The new politics of fire: The climate crisis demands a different way of governing

We live in an age of fire. The list of its political manifestations is long: the image of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed and car bombings or self-immolations at political protests, wars and incendiary speech meant to incite hatred toward others, the “melting pot” of immigration and political kitchens where policy matters were decided by the tightest circle of ministers. But something else is going on with the politics of fire today, something worth reflecting upon so as to realize where our world ablaze is heading.

The prospects of the entire planet going up in flames are at their highest. Global heating, well in excess of internationally agreed-upon limits, and continued reliance on massive incineration of matter for energy production; the warming not only of the atmosphere but also of the oceans; hybrid warfare, now involving AI, and the recently reignited nuclear arms race; inflammatory rhetoric immediately going viral thanks to the pervasiveness of information technologies are so many signs of a devastating fire swallowing up not (only) the world but the earth itself, with its atmosphere and ecosystems, habitable places and previously inaccessible fossil reserves. The forest fires raging everywhere, from LA in 2025 to Spain and Canada in the summer of 2024, are a case in point here.

We are no longer sensing the transformative, positive effects of fire, be it the flames of technology or be it a revolutionary conflagration capable of instituting another economic and political mode of existence. In combination, the reignited arms race and the non-enforceable nature of international climate treatises amount to a scorching heat devoid of any light.

The contemporary flames have a decidedly apocalyptic feel to them. This is the case, in part, because the ashes they produce are not fertile; they suffocate, rather than nourish, the very possibility of the future. The byproducts of mass-scale industrial activity and nuclear waste are just two examples of such death-bearing ashes. Devastating as they were, “scorched earth” warfare tactics still contained the promise of a new beginning in the future, bearing as they did a close resemblance to the myth of the phoenix, reborn from the smoldering remains of its previous life. Today’s “scorched world” no longer sustains this hope.

The world comes into view as a whole precisely when it is ready to burn up all at once. And the technologies responsible for global heating as much as those that may result in a thermonuclear war are making this terrifying vision of the finite world sharper than the catastrophic history of the two wars in the twentieth century known as “world wars.” The end of globalization is heralded by ultra-nationalist far-right movements that nonetheless maintain clandestine ties among them and represent the old-new face of capital. Is it by sheer chance that this contrived end coincides with the technological potential to wreck the world as such in its planetary extent, rather than the separate worlds of particular civilizations or peoples?

Another cause for despair is the relation to all matters fiery by politicians of every stripe. On the one hand, technocratic governments — mostly in the West, whatever this disoriented orientational term means, in light of the inclusion of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand — are all but resigned to their own incapacity to regulate the fires of global heating and public affect, actual forest fires and the feared flames of a nuclear holocaust. Instead, they dedicate themselves to the futile task of temporarily putting out some local fires, while others are ignited and still others rage uncontrollably. Despite their managerial approach to governance, they ultimately deal with the unmanageable. On the other hand, right-wing populisms and neo-fascisms thrive on fanning the flames of every conflagration imaginable, from hatred toward the other and the foreign to the blaze of global heating, given the unrestricted and indeed increased extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Whether due to the incapacity or due to the unwillingness to regulate their intensities, fires of every kind imaginable rage and ravage the planet.

More than that, we live in an epoch when fire (or, more precisely, its use) comes into its own, dispelling the daydream that, once unleashed, it can be easily controlled. Political and ecological fires appear terrifying and overwhelming, their elemental nature coming to the fore. Perhaps, this is a final footnote to the Promethean endeavor, which was based on the desire to control fire, on harnessing its explosive potentiality and placing it within definite spatial or purpose-oriented constraints. From the steam engine to nuclear fission, industrial and postindustrial production (of energy, and much else) relishes its illusion of control, while spawning uncontrollable side effects, ranging from CO2 atmospheric pollution to runaway chain reactions and non-disposable nuclear waste. What is gradually changing is not the sudden irruption of uncontrollability itself, but awareness about it — though there is still plenty of hope around that technological solutions could be found to the multiplying crises, reinforcing one another in positive feedback loops.

In light (and in the heat) of the current conflagration, it is easy to succumb to irresistible despair. But necessity is the mother of invention, and the turning point lies not so far from the point of sheer disappointment, despondency, and gloom. So, what if we did not have to burn anything, while still procuring enough energy? An apparent utopia, this has been crucial to the life of plants for millions of years. In their practical relation to energy, they demonstrate an evolutionary realization that it is redundant to burn anything here on earth, because the daily blaze of the sun caters to all energy needs in abundance. Plants do not rebuff fire, but merely displace it in time and cosmic space. Vegetal receptivity to the sun, to its light and heat, is an alternative to igniting fires (with the proviso that a few tree species, such as eucalyptus, actually welcome an earthly fire as well). If necessity is the mother of invention, then there is no need to invent anything yet unseen or unheard of — merely to learn from plants how to recalibrate our relation to energy and to fire.

Politically, plants are not the absolute sun worshipers they are made out to be; they are not the conduits of the cosmopolitical figure of the One (God, King, Star…) Even as heliotropes, or the flowers that follow the movement of the sun across the sky throughout the day, they stretch up, down, and sideways at the same time, anarchically dispersing the principle (and the political principal thing, the authority) among several elements.

The new shape of the politics of fire is as sharp and discernible as it is still vaguely unrecognizable, depending on whether the vegetal recalibration and moderation of fire is on the horizon. Much hinges on the plants’ own relation to fire on the earth scale and on our relation to this relation. Will the living and the long-dead forests (those converted into oil, coal, and natural gas) be engulfed in the flames, burning up the entire planet? Or will the growing-metamorphosing-decaying plants lead the way in renegotiating the approach to, as well as the applications and implications of, fire for the sake of a livable future?