I almost called this blog, "Kids Should Play With Fire", but in our modern times, it seems we are almost constantly facing some form of fire danger and/or smoke challenges when summer comes regardless of where we live in the world. With this being the case, I think it's prudent to be mindful and respectful of any discussion of fire. While my son Orion is literally at Fire Camp this week (with a simultaneous fire ban in effect) and my daughter Tara and Orion spent the early part of the summer playing with and developing fire skill almost every day, the reality is humanity's relationship with fire is more complicated than ever.
There's a good soaking rain that just came through the PNW where I live, and yet there are still multiple wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California, and the town of Jasper was just devastated by wildfire up in Canada. Clearly, these are challenging times, and we must have a clear relationship with fire.
All that being said, I do think kids need to play with fire (under the right situation and circumstances). I've seen time and time again that kids have a natural interest, passion, and curiosity about fire. What burns? How? For how long? What can you use to start a fire? How do you keep it going?
These are very, very old questions. After all, humans and proto-humans have had a relationship with fire for over a million years. In fact, many anthropologists make the argument that fire actually helped make us human. So, it's no wonder that kids are naturally drawn to learn how to make it and what works best. It's instinctual, it's natural, it's fundamentally human.
But, what happens if kids aren't allowed to make fire? What if there always told it's too dangerous? What if they never learn what burns or not?
Well, in my experience I've seen two very clear scenarios that tend to play out. One, kids grow into incompetent teens and adults who don't know how to work with fire safely, adequately, or in a competent manner, and they actually become dangerous to themselves and others regarding fire. Or, two they have a suppressed passion and interest in fire that leads to unsafe, unsupervised experimentation with fire which can and does sometimes lead into the more serious mental health issue of pyromania.
Teaching kids how to safely make a fire (materials, structure, appropriate conditions) is a good start. They need to know about how to make a fire pit, how to properly extinguish a fire, how to watch out for fire dangers, and when you shouldn't make a fire. I believe fire can be a great teacher and mentor for kids when we give kids good supervision, appropriate tools and conditions, and freedom to experiment.
There are some larger issues for us all to look at regarding humans and fire. Widescale fire suppression as the main strategy of the US Forest Service and National Park Service has led to very large tracts of forest that probably should have burned a long time ago. A sudden reversal of that policy in the last decade combined with record high and dry temperatures has led to a tinder box forest for much of the world.
Contrast this with again a more ancient relationship with fire. Indigenous people in both North America and Australia (and probably plenty of other places) practiced very sophisticated methods of controlled burns using thousands of years of relationship with land to know how to use fire as an ally to nourish the land, the ecosystem, and the people.
My first ancestral skills teacher spoke of this many decades ago. He described traditional Native North American migration patterns and fire practices as based around forest edges and harnessing dead, down, and dry wood to make camp and cooking fires with. This naturally reduced the load of natural tinder and kindling in a giving forest, and when combined with controlled seasonal burns created a very different forest than what we see now.
As we go deeper into the 21st century, it is clear that fire is part of our future. How exactly that plays out and what we chose to do about it remain to be seen. For me, I come back to the basic idea that has been around for a long time: Fire is a being to be respected and honored, and when you do so, it becomes a powerful teacher.
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