A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of fuel with heat and light given off, and in landscape terms it is a process that a great many ecosystems are built around rather than an interruption of them. Chaparral, boreal forest, longleaf pine savanna, cerrado, and fynbos all carry species that require it, with seeds that will not open, cones that will not release, and buds that will not break without it.
Etymology
English has two words for fire and inherited them from two different directions. Fire is the old Germanic word, from a root that named the substance as a thing, and it is the one that became the everyday noun. The other root came in through Latin and gives ignite, igneous, and ignition, and it named fire as a living force. Both survive in English, which is why the rock is igneous and the wood is on fire.
Notes
The lexicon’s entries for fire regime, fire mosaic, fire-stick farming, firebreak, and free-burning cover the working vocabulary. The single largest thing to know about fire in landscape is that suppression is itself a management decision with consequences, and that many of the places people describe as untouched were shaped for thousands of years by deliberate burning.