As I have said ealier Burning Behavior (BB) really took off in the 17th century:

As a means of recording the passage of time, the 17th century was that century which lasted from 1601–1700 in the Gregorian calendar.

The 17th century falls into the Early Modern period of Europe and was characterized by the Baroque cultural movement and the beginning of modern science and philosophy, including the contributions of Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton; Europe was torn by warfare throughout the century, by the Thirty Years’ War, the Great Turkish War and the English Civil War among others, while European colonization of the Americas began in earnest.

Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu is the founder of Japan’s last shogunate, which lasted well into the 19th century.In the east, the 17th century saw the flowering of the Ottoman and Mughal empires, the beginning of the Edo period in feudal Japan, and the violent transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty in China.

As did the population: 

BB has made this Population possible. It seems that one feeds off the other and vice versa. Many combustibles have been burned over the last several hundred years including, peat, sticks, charcoal, wood, dried manure, coal (of several types), agricultural, redidential, industrial, medical and commercial waste, oil (in several forms), ethanol and other alcohol derivatives, nitroglycerin, various rocket fuels including hydrogen and oxygen, and finally the heavy metals (i.e., uranium, e.g.). The point here is not to create a catalog of combustibles because lets face it, if you get anything hot enough it will burn.

While I have to admit that writing an essay on the history of BB and manure might be fun in part because people are still doing it.

 www.energyunlimitedinc.com/manure.html. 

It would be fun because of all the poopoo and crap jokes I could tell. However, this is a Blog not a term paper or an exhaustive Dissertation. I just want people to see through all the “global warming isn’t happening” nonsense and “humans didn’t cause it, even if it is” Bart Simpsonisms and think about why we must stop most BB and soon.

Lets take a short look at coal  BB to act as a standard for all the BB we do. I know a lot of eco types would pick oil as the standard. It is radically inefficient. Find it, drill it, pump it, transport it, refine it, transport it again and then burn it. Still, we have been burning coal for at least several thousand years, much longer than oil, and the trail of evidence is much simpler. Dig it up, transport it and burn it. Though those crafty mine owners are now getting ready to build their electric power plants next to their mines to cut out the cost of the railroads.

For an excellent history of coal mining, child labor, explosions and just the continuing nastyness of coal mining look here http://www.pitwork.net/history1.htm.

 It contains an interesting report by the great author Charles Dickens. Remember that at the same time last week that 9 coal miners died in Utah in August 07, 129 miners died in China. Anyway records show that we burned “exposed” coal and “near the surface” coal seams from 100-200 B.C to today. Like I said, it was not before the realization that the more you burned the more Work you could do culminated in the discovery of steel. The discovery of steel led to the building of ever-larger machines. Bigger machines led to burning for (steam) transportation. Transportation led to migration. Migrations led to rapid population growth (and wars) as a result. More burning led to the internal combustible engine. This increased our population through migration and increased our food production has pretty much led us to where we are today. But to think about the sheer magnitude of coal lets think about

 Total Deaths in Coal Mining

From 1880 to 1910, mine explosions and other accidents claimed thousands of victims. The deadliest year in U.S. coal mining history was 1907, when 3,242 deaths occurred. That year, America’s worst mine explosion ever killed 358 people near Monongah, WV.

 http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html

In the last 16 years coal mine deaths per year have hovered at 35 per year in the US. While this is a huge improvement still nearly 500 Americans died to get us our coal in that time period.The Chinese are following in our footsteps:

2000: 5,300 deaths.
2001: 5,670 deaths.
2002: 5,791 deaths.
2003: 7,200 deaths.
2004: 6,027 deaths.
2005: 5,986 deaths.
2006: 4,746 deaths.

In just the last 6 years nearly 40,000 people have died in China. They have the same “give a shit” attitude that we had 50 years ago. www.asianresearch.org/articles/2997.html

According  to the FAR research group this has been going on in China since 1977 or there abouts so you could add another 120, 000 deaths.

http://www.perryopolis.com/coal.shtml

In every year from 1900 to 1945 more than 1,000 coal miners were killed in mining accidents in the US. In many years there were more than 2,000 deaths, and, as noted above, in just the month of December 1907, there were more than 3,000 coal-mining deaths. In 1961 there were 293 deaths; in 1981 there were 153, and in 2001 there were 42. When you do the math just in on these little snippets of data, neearly 400,000 coal miners just in the US and China. That is all the people in Springfield 4 times over!

And that does not factor in highly destructive mining practices like Mountain Top Removal where any related deaths are consider EXTERNALITIES by the mining companies.

blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/bush-administra.html

 International statistics are really hard to come by. You would have go to every countries’ mining statistics sites and do a total, but India who is not too far behind China in lax standards manage to reduce  their mine deaths to 99 in 2004.  http://coal.nic.in/point18.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_coal_producing_regions  

So doing some very simple math, considering that there  are 10 major coal producing areas in the world, its pretty easy to see that nearly 10,000 coal miners die world wide every year in this modern era, and if you project that back 100 years it is possible estimate that at least  1,000,000 miners have died from direct mine fatalities. This does not include all the other causes that coal miners can die from. These are not pretty deaths either.

I am not going to project that back 3-400 years because it is just too gross and too disgusting. So what does the total tonnage look like?

 Total Amount Mined.

Please see graph:

 Briefly put, you can not possible conceive of how much coal the above graph represents. It is something on the order of PIKES PEAK. We have been burning this much coal for the last 10 years! That is 10 Pikes Peaks gone up in smoke since 1997. Whish. And its the smoke part that is killing us.

I want to make a very serious point after I finish with Burning Behavior – Part 3 that involves Isaac Asimov.

After commenting on John Martin’s blog where he was excoriating fired  Professor Ward Churchill I felt compelled to check my facts. I cautioned John that “getting” one obnoxious Professors tenure could bring on a witch hunt for other wacky Professors that for one reason or another had been given tenure. Coming from a long line of educators I am extremely sensitive to tenure issues. Since his firing several wacky Professors have been denied tenure or had their academics challenged including Glen Poshard at Southern Illinios and Finkelstein at Depaul. Lets face it, the University is not about TRUTH, its about learning how to judge both what is truthful and more importantly what is useful. Wackyness and Hillarity abound at the University (no matter which one you attend). I believe this adds to the undergrad and graduate experience.

Nonetheless, having not been able to find the essay of Asomov’s that I wanted to use for the Why We Continue To Burn piece (coming soon). I thought it behooved me to go to UIS’ library here and try to find it. I failed miserably! I spent the whole day looking for this damn essay. It wasn’t in the magazine I thought it was – Discover, Omni, Scientific American. I went through all the stuff I could in the stacks and periodicals. I found an article in Discover where Asmov seemed to be moving towards the position he left us with and an essay that posited Exactly the opposite position! Finally I came home at 6:00 pm in the misery of failure and googled – Asmov 1989- and found what I was looking for…Man. You never know where you will find the truth.

I am writing this simply as an excuse for having no exciting new blog for today.

The Second Phase of burning behavior or fire usage was literally an amazing passage from a period of unintended discovery to purposeful discovery. Think about it. Above and beyond keeping you warm, producing light at night and cooking, fire, at first glance appears to have no other useful purposes! I know from a modern humans viewpoint that is a ludicrous statement, but in the eyes of early humans that was miracle enough. The idea that fire could do WORK for them surely did not immediately occur to them.

It is not hard to image that someone tossed a used clay dish in the fire thinking to burn it up or at least to sanitize the campsite. It is not hard to imagine the amazement of whomever retrieved that dish that not only was it intact but it was much harder, and somewhat water proof. So modern pottery was born. It is not hard to imagine that someone noticed after many days of burning fires in a cave campsite that soot (pollution) was building up on the wall and that if you ran your finger through it your finger would turn black. More intriguing though was the fact that whatever you touched also turned black. This discovery provided the basis for both modern art and modern writing. But it also showed that there many things that a human can do with fire. By at least 7,000 years ago the last Human competitor, Neanderthal, had gone extinct, and the other Hominids had evolved into various species of monkeys to join us in the primate family. Early Humans could do most of the things that we do today. They were capable of  sailing flawlessly over the seas, building big buildings when they wanted to, forging metals, communicating over long distances, and early work in china had begun on explosives. They could leisure travel, rapidly travel on the ground and they had advanced forms of government.

But wait you say. OK, here is where the pitch for lifestyle change comes in? NOPE don’t want to change your lifestyle. Or, aren’t you idealizing these folks? Nope just using broad general language to describe what the Persians, the Chinese, The Egyptians and the Greeks, the Russians, the Aztecs, and the British were capable of up until about 400 years ago. Would I like the world to go back to being “like then”? Absolutely not, though I confess that I would love to go back for a day or two just to see them in all their glory. But they did not have 2 things I absolutely must have, the scientific method, and steel. I could never live in a world that could only advance knowledge through observation and comparison. That’s way too frustrating and most of the governments were religious in nature. Who needs that?

And let me quickly add this is no Ph.D. thesis or even a term paper that a high school teacher would accept. No footnotes, no sources sited, no Authority added, and plagiarism abounds but the fact of the matter is that all of the civilizations up to roughly the European Renaissance in the 16-1700’s by most western calendars were low burn or no burn societies. Plus there were not a lot of people around doing the burning. World population estimates for 1,000 A.D. are 275 million people with probably about 15 million people in America. 500 years later there were only 200,000 million more people at 450 million. By the heart of the era that I am talking about there are estimates that in 1650 there were only 500 million souls. That would be the current combined population of the U.S. and Canada. And had birth rates stayed the same in 1800 there would have been 550 million people, in 1950 there would have been 600 million people, and in 2100 there would have been 650 million people. That is nearly 600 million less people than exist in China right now.

So what happened? The answer is simple from 1700 we burned stuff up to support more people. And frankly with out all that burning there would not be 2/3 rds of the people that are alive today. But in addition to that, in the process, we have broken down a lot of the earth’s defense mechanisms as we have grown and multiplied. More on that in the next blog.

To hear the song goto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PoIrcyd34

I would like to go over the history of burning behavior so that everyone can see why it’s so primitive and why much of it is so unnecessary. Also to make a point that burning behavior has changed in many ways over the years to become better behavior sometimes and worse at others.

We Humans evolved from Hominids in and around the Rift Valley in Africa. Their precursors were little hamster like creatures. The hominids were all little upright primates about 4 feet tall. And even then we were engaged in BB because we eat. Eating involves oxidation, that is we inhale air, and eat food. Our Bodies convert that oxygen and food to energy and heat, so we have been little burners since the beginning. Fire is nothing but the rapid oxidation of combustible materials. So we literally burn calaroies. The hominids had several advantages over their domain that eventually led them to evolve into us, modern humans. They were smart, they could see over the savanna grasses. Only birds, really large mammals, and tree dwellers could really “see far”. They used simple wooden tools principally bowels, flat boards and sharp sticks. This was roughly 2-4 million years ago. They were also extremely agile and hunted in groups, behaviors held over from their days living in trees.

(photo removed)

(Today all Light Houses in the U.S. are solar powered)

http://www.californiasolarcenter.org/history_pv.html

I imagine that early on Hominids were real dangerous because nothing would have been afraid of them. I mean they would not have presented a profile that any beast would associate with danger. By hunting I must add, not what is conjured as a hunter today. Hunting for fruits and nuts and roots. What we now call gathering. But also hunting for grubs, ants, small fish, and whatever else they put in their mouths and seemed OK. I am sure they daily watched other animals eat each other as well. With their sharp sticks I am sure they thought about that and tried it. But uncooked meat is very difficult to digest and contains massive amounts of pathogens. So I am sure that those experiments ended in death. For those that lived in a fish infested environment, I am sure that they experimented with drying the fish (using the sun to “cook”) and eventually they tried that on animal parts. Still drying only gets you so far as does salting things to preserve them.

(photo removed)

(During the 1970’s and 80’s Father Verspieren preached the Solar Gospel to pump water in the Third World)

The Hominids and the early Humans would have seen fire too. Fires in the Savanna are real common. Lightening strikes and spontaneous combustion would have burned large area of grasslands every year. Animals would have been burned in those fires and the early folks would have tried to eat them. Cooked meat tastes real good because of the caramelized fats. That probably motivated them to try to “capture” fire by putting rocks around something left burning on the edge of a fire (the first fire circles). Once the fire was “trapped” they feed that fire with combustibles from around the area. NOW those lucky hominids had something REAL valuable. I am sure the word spread (dare I say) like wild fire throughout the tribes. The first controlled tribal fires are thought to have occurred around 1,400.000 years ago. Unfortunately fire and nomadic lifestyles lie in conflict. Unless you know how to independently start one they can be hard to transport. While farming is usually attributed to the Settling of the Human family into villages. My bet is that the first villages actually resulted from tribal people not wanting to abandon the fires that they had tended and used for many wonderful things.

(photo removed)

(Solar Panels cover an apartment building in Bremensm Germany)

Also, I’ll bet the quest for fire starting devices was that era’s technology race. What we do know is that by the time of the Neanderthals they were brilliant firestarters. They used flint and rock strikers or wood bow starters or water soaked grass chaf (in the hotter climates) to start fires and they transported fire with them in portable ember chambers. Surely by the time “modern humans” populated the North and South Americas 20,000 year ago from what is now France and Russia fire or Burning Behavior was an intricate part of human life. But all ready they were doing bad things with it. Tribes used purposely-set fires to attack other tribes and they used fire to clear forests for farming areas. Even more ominously for us today they used fire to burn people alive as sacrifices to their gods and as punishment for their rivals. Still there were only 50 or 60 million people on the planet at that point. How much harm could they do?

(for those of you who are wondering where I am going with this? Patience. I cover like 4 million years in basically 2 pages! I hope to cover 20,000 more years in 2 more posts and then talk about what I really wanted to talk about which Isaac Asimov and Captain Kirk on Star Trek – really…)