By Lindon Pronto and Johann Goldammer, Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC)

This article appears in the September 2016 Newsletter of the Commonwealth Forestry Association

Every year, roughly an average of about 600 million hectares of vegetated lands is affected by land-use fires and wildfires (Mouillot and Field, 2005).…

The old proverb—fire makes a good servant but a bad master—has become too literal a guiding doctrine, for too long. This understanding characterizes fire entirely within the context of how humans relate to fire, while neglecting fires’ innate role within the natural environment, as an ancient earthly element, much older and perhaps much wiser than we human…