6.4.2 Tria juncta in uno: A Pyrosystemic Synthesis

As discussed earlier, myriad sources suggest that our ancient ancestors feared not fire. On the contrary, they worshipped it, for they, as do clades of our closest living relative, g.Pan [chimpanzee], recognised it held potentialities. However, as humans migrated out of Africa and to the present day, we transcended several “pyric phases” (Bowman et al, 2011, p.2229), which though not universal in their spatiotemporal distribution across species, let alone civilisations, nonetheless constitute a series of paradigmatic shifts of which, until recently, the general direction of travel has been towards eradicating wildfire from ‘wildlands’.

Beyond the field of fire ecology, recognition of the adverse implications of anthropogenic augmentation of fire-prone landscapes is slowly, but surely filtering through to they that are logic, therein science-led, within society at large. However, the matter that myriad internal and external factors contribute to the propagation of a paradox, of which a root cause is the fact that not merely are the manifold and complex implications to biotic and abiotic systems distributed in space and time, but across verified timescales (Spies et al, 2014, p.3), renders only they as have either first-hand experience and/or capacity for abstract thinking across multiple disciplines and scales able to fully grasp the gravitas of the situation. If applying Jung’s theory of Psychological Types (2017), they as align to all of the four primary variations thereof could, in theory, grasp the systemic dynamics. However, they of whom the worldview is predominantly informed by the senses and/or feeling will likely do so only upon witnessing phenomena first hand, and even then, their interpretation will be led by what they believe they see or feel.

One might reasonably posit that variations in psychological types could explain why, no matter the extent of the environmental, and in turn societal pandemonium projected to come forth from the Pandorian pyxis within the land-use-type known as the wildland urban interface there remains a veritable paneremos of panoptical paradigmatic interrogations of the architectural and urban design thereof. However, whatsoever the causation, as discussed throughout the preceding chapters, significant is the body of transdisciplinary data as suggests our species, and in turn and descendants thereof, need relearn how to metaphorically dance, not ‘play’ with fire. When such is the gap between the workings of fire regimes, and in turn, the processes as are collectively referred to as Earth systems, and the predominant WUI paradigm of present, nothing short of a philosophical pan-genesis is proposed, wherein, to co- opt a statement by Darwin in relation to his Pangenesis hypothesis, a bringing together of “a multitude of facts, which are at present left disconnected by any efficient cause” is pursued (Darwin, 2010, p.357).