A Burning Issue: Anthropogenic Vegetation Fires

Abstract

Human-induced vegetation fires play a central role in past and present nature-society interactions. Tens of thousands of years ago, hunter-gatherers presumably employed fires as a hunting technique. Today, vegetation fires continue to be an integral part of shifting cultivation and traditional pastoralism, and they are a crucial tool for the clearing of forests. In industrial regions, however, vegetation fires are increasingly seen as a risk that threatens valuable infrastructures and contributes to climate change and air pollution. This chapter considers human-induced vegetation fires from a socioecological perspective. It begins with a quantitative estimate of the global relevance of human-induced vegetation fires and continues with a discussion of how these fires can be integrated into basic socioecological concepts. In a further section, we develop a global ideal typology of vegetation fires, which can serve as a basis for discussing their complex variety. We conclude with the question of to what extent and under which circumstances human-induced vegetation fires are sustainable. Overall, this chapter shows that human-induced vegetation fires continue to play a crucial role in society-nature interactions, and it demonstrates that Social Ecology provides important tools to analyze and conceptualize human-induced fires at different scales.