On Photosynthesis and Pyrotechnics: Life Between Fire and Law

A prelude to a history of the concepts that have defined the intellectual trajectories and disciplinary separation of economics and ecology, this chapter posits the basic elements of a critical bioeconomics. Recognising first the foundational importance of photosynthesis in life’s unique trajectory on Earth, we then identify a common feature of all known human economies. Through a discussion of the ‘firestick farming’ practised for millennia by the first nations of Aboriginal Australia, it is argued that this is not Adam Smith’s ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’, but pyrotechnology: the skilful utilisation of fire. A multiplicity of pyrotechnical arts have empowered human social endeavour to transform the Earth, intentionally and otherwise. Now, Earth system scientists warn that runaway global heating, ocean acidification, and mass extinction will result from a failure to rapidly curb the unconscious appetite for hydrocarbon combustion of thermoindustrial society. Unless economic theory and governance comes to terms with the photosynthetic preconditions of biological and economic life, and succeeds permanently in shifting us to energy sources that involve ‘more light than heat’, we will condemn our descendants a future of ever ‘more heat than life’.