East of the wind and west of the rain
There are places that rest tangibly on the Earth's surface, and places that flourish only in
the imagination, and places that plat their existence within a moral geography, and a few
places, not many, Bor Island among them, that manage to fuse all these settings together. In
truth, Bor belongs with that long tradition of island Arcadias that have attracted Western
thinkers since well before Thomas More in 1516 gave them the name they now have,
Utopia. What makes Bor Island unique is that its informing theme is fire.
The tangible Bor Island is a 50-ha patch of sand and Scots pine along the east bank of the
Yenesey River halfway between Krasnoyarsk and the Arctic Ocean. It sits close to the
geographic center of Russia. Its imaginative existence appeared when Johann Goldammer, a
German forester turned ecologist, saw its potential as a site for an international experiment
and named it after a small village, Bor (Russian for "conifer forest"), a few kilometers to the
north. It is a contained space, surrounded by marsh or river, an ideal setting for an
experiment. It metamorphosed into a moral landscape when it passed through the portal of
Goldammer's idealism. The international cadre of scientists who conducted the burning
came from countries that two years before had been Cold-War rivals, and so made Bor
Island an experiment in political ecology. Its immolating fire could be imagined as a kind of
Ragnarrok intended to burn away the legacies of the old regime. More broadly, the coniferclad isle was a quirky microcosm of Earth as a uniquely fire planet and of how its dominant,
uniquely fire creature might inhabit it. Their species monopoly over fire had granted people
a defining ecological power, but as they moved from burning savannas to burning fossil
fuels, they had unhinged the dynamics of the planet.
Johann Goldammer's vision was to burn off the isle, measure the character of the fire,
sample its emissions, and then, over the next 200 years, record what regrew in its aftermath.
~
It was an improbably quest from someone only half way through an improbable career.
From his father, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Marburg and longserving president of the Paracelsus Society, he learned to value scholarship and the
Paracelcean notion that toxicity resides in the dosage not the substance. From his mother’s
family, with long ties to the North Sea, he caught the “seafarer virus,” worked on a cargo
ship the summer he turned 15, and from 1968-1972 attended the Naval Academy FlensburgMürwik. He graduated as a Leutnant zur See, later promoted to Fregattenkapitän, and remained
in the naval reserve as the commander of a minesweeper and minehunter. Whether that
military experience only sharpened his talents or helped instill them, he has an exceptional
capacity to organize, a quiet authority, and the ability to command. In a sense his career on
land has emulated his experience at sea. He is the person who clears away the impediments
and makes it to possible for others to maneuver.
The prime mover of his character, however, is a deep-bred idealism, and this joined to a
fascination with forests acquired when, still in his teens, an Oberforstmeister gave him a tour of
a private estate. The “forestry virus” joined the seafarer virus. In 1972 he enrolled for a
diploma in forestry at Freiburg University. A casual observation from one of his professors
and his family’s lingering sympathy for things American pointed him in a direction far from
the traditional themes of German forestry. The Americans, he learned, were deliberately
burning some of their woods. Johann went to the Tall Timbers Research Station, north of
Tallahassee, Florida, to find out for himself. “Fire Ecology and Fire Management” became
the subject of his diploma thesis, which introduced Feuerkölogie into German. In July 1977 he
joined the State Forest Service of Hesse. After two years he returned to Freiburg for a
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doctorate in forest science, this time studying fire in southern Brazil. While there, he
married Dorothea Knappe, who he proudly notes became the first woman to conduct a
prescribed fire in Brazil's pine plantations. He graduated in 1984. In landscape fire he found
a theme common to all peoples and most places, and a medium for his idealism.
The contours of his career came into focus the next summer. A Greek charitable
foundation invited him to discuss with Greek colleagues the fires then plaguing that country.
On August 18, 1985, while boating to Thassos Island, he could see a smoke plume swelling
upward. At Limenaria he watched the Greek Navy readying to attack the flames and offered
his services as both a Naval officer and a civilian fire expert. He was accepted and promptly
organized a gang of sailors and “instructed them how to fight the fires” with the buckets,
hand tools, and towels on hand, and then he worked with villagers from Maries. At that
moment he discovered “the two different souls in the two chambers of my heart.” One
belonged to a “forester and ecologist”; the other, to “the Captain of a ship.” At Thassos he
first “felt the unity, the symbiosis of both.”
He took up the quest. Over the next 30 years there was no required skill too difficult for
him to master, no task too arduous to undertake, no place too remote to visit. He
completed his habilitation at Freiburg, which qualified him for a university professorship. He
organized conferences on fire’s ecology and management, published their proceedings, and
later edited an international journal. He set about acquiring the practical skills he would
need. He learned fire fighting and fire lighting and their tools. He became fluent in English,
and conversant in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He trained for a pilot license to fly
small planes. He certified in explosives. He learned the evolving sciences that connected
fire with the atmosphere and satellite reconnaissance.
And he became the Earth’s most widely traveled fire expert. With various sponsors, he
went to Brazil, the Philippines, Burma, India, Indonesia. He traveled from Mozambique to
Mongolia, from Albania to Nepal, Ethiopia to El Salvador. Everywhere he sought to build
capacity by organizing conferences, editing books, and transferring expertise. He helped
plan complex, multi-nation field campaigns to measure fire and its effects in southern Africa,
Brazil, Southeast Asia, and Eurasia. It was not enough to do science or write up a consulting
tour: what mattered was creating institutions that could endure and continue the job.
In 1991, still early in his career, amid glasnost and perestroika, he joined an American
colleague for a fire study tour of the Soviet Union hosted by Avialesookhrana, the Siberiabased aerial forest firefighting service. It was the first American fire contact since the
invasion of Afghanistan in 1978 and the first German inquiry ever into Russian fire. At
Krasnoyarsk, while meeting with fire officers and with scientists at the Academy of Sciences’
fire lab, Goldammer conceived the notion of holding an international conference that would
unite Soviet and Western fire specialists. Two weeks after he departed, the USSR imploded.
The next year, with funds from the Volkswagen Foundation, he returned and identified Bor
Island as a suitable site.
On June 3, 1993 he led a group of scientists - Finns, Canadians, Americans, and Russians
- that with operational assistance from Avialesokhrana ringed Bor Island with fire, sending
an enormous plume upward in what resembled a giant burnt offering. Many of the team
returned the next year to resample their transects. (They claimed the beetles, gorging on the
blasted pine, were so loud they drowned out the ceaseless hum of mosquitoes and black
flies.) Most of the island, though not all, was burned clean by flames lofting from a dense
lichens prairie through the conifer canopy. A worn-out world was about to be replaced by a
new one growing through the ash.

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His unlikely career as a fire authority - implausible not least because Germany had no
tradition of fire research or institutions beyond simple protection - seemed to rise with the
plume. In 1993 he became the leader of the UNECE/FAO Team of Specialists on Forest
Fire and edited its International Forest Fire News. In 1998 he created the Global Fire
Monitoring Center, located in the abandoned control tower at the Freiburg airport, built of
steel and straw mats in the 1920s and topped with a windsock, rising out of the tarmac like a
castle keep. The GFMC quickly became the bridgehead for a planet-spanning consortium of
regional fire programs. Many of the world's fire hotspots were also political flashpoints, and
Goldammer was there to find common cause in better fire management - in Azerbaijan, the
Balkans, Libya, Ukraine. The GFMC became an outpost of the UN International Strategy
for Disaster Reduction. The numberless hours sitting on folding chairs at droning
conferences, the countless clichéd toasts, the jumbled millions of polyglot words, he has
patiently endured them all and tweaked them into declarations, position papers, and
ultimately institutions that can improve fire’s management, and through fire, humanity’s
stewardship of the planet.
Among the major firepowers his position is curious. What holds his peculiar empire
together is his personal vision. The more arrogant of the global fire community may politely
regard him as a kind of Peter the Hermit on a children’s crusade. He commands no
battalion of engines, can launch no fleet of air tankers, oversees no big-science lab. He must
forage constantly for funding. The Global Fire Monitoring Center they may dismiss as a
kind of Vatican among the real powers. Under their breadth they might mutter, after Stalin,
How many divisions has the Pope? But if you add up all the networks, interconnect all the
collaborative projects, adjust the fulcrum for the scores of leveraging effects, and if like
Johann Goldammer you can cajole and inspire and never be driven to despair, the answer
might be, Quite a few. Because he does not represent a national government, he can move
where the major powers cannot; he has succeeded where larger, less nimble, and less
motivated organizations have stumbled.
And he has patience. In March 2012, after five years of relentless prodding, he finally
received permission to burn off, for ecological regeneration, a heath at Jűterbog Ost, a
former Soviet-German artillery range, now converted into the Heidehof-Golmberg Nature
Reserve. Five years is not too long for someone who considers 200 years a reasonable
duration for a fire experiment.
~
Throughout, Bor Island continued to beckon. Over the next 20 years he visited Russia
42 times, six with sidetrips to measure the changes the grand experiment had wrought.
Twice the Russian Forest Ministry awarded him medals; once, by invitation, he addressed the
Duma. In July 2013, with mandatory retirement from the Max Planck Institute and Freiburg
University approaching, he organized what would be his last trek to Bor, a 20th-anniversary
reunion in which the future would be handed over to the next generation. The future,
however, was out of his hands.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bor burn, the island had sprouted with lush regrowth.
Fire did what it so often did in nature and myth: it renewed. The contrast with the slow riot
of the Yeltsin years was striking. But part of the paradox of fire is that it is also conservative.
Unless the fundamentals change - unless new species arrive or old ones disappear, unless the
wind and rain alter their rhythms - the new growth will assume the form of the old.
Revolutionary fires typically end with a new regime that, in its basics, resembles the old one.
And so it has proved at Bor Island, where the soft tyranny of Vladimir Putin shut down the
special quality of ecumenical science that had characterized the original experiment. Save for
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Goldammer, the only participants granted visas for the reunion were Russians or members
of countries that had once belonged to the Soviet Union. A Pinus silvestris forest was
regrowing much like the one burned away on that bright July day in 1993.
It might seem to most observers a sad coda to a quixotic dream, but Johann Goldammer
knows the value of tenacity and endurance. The tree you plant one year will grow to shade
another generation. Given time, a change in global climate - and in the climate of opinion and the outcome might shift. The work goes on. He hardly sleeps. There are meetings on
capacity-building, aerial fire control, and research on fire in the Earth System to organize and
coordinate in China, Austria, Sumatra, Brussels, Korea, Italy, and Croatia. It can seem a
frenzy of errantry.
Yet there remains a vision at the core, and it was once given a tangible form as a place. If
it seems an odd place, recall that folk tales abound of improbable youths called to unlikely
roles and of treks to scenes strange beyond reckoning, and that intellectuals have repeatedly
dreamed of Arcadias idealized to the yearnings of their times. If you believe in the
commonwealth of humanity, if you have adopted fire as the medium of your idealism, if you
have talents for organization and command, if you wish to live your convictions, then you
must unflinchingly follow your heart’s desire to wherever the flame beckons, even if that
quest takes you to a patch of pine-clad sand that lies east of the wind and west of the rain.
Steve Pyne

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