The discussion of fire and the matter of living in the Anthropocene keeps circling back to the question of what we make and how what we make shapes our landscapes and the planet as a whole. While environmental campaigns have frequently been about protecting landscapes and ecosystems from damage due to industrial activities, and these remain important, the bigger questions raised by the Anthropocene focus on production. It's all about what we make, and crucially what what we make does to the Earth system, to invoke Foucault's phrase once again.

Fire has allowed us to change our habitats dramatically. But while fossil fuels have made some parts of humanity wealthy it is clear that we cannot go on using them the way we have done for the last couple of centuries. The Green New Deal idea, some of the policies which were partially incorporated into the US 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, suggests making very different things for a society that is fairer and one that can survive in the long term.

Humanity cannot go on using firepower without constraint both because of the dangers of climate change, and because of pollution from plastics and all the destruction that the current combustive mode of economy entails. Lobbying and attempts to change public policy have only worked up to a point. Other strategies are clearly needed as the activists in climate strikes, tyre extinguishers and many other campaigns are reminding us daily.

Clearly, humanity is making far too much carbon dioxide. Which in turn raises the question who decides what gets made? Investment is central here as divestment activists have figured out; money spent on pipelines and oil wells isn't money spent on solar panels. Money invested in making internal combustion engines isn't going to make batteries or electric motors. Funding, as provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act, to make and install heat pumps in American homes has the potential to speed up the electrification of heating and in the process use energy much more efficiently. Comfortable houses, reduced electricity bills and less climate disruption all go together.

There were fortunes to be made in coal and then oil, and now gas too. More than just fortunes are involved; modern economies depend on these fuels, and states only function if fuels are available to keep modern life going. Access to fuel has been essential to the security of modern states and their inhabitants. The rivalries of states and corporations, the struggles for dominance and control, the political arguments about who has access to what where matters. In other words, geopolitics are indivisible from fossil fuels in the modern world. Other resources have been involved in all sorts of conflict and imperial plunder through history (LeBillon 2012), but oil has pride of place in recent decades.

A sustainable future now requires dismantling these systems and replacing both the technologies and their social and economic arrangements with ones fit for a small vulnerable biosphere. No longer can assumptions of a big world as a stage for geopolitics operate if the long-term future of humanity is to be secured. Numerous peoples have long paid a high price for the struggles for power and space set in motion by European colonization and the expansion of capitalism through the Earth system (Grove 2019). Now even those who have benefited most from these colonial arrangements and their subsequent evolution into the global economy are beginning to feel the impacts of sea-level rise and climate disruption.

The large oil companies are truly global companies with holdings and infrastructure in many countries. Crucially in many places they held the rights to exploit petroleum and their wealth was tied to the valuations of these reserves. This is often still the case and stock values are linked directly to gaining access to what lies deep underground. States have struggled to exploit these resources and enrich themselves in the process too. The case of the Gulf States, sheikdoms sitting on oil fields, emphasizes the point that there are vast fortunes to be made. But fuel resources are unevenly spread around the globe, and while some states and corporations have gained enormous wealth others have had economic disruptions because of their dependence on fuel from abroad.

The Promethean moment

Since life first emerged from oceans and plants started growing on land surfaces fires have had fuel. It's so obvious that we don't often think about it, but stuff that was once living is what burns. Trees provide firewood. The paper we use to start fires in our coal or wood burning stoves comes from trees. If we use fire starters instead of paper most of them are petroleum based. And petroleum is in fact a deeply buried residue of former life.

Mostly we burn fossil fuels. Coal, petroleum and natural gas all come from the remains of decayed living things. Organic material, stuff that was once living, has lots of carbon in it, and burning it produces carbon dioxide gas. Once it collects in the atmosphere it traps heat and warms the world. Oxygen is a by-product of life too, and it is also what is needed to make fire. That and a spark to start a flame so that the process of combining the carbon from organic stuff, things that were once alive, with oxygen in the air, can happen.

We will never know exactly how the human use of fire started, but it is a reasonable guess that it started in various places in different ways. What matters, as fire historian Steven Pyne (2021) makes very clear, is that, unlike any other species we learned to start fires. Yes, we have language, and culture, and tools, and religions and lots of other things that we think separate us from other species. But beavers are great hydrological engineers; elephants have complicated communication systems; whales too. Ants and other insects build complex structures. Only us humans start fires.

Once we learned that “ignition trick” in Pyne's apt phrase, we could have fires pretty much where and when we wanted them. It is difficult in the rain for sure and fires are hard in a desert or on Arctic ice sheets, far from plants to use for fuel. But nonetheless we could have heat where we needed it much of the time, and that made a difference, a very big one as it turned out.

It would be a mistake to argue that fire explains all human history. It is not the only thing we need to focus on in trying to think through the implications of the Anthropocene for how we need to live in coming decades. Other things matter too: culture, politics and the new innovations of digital technologies. But when you dig into these other aspects of human accomplishment, somewhere in there fire has historically played a key role.

We are an urban species now; the majority of us live in cities and towns, and even those of us who don't live in cities rely on all sorts of things that urban civilization provides. Humans live scattered all over the planet, mostly on land, although a few of us are on the water on in the air at any one given moment! But wherever we live we rely on cooked food for our subsistence, and until the invention of microwaves, cooking relied on an external source of heat, and most of that heat was a matter of fire of some form or other.

Food is key to cultural life for most of us. Kitchens have stoves, and these places are key to social life. Fireplaces in many homes have long been the source of heat, the focus of family life. Hearth and home go together. Rituals of food preparation, family recipes and shared meals are all tied into the apparatus of heating to cook food. Cooking, as Stephen Pyne puts it, has changed us in numerous ways because it has dramatically altered what we can digest, allowing us, unlike most other species, to become omnivorous, able to eat all sorts of things.

Simple fires offer warmth and the ability to cook food. These two key parts of human life have effectively been moved from our bodies to the surrounding habitat. Our digestions are extended by cooking, allowing us to eat things from which we would otherwise have trouble gaining nourishment.

Stephen Pyne's (2015, 2021) accounts of fire history show that we have been changing the way we engineer fire. From the early days of open fires, we added furnaces for smelting, fireboxes for steam engines, and then the pistons and cylinders of internal combustion engines. All of these are about constraining and controlling the forces of combustion to make it serve our needs. Recently we have added fire engines, hoses, and preventative measures in terms of building codes, sprinkler systems, and fire hydrants to city streets too so we can better deal with things when they burn where they should not. Now we need to constrain fire still further so that we can control the large-scale consequences of our use of combustion. If we do so, in turn we will have a better chance of tackling the wildfires.

Can we, as Naomi Klein (2014) suggested a decade ago, reimagine our cities in ways that take their energy consumption seriously and allow us to regain control of it from fossil fuel companies? Some cities and municipalities, faced with rising tides, damage from storms and citizens demanding action, are starting to declare states of climate emergency. They are beginning to think long and hard about how to both adapt to changes that are unavoidable, and act in ways that don't make things even worse. Can industrial societies also curtail the exploitation of resources from the lands of conquered peoples, and in the process rebuild energy systems that can give them economic futures and a life within their ecological contexts? This should help with the extinction crisis that we all face.

Reworking our financial institutions to invest in sensible buildings, energy systems that do not require burning things, and remaking cities that are much healthier both because they have less pollution and can better cope with extreme weather, is a future worth working hard for; the Greta Thunberg generation deserve no less. Babcock Ranch in Florida, the community designed to run on solar power and to deal with extreme weather, which survived Hurricane Ian in 2022, points the way to building and planning sensibly for a climate-disrupted future.

In November 2018 wildfire destroyed Paradise. The town in California, that is. The so called “Camp Fire” killed 85 people in the town and surrounding area. That year also, fires burned large parts of Siberia, New Zealand and Canada, killed motorists in Portugal and Greece and eradicated crucial ecosystems in Tasmania.

These forest fires are getting hotter and bigger and are burning more places. More than ten million acres of forest burned in the United States for the first time in 2015, and then again in 2017, and in 2020. By late June in 2023, halfway through the fire season, more forest area had burned in Canada than in any previous complete season. The smoke from these wildfires in Canada caused air quality health alerts in New York and elsewhere in the United States.

In July 2023 media reports of wildfire on the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean showed tourists struggling to escape the flames. A record-breaking hot summer in the region set the scene for wildfire. Heat records were also being broken widely elsewhere, notably in Iran and in India. In August wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui the other side of the world becoming the deadliest blaze in modern US history.

The power of these fires when they get going is staggering; temperatures get so hot that trees explode and timber-framed houses and their contents are vaporized (Vaillant 2023). Temperatures over 500°C loft smoke into the stratosphere, generating pyrocumulonimbus clouds and fire-driven weather systems. The level of destruction, of trees, houses, and whatever else gets in the way of these fires is increasing. Fighting fires requires larger and larger efforts; insurance costs for lost property are rising too.

Climate change is clearly making those wildfires worse as droughts and extreme temperatures extend fire seasons. The winter of 2019 was unusually hot and dry in Australia; its wildfires have become an ever-increasing hazard. The following year brought even more extensive wildfires and a terrible toll on wildlife and property. Dramatic pictures of people being evacuated off a beach grabbed the world's attention.

Wasta

A blanket term that encompasses a multitude of informal interactions common in Arab societies employed for faster procurement of needs, mediation of conflict and receipt of personal favours.

Wasta stems from Arab traditional tribal practices of family mediation, and is generally understood to entail the intervention of a third-party patron to secure a service for an individual. However, since the mid-twentieth century it has taken on different forms, including potentially corrupt practices such as nepotism, cronyism, clientelism and patronage in obtaining exclusive access to public-and private-sector resources. Wasta is associated with favouritism, literally translating to “middlemanship”, and has been solidified in contemporary Arab discourse as synonymous with corruption. This is due to the exclusivity of wasta; the practice is reflective of social class, family influence and personal connections. Thus, the majority of people do not have the necessary social capital to deploy wasta when needed. Examples of the applications of wasta may include (but are not limited to): securing a job or promotion, securing a place at a university, skipping a queue or waiting list, speeding up paperwork, and, sometimes, overlooking minor legal violations.

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Watergate

A political corruption scandal in which US president Richard Nixon was implicated in a plot aimed at sabotaging and spying on the Democratic Party, exposed as a result of a break-in in 1972 at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC.

“Watergate” was subsequently revealed to have been a plot orchestrated by President Nixon and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP). Nixon and other culprits actively attempted to cover up their involvement including by shredding evidence and halting FBI investigations. However, this conduct was exposed when the Supreme Court ordered the release of the “smoking gun” tape, an audio recording of a meeting in which Nixon is heard formulating a plan to block investigations.

The perpetrators of the break-in were deliberately paid using cash and cashier's cheques in an effort to conceal money flows (see money laundering), but some burglars were on the White House payroll and the numbered bills found were traced back to the banks which had issued them, connecting them to Nixon and CREEP.

National Integrity System (NIS)

An approach that assumes integrity in certain key institutions provides a country with a higher level of resilience against corruption.

The NIS approach dates from the 1990s when it was developed by Transparency International (TI) as a means of combining analysis and reform proposals at country level (Langseth et al. 1997). An NIS survey is usually conducted by civil society or academics, using a multi-stakeholder approach to gather information and verify the results. These can be conducted independently of TI, although TI is the central resource for the methodology and guidance and its national chapters have conducted most of such studies.

The underlying theory is that a country's “national integrity” or level of corruption rests on the performance of certain key institutions which provide a defence against corruption. The institutions are not specifically anti-corruption institutions but are fundamental to a country's structure and culture. These are often portrayed visually as the pillars of a Greek temple. Many pillars of integrity are relatively uncontroversial and universal, such as the judiciary.

Critics have noted that the relevant pillars should be varied by country, as well as there being subjectivity around the interpretation of “integrity”, and that assessments risk being disproportionately reliant on anti-corruption policies and procedures and compliance-based approaches. However, the NIS guidance has been updated to reflect these critiques and, although resource-intensive – and so rarely carried out – the NIS approach is regarded as a useful tool for assessing the strength of a country's anti-corruption defences.

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Further reading

Brown, A. & F. Heinrich 2017. “National Integrity Systems: an evolving approach to anti-corruption policy evaluation”. Crime, Law and Social Change 68: 283– 92.

Heywood, P. & E. Johnson 2017. “Cultural specificity versus institutional universalism: a critique of the National Integrity System (NIS) methodology”. Crime, Law and Social Change 68: 309– 24.

Langseth, P., R. Stapenhurst & J. Pope 1997. “The role of a National Integrity System in fighting corruption”. Commonwealth Law Bulletin 23: 499– 528.

Natural resource governance

The application of fundamental governance concepts such as oversight, accountability and transparency to the natural resources sector, and typically to oil, gas and mining specifically as a means of addressing corruption.

Laundromats

Complex financial schemes designed to move very large quantities of money or assets – usually derived from illicit activities including various forms of corruption or organized crime – across international borders and in the process clean (or launder) the funds so that they can enter the legitimate economy.

The term “laundromat” was coined by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) following its investigation into and exposure of a series of international money laundering schemes. The OCCRP has exposed several such schemes, including: the Proxy Platform in 2011, the Russian Laundromat in 2014, the Azerbaijani Laundromat in 2017 and the Troika Laundromat in 2019. In 2022, Transparency International exposed another operation, which it named the Bottle Laundromat; the London Laundromat is the name given to the role that London and its financial services play in cleaning “dirty money”, particularly for Russian oligarchs.

Laundromats involve very large quantities of funds and an extremely high number of transactions and related vehicles. For example, the Russian Laundromat involved the laundering of $20.8 billion from 19 Russian banks, through 5,140 companies with accounts at 732 banks in 96 countries (OCCRP 2017). Laundromat schemes are characterized by the involvement of banks, secretive offshore shell companies with proxy directors and shareholders, and formation agents able to quickly create and dissolve the offshore companies.

In the simplest terms: banks with weak anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance procedures enable illegal funds to enter the financial system (placement). The funds are then converted or moved to distance them from their source, often through the bank accounts of shell companies and offshore financial centres (layering). These funds then re-enter the legitimate economy through legal purchases or investments (integration). Where concerns are raised or when investigations are undertaken, the legal system is often ill-equipped to trace or respond to the complexity of the financial manoeuvres.

Investigations into Laundromats have revealed the sophisticated way in which illicit funds, often the proceeds of corruption, can be laundered by engineered complexity and building cycle after cycle of financial transac-tions. Each transaction launders the money a little more by creating greater distance from the original source of the funds. Involving well-regarded financial institutions at the earliest possible stage is an important part of the process.

Zero tolerance

A term commonly used by organizations including companies, civil society organizations and international development agencies to signal a firm stance against corruption.

“Zero tolerance” implies that an organization will make the maximum effort to prevent corruption, as well as to hold any individual(s) involved in corruption to account. The term is promoted as a means to elevate the seriousness of the issue and eliminate any ambiguity around the acceptability of different forms of corruption.

A zero-tolerance stance may however have the adverse effect of discouraging reporting of corruption or appearing to set an unrealistic goal. For this reason, it is sometimes considered a contentious term. Some commentators have argued instead for a more realistic and scaled response to corruption. In this vein, zero tolerance would be enforced through proportionate risk management and viewed as an aspirational goal and not a target. Furthermore, zero tolerance for corruption should not be misconstrued as zero tolerance for corruption risk, since risks can be managed and mitigated, particularly if assessed properly through a corruption risk assessment.

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Zondo Commission

A public inquiry established in South Africa in 2018 to investigate allegations of state capture, corruption and fraud in the public sector, presided over by Judge Raymond Zondo.

The commission was created on the recommendation of a report by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela in 2016, State of Capture, which detailed her investigation into improper relationships between president Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family (see Zuma, Jacob case study). The commission inter-viewed almost 300 witnesses over a three-year period and compiled its findings into a five-part report published in 2022.

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Zuma, Jacob and the Guptas: case study

State capture in post-apartheid South Africa involving the president and the misallocation of government resources.

Three Indian-born brothers – Ajay, Atul and Rajesh Gupta – are widely regarded as key individuals behind the “state capture” of post-apartheid South Africa. During the presidency of Jacob Zuma (2009– 18), the Guptas used their contacts in the highest echelons of South African politics to win lucrative state contracts and heavily influence political appointments.

UNCAC Coalition

An international network of civil society organizations at the national, regional and international level advocating for the ratification, implementation and transparent and inclusive monitoring of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).

Founded in 2006 and based in Vienna, the UNCAC Coalition consists of around 350 civil society organizations from 100 countries. The Coalition concentrates on the convention's key issues including access to information, asset recovery, beneficial ownership transparency and protection of whistleblowers and anti-corruption activists. The Coalition further advocates for the recognition of the rights of victims of corruption, and the recognition of grand corruption as an international crime.

The Coalition holds events, publishes reports, develops policy proposals, and delivers guidance and training to governments and civil society about UNCAC. It also advocates for the inclusion of civil society in all UNCAC meetings and for the contribution of civil society organizations in the UNCAC review process, although some governments remain strongly resistant to this.

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Unexplained wealth

Assets held by a person that clearly exceed what they could reasonably be expected to own through lawful acquisition.

The closely-related concept of illicit enrichment is defined in Article 20 of United Nations Convention against Corruption as “a significant increase in the assets of a public official that he or she cannot reasonably explain in relation to his or her lawful income”.

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Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWOs)

A legal mechanism for non-conviction based asset forfeiture.

The presence of unexplained wealth can form the basis for civil or criminal action in cases where a predicate offence cannot be identified or proven. Civil powers such as “unexplained wealth orders” (UWOs) focus on assets rather than the conduct of individuals. Some jurisdictions favour the use of these tools over criminal seizure powers, as they provide for a “rebuttable presumption”. In such a scenario, assets are initially frozen and only deemed recoverable in cases where a respondent does not comply with a UWO. Such reverse burdens of proof have proved controversial due to a perceived incompatibility with a respondent's right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. The “rebuttal presumption” therefore has the advantage of providing an avenue for civil recovery of assets, as well as constituting an investigative tool for enforcement agencies, while preserving the rights of the respondent.