopolitics of the Fire Age
560 Plays1 year ago
2023 seemed to be the year of wild fires, and it is increasingly clear that we are moving away from a planet whose geology is shaped by ice ages to one shaped by burning.
"Firepower" also has military connotations, and my guest today, Professor SImon Dalby, argues that this is not co-incidental. I will be talking to Simon about the new geopolitics of the fire age.
Simon's most recent book is: Pyromania: fire and geopolitics in a climate disrupted world (Agenda Publishing, 2023).
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Transcript
Introduction to Beyond the Map
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Beyond the Map, a podcast that looks beyond the obvious to understand the hidden geographies that make our world.
Meet Jo Sharp: Geographer Royal
00:00:18
Speaker
I am Jo Sharp, Professor of Geography and Scotland's Geographer Royal.
Wildfires of 2023: A Global Concern
00:00:23
Speaker
During March of 2023, it seemed that much of the world was on fire.
00:00:29
Speaker
The 2023 Canadian wildfire season has been the largest and most devastating on record. Double the size of previously recorded wildfires, they sent a plume of smoke that traveled as far away as Norway, and for a time in June turned the sky above New York City orange. The burning covered an area larger than Greece.
00:00:49
Speaker
In August, dozens of fires burned across Greece. Strong winds and hot, dry summer conditions combined to whip up flames and hamper firefighting efforts. On just one day, Saturday the 26th, firefighters tackled 122 separate blazes. The same month, wildfires claimed more than 4% of land cover in Tenerife, and Hawaii witnessed the deadliest fires in the US for 100 years.
Entering a 'Fire Age'? A Look at Stephen Pine's 'The Piracine'
00:01:15
Speaker
It is no wonder that some commentators have suggested that we are now in a fire age.
00:01:21
Speaker
In his book, The Piracine, Stephen Pine notes that fire has always been a part of the natural world. He says the following, fires are older than pines, prairies, and insects, but nature's fires are patchy in space and time.
Understanding Natural Fire Rhythms
00:01:36
Speaker
Some places, some eras burn routinely, others episodically, and a few only rarely. The basic rhythm is one of wetting and drying. A landscape has to be wet enough to grow combustibles,
00:01:49
Speaker
and dry enough, at least occasionally, to allow them to burn. Sand deserts don't burn because nothing grows. Rainforests don't burn unless a dry spell leeches away moisture. Biomes rich in fine particles such as ferns, shrubs and conifer needles can burn easily and briskly. Landscapes laden with peat or encumbered with large trunks burn poorly and only when leveraged with drought.
Human Impact on Fire Patterns
00:02:15
Speaker
Yet there was one requirement for fire that escaped life's grasp, the spark of ignition that connected flame with fuel. Ignition relied on lightning, and lightning's lottery has its own logic.
00:02:27
Speaker
Then a creature emerged to rig the odds in favor of fire. For Pine, this Promethean moment marked a fundamental shift in history. Earth had a new source of ecological energy. Places that were prone to burn but had lacked regular ignition, think Mediterranean biomes, now got it. And places that burned more or less routinely had their fire rhythms tweaked to suit their human fire tenders.
00:02:52
Speaker
Fire was at the heart of human dominance, but it's also profoundly shaped us.
Firepower and Geopolitical Implications
00:02:58
Speaker
We've got small guts and big heads because we could cook food. We went to the top of the food chain, pine notes, because we could cook landscapes. And we have become a geological force because our fire technology has so evolved that we've begun to cook the planet.
00:03:15
Speaker
Burning has become industrial in the coal-fired engines of the Industrial Revolution, the oil-driven vehicles of travel and trade in the gas-fired boilers that eat our homes. As fire can now be constant burning throughout the seasons, its guiding rhythms are no longer wind, sun, and the seasons of growth and dormancy, but the cycles of human economies. Human firepower is reshaping the planet.
00:03:39
Speaker
Fire power, of course, also has military connotations. Once gunpowder had been formulated, the concentrated force of combustion added explosions to combat. And once explosives were used to move projectiles, it spread the death and destruction further too in the form of rockets, cannons, and guided missiles. The command to use these things in battle is the word fire.
00:04:04
Speaker
This is more than just symbolic, and it is clear that the geopolitics of the 21st century are increasingly shaped by pyromania. The realities of the fire age are a long way from the Cold War of the 20th century, and yet much of the language and concepts of geopolitics around the primacy of the military and of individual states and boundaries has not changed.
Simon Dolby's Career Shift: Cold War to Environmental Security
00:04:25
Speaker
We need to rethink geopolitical categories.
00:04:28
Speaker
Not only will this require a shift in the way we think about firepower, but also what we mean by self-defense and security, even how we might approach non-proliferation.
00:04:38
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To understand the geopolitics of the fire age, I'm joined today by Simon Dolby, Professor Emeritus at the Balcili School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of many books and articles on geopolitics, environmental security and climate change, and his book, Pyromania, Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Destructed World, was published in October 2023.
00:05:02
Speaker
Simon you started your career researching institutions that set the geopolitical agenda in the cold war you know the state military agents those kind of concerned with borders power security and military.
00:05:17
Speaker
I introduce this episode talking about fire and this isn't something that those who study global politics have usually been very interested in but over the course of your career you've moved much more towards a focus on environmental security more broadly.
00:05:34
Speaker
I have indeed, because one of the things that got me started thinking about this was actually right at the beginning of my research on the Soviet threat and geopolitics in the early 80s. And that was fire in the form of the damage done should a nuclear war between the superpowers actually happen.
00:05:52
Speaker
One of the things that was in my early reading on all of this that really piqued my curiosity was the discussion about nuclear winter in 1983 and the crucial point in all of this was that a nuclear war would be bad in terms of the direct destruction and the
00:06:11
Speaker
blowing cities to bits with nuclear weapons but additional damage that would be done by that kind of destruction would be done by fire because cities would actually burn as a result of the detonations from
00:06:28
Speaker
and nuclear weapons directly, and also, of course, all the disruption caused to gas pipelines and petrol tanks and all of the inflammable stuff that modern cities contained.
Nuclear War Imagery and Public Consciousness
00:06:39
Speaker
So, in fact, fire would indirectly, by lofting huge amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, shade the planet, cool it, disrupt agriculture, and do all sorts of other things, so immediately, once
00:06:54
Speaker
fire was at the back of my mind as the crucial vector of where military turned into disaster by literally burning things. So it's been on my mind for a very long time. And I think everyone of our generation who grew up in the UK certainly has probably got absolutely imprinted into their mind.
00:07:15
Speaker
the image from that BBC programme threads of the milk bottles melting on the doorstep in Sheffield. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything that was, I suppose, a kind of fictionalised or dramatised sort of potential real event programme. And it was absolutely astonishing to see the power of fire in that.
00:07:40
Speaker
At about the same time, the American media broadcast the day after, which was actually a fictional destruction of Lawrence, Kansas, and what would happen at the same kind of images of destruction and heightened public awareness of the issue in the
00:08:02
Speaker
part of our background, but it's also part and parcel of many geographers actually having to stop and think about cities, destruction, fire. And all of those things are definitely part of my intellectual heritage, which I've come back to recently. And so the concept of environmental security has become very prominent in your work. It's been there for some 33 years, I think, because
00:08:34
Speaker
a chapter for a collection of papers back in 1990 about environmental security in the Pacific. I'd never thought about it until I was put on the spot by an editor who needed a chapter awful quick. I had to learn even quicker. But that was what literally accidentally I stumbled into linking up some of those things through this concept of environmental security.
00:09:00
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And it's something that's still, despite the fact you've been working on it for 33 years, is still not mainstream.
Disrupting Natural Patterns: Human Influence
00:09:08
Speaker
I mean, in one of your most recent papers, you noted that there's a bit of an academic division of labour. So the social scientists, those who think about international policy tend to assume that we're working with a stable environment.
00:09:26
Speaker
that there's this position of a stable environment for understanding political change emerging from that. And the point I've been trying to make and that lots of the Earth System scientists have been trying to make now for the last couple of decades is that that assumption is wrong. We no longer live in a world where stable assumptions about environment from the past can be simply taken as a backdrop for any kind of politics, policy or planning.
00:09:53
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We live in the age where it's now likely to change and go on changing, whether it's weather patterns, whether it's the migration patterns of various wild species.
Environmental Changes vs. State Boundaries
00:10:09
Speaker
All of these things are increasingly getting messed up by the dramatic changes that human activity has mostly inadvertently.
00:10:17
Speaker
introduced to the world in the last few decades, well the last half century at least.
00:10:25
Speaker
And you mentioned migration there, and if we look into deep history, that's what people have done when environments change, that we have moved to environments that are more conducive to life. But our problem is that we've kind of got two sets of geographical processes going on at a global system. We have these global environmental shifts, but we still have a system of states
00:10:55
Speaker
based on the Westphalian notion of our primary identity, our primary loyalty, I suppose, being to the territorial states. And so these two systems really are in tension at the moment. Increasingly so, because the assumptions about territorial states are that boundaries are fixed.
00:11:15
Speaker
The assumption is that once you fix the boundaries, well, the environment that you've surrounded is going to more or less remain the same. And neither of those assumptions actually really hold. If you think about territorial boundaries, of course, rising sea level has got to change coasts increasingly rapidly. Louisiana is disappearing under the waves. Bits of Florida are likely to follow. Whole countries like Tuvalu
00:11:40
Speaker
might well disappear too. And if we are talking about fixed boundaries, well, that ain't so because the environment is changing and literally rising sea levels are going to obliterate a few small island states. But nonetheless, it does make the crucial point that the environment is far from stable.
Rising Sea Levels: Legal and Cultural Challenges
00:12:01
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There's a lovely old line about as Florida gets under the waves, the maritime boundary between Cuba and the United States will start to migrate northwards because you usually stood the difference
00:12:14
Speaker
No doubt, the Americans will put a whole lot of concrete on the South Keys, the southern part of the Keys, and that will technically still remain US territory, so that will stop the evil Cubans taking more and more of American water. The point about this is that we do live in a much more volatile world, and this assumption about staple boundaries is simply now out of date, and we've got to recognize that and try to think about how we adapt to a much more
00:12:45
Speaker
And this has already been tested in the courts, hasn't it? Eona Te Te Oha, a native of Kiribati, claimed refugee status in Ote Roa New Zealand in 2015, I think the first to seek refugee status on the grounds of climate change alone. He argued that rising sea levels in his homeland meant that his family would not be safe there. He was unsuccessful as the New Zealand High Court decided that he could not be a refugee as he was not being persecuted.
00:13:13
Speaker
But am I right that this is changing? They have been talking about how they are going to actually deal with migrants to the substantial extent New Zealand already provides working visas and various ways for folks from some of those island states to live and work at least for
00:13:31
Speaker
time in New Zealand. The idea was could there be a special class of humanitarian visa specifically to deal with people whose states no longer existed? And New Zealanders have been thinking about this for a long time. One of the first talks I did on these themes in 1991 in New Zealand after the talk Mr. The New Zealand International Affairs Society
00:14:00
Speaker
One of the people in the audience came up to me and said, but Simon, if the island disappears under the ocean, Tuvalu is no more. There's a small population there who will notice the difference, to which of course I enjoyed. Well, the Tuvaluans will notice the difference.
00:14:19
Speaker
And he then said, yeah, yeah, of course. But I mean, who else? Half of them live in Auckland and New Zealand already. What's the difference? Well, of course, the difference is huge in terms of international law. It's huge in terms of whether the two balloons get citizenship rights. Can they take the citizenship rights with them when their island disappears? What about their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren? They got citizenship rights.
00:14:48
Speaker
Those are the big questions that are facing the international community that's been slow to face up to them, but those are the kind of bizarre questions where territory and environment intersect, which are questions we simply cannot avoid dealing with much longer, because some of those island states are starting to get inundated.
00:15:09
Speaker
I mean, it is a fascinating but horrifying situation to be thinking, can you be a citizen of a state that no longer has territory or no longer has territory above the water? And in the state system as it is at the moment, there isn't an alternative. And it raises really quite existential questions for certain people.
00:15:32
Speaker
Part of that case in New Zealand was also whether refugee status could be granted to somebody who was forced out of their home by rising sea levels. And the answer is no, because the refugee convention basically says, if you're not being persecuted, you don't have to leave, therefore you're not a refugee. And the argument in that case in New Zealand was rising sea levels isn't persecution.
00:15:57
Speaker
which when you stop and think about it is legally valid and geographically nuts. But we are facing this world in which these things don't fit together very well. And so welcome to the Anthropocene. Indeed.
00:16:15
Speaker
It's very difficult to imagine any opposition to the concept of Anthropocene. I know it's still quite contentious, but it's very difficult when you hear a case like that, not to start to realize that, as Stephen Pine has suggested, we're moving from a planet that's driven by environmental
Humans as a Geological Force
00:16:35
Speaker
forces. He talks about moving from an ice age to a fire age. We are now the main geological force. Of course, when I say we, there's a very distinct
00:16:45
Speaker
geography to who that we is, which again is why some other people are uncomfortable with that concept.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, the reason why we no longer live in an ice age but now live in what Pine calls a fire age, the so-called pyrocene in his terminology, is simply that humans, the rich and powerful among humans, have been burning vast quantities of fossil fuel very quickly over the last couple of centuries. And indeed, it's accelerated because about half of the burning at least of oil has happened in the last 30, 35 years.
00:17:22
Speaker
The point about this is that that has fundamentally changed how the climate system works. No longer are we dependent on those so-called Milantrovich cycles where the
00:17:35
Speaker
orbit, tilt, there are moves in predictable patterns over a long period. The earth wobbles a bit and it tilts a bit too, all of which means that the sun hits the earth in different ways and that has caused ice ages to come and go for the last million years until, very recently, when suddenly all this new carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and
00:17:58
Speaker
CFCs and methane are in the atmosphere and it's heating the planet and that's now far more powerful as a forcing agent to use the jargon of climate than the orbital mechanics of orbits and tilts and wobbles that the planet has historically undergone.
00:18:20
Speaker
It's the rich and powerful among us that have decided to use fuel as an energy source, which have changed these fundamentally. And that's why we talk about the Anthropocene, because the most important forcing is now as a result of human activity. Not all humans, obviously, but clearly the rich and powerful, the fossil fuel burning part of our species has had this dramatic effect, sort of changes all sorts of things quite fundamentally.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think thinking about the pyrocenis or the fire age instead of the Anthropocene helps to really focus attention on that. Because there's always been, there's always been fire. And you've written about that. It's not that fire is inherently bad for ecosystems. In fact, in many respects, it's a necessary process. But it's the fact that the spark is no longer lightning occasionally, but is us whenever we want it.
00:19:18
Speaker
Pine talks about us being the only species that has mastered what he calls the ignition trick. We start fires. We don't wait around until lightning or the occasional volcano sets something on fire. We can do it, more or less it will. If you've got a box of matches in your pocket, you can start a fire.
00:19:37
Speaker
The technology for doing this is simply crucial to human civilizations. It's been crucial to our changing how we do food. We've been able to burn forests to make fields. We burn the stubble on the fields to fertilize them for the next planting. We do fire all the time. What's been different in the last few hundred years
00:20:00
Speaker
is not only have we used coal and peat and a little bit of oil initially for fire, but we've done it now on a vastly greater scale. And we, of course, have used the technology of steam engines and then internal combustion engines to dramatically increase the connections between places, the speed at which we can move, and the sheer amount of stuff we can move is now vastly greater than it
00:20:34
Speaker
of the planetary ecology.
Combustion Sources in Historical Geopolitics
00:20:36
Speaker
We've been slow to realize that the crucial geophysical process at the heart of all of this is our partial control of fire.
00:20:51
Speaker
Indeed. And what that then brings back, because when we're thinking about environment, the questions of security and geopolitics, is just how much of, I suppose, the last 200 years, global geopolitics has been driven more than anything else by the need to secure sources of combustion.
00:21:11
Speaker
Coal was absolutely crucial to the Industrial Revolution. It was crucial to the rise of steam ships and that gave us naval power based on vessels that used coal until the beginning of the 20th century when
00:21:26
Speaker
It began to be very clear that it would be much, much easier to power ships using oil rather than coal, and so gradually that shift became crucial. In the British case, of course, there was plenty of very good coal under Cardiff.
00:21:48
Speaker
under Newcastle and a few other places, which if you could coerce the miners into digging it up, was a guaranteed fuel source for the Royal Navy at least.
00:21:59
Speaker
It was a guarantee source as long as you could actually find places where the ships could come into port and use that fuel. The argument then was, well, oil is a whole lot better for driving ships. But Britain didn't have any oil. This was before North Sea oil was even dreamt of. But there was oil in places like what was then called Persia.
00:22:26
Speaker
So the American subsequently but the British first of all got involved in the Middle East at least in part because they wanted to secure supplies of fuel oil for their for the Navy and this caused of course a major controversy before the First World War and yes Winston Churchill was involved in all that determined that it would make better more powerful ships and you know the
00:22:52
Speaker
Securing the fuel supplies from just places was, of course, an essential part of retooling the Navy to run an oil instead of coal with all the repercussions that that had through the 20th century.
00:23:06
Speaker
So do you think that part of the reason that at the same time that increasingly we can't avoid understanding these global environmental processes as being more and more influential? I mean, we can't ignore the increasing storm events. We can't ignore the statistics about heating. I mean, it seems undeniable. And yet we've got the rise of conventional geopolitical imaginations of the world, whether it's, you know,
00:23:34
Speaker
Trump wanting his walls or taking back control through Brexit, or even in the public imagination, there seems to be an insatiable interest in conventional geopolitical accounts of the world, the prisoners and futures of geography. Why do you think we come back to that way of thinking about the world when it seems so out of kilter with what's going on?
00:23:59
Speaker
Two reasons. One of them is that this is a very simple way of mapping the world. England is here. France is there. Russia is over there. And we've all seen school atlases and they've got these nice colored boxes and it all seems orderly and safe. And just it's part of our geographical imagination. All this stuff about climate change and international commodity chains and everything else is complicated, very difficult to map.
00:24:30
Speaker
And it's very reassuring to have simple here's and there's, our place and their place. And everybody should have a place and stay in their place is a nice orderly way of ordering our thinking. And unfortunately, in the face of uncertainties and rapid change, it's really, really easy to cling
00:24:52
Speaker
to those simple certainties. Of course, that's exactly what populist politicians have figured out and are invoking these kinds of simple geographies. Build the wall, keep them out. Great slogans, geographical nonsense, but very effective politically. This is why it's so worrisome. It's also, of course, the stuff that you and I got started on in terms of trying to think about how
00:25:19
Speaker
geographical categories are so important and so powerful in politics. You need to unpack them and think critically about them.
00:25:28
Speaker
But that's far more difficult to do in simple slogans than the populist language allows simple slogans, simple geographies, and a certainty and a fixity that is most reassuring in very troubled times. And so the
Pandemic Exposes Global Vulnerabilities
00:25:46
Speaker
obvious appeal comes from the simple fact that these are simple facts.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, I was momentarily optimistic at the beginning of the pandemic that some of that was being challenged, that there was a sense of us being a global system of understanding our shared vulnerabilities, our shared interdependencies.
00:26:10
Speaker
And that didn't last very long. I think this horrible phenomena of vaccine nationalism where every politician was going to be judged on whether they managed to get more than their share of the world supply of vaccines. And of course, the rich and powerful grabbed them all. And those in the
00:26:29
Speaker
in the Global South, which didn't have the financial and the political connections, just had to wait. And this really set countries against each other in a way that was most unfortunate. Sometimes it was very humorous. The Trump administration wanted to close
00:26:46
Speaker
closed the border with Canada until somebody pointed out that the one sawmill that produced the crucial paper that was needed in masks was actually in Canada, not in the United States. If you want to close the border, you don't get mask raw materials. This kind of stuff just reminded everybody that, sorry, you can't just close these borders and expect that this will all work out nicely because we will stop everything moving and therefore dangers will be kept at bay.
00:27:16
Speaker
Not least, those kinds of statements came too late because the virus has already got loose and the attempts to close the border were done badly and too late in numerous cases.
00:27:29
Speaker
And I think it did reveal to a lot of us just how porous our borders are to trade, to viruses, to everything apart from people in many respects, or to certain people,
Beyond Simple Geopolitical Narratives
00:27:42
Speaker
of course, from moving. I mean, I was astonished to hear that all the way through lockdown, 10,000 people have been flying into the UK every day. And I just couldn't quite get my head around those numbers. And yet the borders are so intensely policed in other respects.
00:27:59
Speaker
It was very hard because different countries reacted in different ways. I mean, lots of Australians got stranded abroad for many, many months. They were on trips and the borders closed.
00:28:09
Speaker
And yet when Trump closed the border with China, supposedly, there were home jumbo jets of Americans in China that were allowed in without anybody doing a health check or anything more than saying welcome home and stamping the passport. So the complete and utter failure to connect up this sort of quarantine type geography with the practicalities of just
00:28:35
Speaker
aware of where people are traveling really should have highlighted the fact that we are living in a hugely interconnected world for which these simple boundaries and territories are a really bad way of trying to administer things. And we need to think much, much more carefully about how it is that we invoke simple geographical terms because they obscure more than they reveal frequently.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah, and the geographical imagination, we moved on to thinking about the origin of the virus, which became so important and tied into quite well-embedded orientalist images of diseased parts of the world, and then those parts of the world that were healthy and free of disease and somehow being invaded. And it's a language that we've seen being used in geopolitics so often that it so readily can slip back into the way that we think about the world and talk about the world.
00:29:29
Speaker
It's familiar tropes. In a crisis, you resort to familiar tropes like simple geographic names and away you go. And the world we live in of social media and instant headlines encourages slow veneering rather than thinking.
Fire in Environment and Military: A Dual Role
00:29:47
Speaker
And that's part of our problem. And trying to do some serious analysis of it, which is what all geographers should be doing,
00:29:57
Speaker
The more of it we can do to get people to stop and not just accept slogans and not accept simple assumptions about here and there, them and us, diseased and healthy, those kinds of distinctions are what we all have to try and tackle as best we can because this world is globalized, it's interconnected in all sorts of fundamental ways that we're not really yet grappling with.
00:30:27
Speaker
and geographers have got a really useful role to try and point all these kinds of things out.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't think we've been very good at doing that. But I do think your shift towards fire, I think is a really interesting way of thinking about where we are just now, because of that connection between the environmental notion of fire and firepower in terms of that militaristic, even the notion that when you shoot your gun, you're saying fire.
00:30:58
Speaker
at that point. This is presumably a conscious move on your part. Is this an attempt to shift a geopolitical or geographical imagination or a shift in the kind of tropes that we use to try and lead to change in behaviour, change in policy, change in something? I would certainly hope so.
00:31:19
Speaker
Partly, it is driven by being a geographer. And despite the fact that we talk about geography as being an integrative way of thinking, we frequently divide the physics and the physical geography from the human and the social part of it. And of course, fire requires us now to recognize that we have to deal with both wildfire and land use planning or connecting up a geophysical process and the human settlements, how fire spreads
00:31:52
Speaker
related to wind patterns in the physical world, but yet the vulnerabilities of people in the way are part and parcel of what human geographers have to deal with.
Decoupling Energy from Fossil Fuels
00:32:02
Speaker
I'm trying to think also about firepower in two senses, obviously in terms of the military sense of fire, whether it's actually the
00:32:12
Speaker
what shoots things out of the end of the gun barrel or what when the thing that gets shot out of the gun barrel explodes on hitting something with fire power in both its senses but it's also in terms of the power that fire gives us because of our use of fuels in internal combustion engines in particular jet engines rocket motors all of these things are part and parcel also of civilian life.
00:32:38
Speaker
because i turn combustion and trucks are more is our cars and the jet planes we fly around the world in all of them are using power based on fire but if we're going to think about the future.
00:32:53
Speaker
we have to think about using the energy we need, but not getting it from fuel. Because if we can think intelligently about how to electrify our societies, move things without burning stuff, then we're beginning to get a handle on the climate disaster that is currently unfolding. We're going to have to move away from thinking about energy without considering its source. Because clearly, if we are burning stuff, that's what fuels
00:33:22
Speaker
is all about it, stuff that burns, then we are making climate change worse. One of the things we really have to do is pull apart energy and fuel. We need to understand that most of the crises that we call energy crises are actually fuel price crises.
00:33:41
Speaker
And if we're very clear about that, then moving away towards solar wind electricity as a major source of energy doesn't require burning stuff. And that's a big step in the right direction. It's ironic that the vulnerable
00:33:57
Speaker
vulnerabilities both in Europe to fluctuating fuel prices in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reminded us all that we're immensely vulnerable to these long commodity chains that supply us with fuel, the international marketing systems that sends
00:34:15
Speaker
prices all over the place and weird patterns. But it's also the same vulnerability to interrupted fuel supplies that caused the Russian troops outside Kiev to get stuck in mud because they ran out of fuel. Again, they're vulnerable precisely because those fuel supplies got interrupted too.
00:34:35
Speaker
So if we're seriously thinking about environmental security, one of the things we have got to get ourselves off both because of the supply of energy tied into fuel is causing us insecurities, and when we burn it, it's causing us insecurities.
00:34:49
Speaker
Both ends of this have to be brought together in this discussion about environmental security. And of course, fire is at the heart of this. We have got to burn a lot less stuff if we are going to be secure, and we would be secure in the military sense if we start firing, as that word again, off all sorts of munitions at each other or threatening to do so too. And at the heart of all of this is this process of combustion.
00:35:14
Speaker
which, Pine reminds us, only humans have learned to do. So it all ties together, and I'm actually trying to find a way that is practical for geographers and for people concerned about both climate and energy, not to mention people that worry about security.
00:35:32
Speaker
try to find a way to tie all these discussions together, which gives us mutual benefits by dramatically controlling our use of fire. And that's the key way of trying to link all these things together that I've been working with for the last few years.
Applying Non-proliferation to Fossil Fuel Reduction
00:35:49
Speaker
And I think you come up with a really interesting way of doing that in a way that might make headway into more policy type discussions or more conventional geopolitical type discussions. When you talk about, because of that kind of elision of environmental and military ideas through the concept of fire, maybe learning from sort of military diplomacy and something like non-proliferation treaties as a way to think about reducing dependence on particular fuels.
00:36:19
Speaker
That's an emergent discussion that I think we all need to stop and think very carefully about. Back when I started thinking about this, we were worried about nuclear war. We started this podcast by talking about nuclear winter and the dangers that came from that. Of course, one of the policy efforts that was then started in the 80s to try to reduce the risks of nuclear war was to try to do
00:36:42
Speaker
what they called arms control, literally slow down and stop the production of ever more nuclear weapons because the assumption was the more of them lying around, the more likely that an accident will happen and we'll get a war which will kill us all. The war would have been
00:37:00
Speaker
caused by fire in various different forms. The destruction that comes from combustion is massive in the nuclear war. But we are now facing a situation where we are facing massive destruction indirectly by the use of fire in the other form in terms of civilian use of combustion in engine
00:37:20
Speaker
So the argument is, well, that massive danger was confronted by trying to reduce the number of weapons quite directly by stopping making them and getting an agreement on the key powers which stop making them. So it's the parallel that we stop digging fossil fuels out of the ground. We stop making carbon dioxide by stopping getting the stuff that makes carbon dioxide out of the ground in the first place.
00:37:46
Speaker
So can we have a fuel non-proliferation arrangement that literally keeps the stuff in the ground?
00:37:56
Speaker
And as long as it's in the ground, it's not being burned, so it's not causing us all sorts of dangers. That discussion is emerging now. And for me, of course, the fire is the bit that connects the two discussions up, because fire is what is actually the cause of the danger in both cases. So are the lessons that can be learned from military security in terms of arms control and apply the same kind of policy tools to climate security by keeping the fossil fuels in the ground.
00:38:24
Speaker
There's an emerging discussion about that, and if there's any budding postgraduate geographers listening to the podcast, there's a topic to link climate and energy and war and security, crucial policy discussions, well worthy of a few theses and dissertations over the next couple of years. So get to it. I think it's a perfect place to stop. Thanks very much, Simon.