Strange Fire: Fire, Discernment and the Collapse of Distinction: Guest Post by Dana Tibbitts

“Strange Fire”

Fire, Discernment, and the Collapse of Distinction

Something is wrong with fire in America. Not the fire that has always existed — the lightning strike on a dry ridge, the creeping ground fire that clears understory and opens cones and moves the way fire has always moved through a living landscape. That fire belongs here. What is wrong is something harder to name, and that difficulty is part of the problem.

Fire is growing. Not just in acres, but in behavior — in heat, in speed, in the way it consumes things it was never meant to consume. And the story we keep being given — drought, climate, fuel load, bad luck — doesn’t fully account for what experienced firefighters, foresters, ranchers, and long-time land stewards are actually seeing on the ground. Something else is happening. The question is whether we still have the capacity to see it.

AN ANCIENT WARNING

In the book of Leviticus, two priests named Nadab and Abihu bring what the text calls “strange fire” into the sanctuary — fire that was unauthorized, severed from its rightful source, brought into sacred space where it had no business being. They die for it. The consequence is severe, and the sequence of what follows matters: God immediately speaks of the need to distinguish between the holy and the profane, the clean and the unclean. The warning about strange fire is inseparable from the collapse of discernment that makes such fire possible.

The Hebrew behind the phrase carries the sense of something foreign, forbidden, altered from its rightful origin, and brought improperly near to what is sacred. This is not a warning about fire’s existence. Fire already belonged at the altar. Fire could warm, illuminate, refine, and purify. The danger was fire severed from its source and invoked where it was never meant to go. Introducing the profane to the sacred is a line that may not be crossed without grave consequence.

That ancient framework is not merely religious. It is a framework of discernment — one that applies anywhere human beings are responsible for distinguishing between what is authentic and what is counterfeit, what is natural and what is manipulated, what originates from rightful order and what has been profaned. The biblical word for profanation is important: it describes the corruption or inversion of something originally designed to sustain life, turned on its head — and nobody notices.

NOT ALL FIRE IS THE SAME

Modern society increasingly speaks of wildfire as a single category — natural, inevitable, in some ecologies even beneficial. And some of it is. Fire has always been part of the created order. But anyone who has spent real time around forests, prescribed burns, indigenous fire stewardship, or historical fire ecology knows intuitively that not all fire behaves the same way or produces the same results. It doesn’t take a forensic analysis to distinguish between the profane and the sacred. It takes only a measure of discernment.

The scale, intensity, and thermal behavior of many fires today are tied not just to what is growing on the land, but to what has been introduced into it: synthetic materials, utility infrastructure, lithium storage systems, plastics, industrial corridors, and expanding development. A fire moving through a living forest watershed is not the same phenomenon as a fire moving through a utility corridor or a landscape saturated with modern construction materials. But we call them both wildfire. That collapse of distinction is itself dangerous.

More troubling still is what happens when fire is no longer even primarily ecological — when it becomes institutional. Across much of the American West, fires are now planned, managed, and expanded within pre-scribed and carefully planned operational boundaries called PODs — Potential Operational Delineations. These are not maps of what nature does. They are maps of what agencies decide. Within this framework, more acres burned means more funding. Larger fires generate secondary and tertiary contracts for “restoration” work that almost never produce thriving forests, restored biospheres or health watersheds, but reliably produce an explosion of highly flammable thorns, thistles… and another healthy budget cycle.

The incentive structure does not reward fire that stays small and ecologically appropriate. It rewards fire that grows to scale in keeping with the million acres per year quota for “treatment” across almost every state in the West.

This is strange fire in the most literal sense. It is fire brought into sacred terrain under an unauthorized mandate — not the mandate of the created order, but the mandate of institutional economics. There is no room within the sacred framework of fire for managed burn perimeters drawn to maximize reimbursable acres. That is not stewardship. That is profanation.

THE QUESTIONS WE HAVE STOPPED ASKING

If discernment is to recover any role in how we understand and mitigate fire, we have to start asking different questions. The current framework begins and ends with scale: How many acres? How many structures? Those numbers drive the headlines, the reimbursements, and the after-action reports. But they are the wrong first question.

What was the ignition source — and who or what initiated it? What fuels were present, and how did they get there? Was the fire behavior consistent with the landscape’s historical patterns, or did experienced people on the ground recognize something else driving the fire? Was the perimeter shaped by ecology, or by an operational boundary drawn in advance? What institutional and financial incentives governed how the fire was managed — and whether it was allowed to grow?

These questions are not paranoid. They are the basic questions of accountability. And the fact that they are rarely asked — that the default narrative absorbs catastrophic fires into the category of natural disaster without examining the human systems layered around them — is precisely the condition the ancient text warned about. When the priests stopped distinguishing between holy and profane, the land suffered. So did the people. And in time, they lost the ability to tell the difference at all.

LIFTING THE VEIL

The deepest issue here is not fire. It is perception. Modern wildfire is increasingly presented as a singular story — climate, drought, heat, wind. But beneath the visible landscape is another reality: infrastructure, institutional policy, financial incentives, pre-planned operational frameworks, and forms of human intervention so embedded in how fires are managed that many people no longer recognize them as separate from nature itself.

When categories collapse, accountability disappears with them. Everything becomes an act of God. Everything becomes inevitable. And the harder, more truthful questions never get asked.

Fire has always existed. That is not the question. The question — the one that demands courage to ask, scientifically, morally, institutionally, and yes, spiritually — is what kind of fire we are actually looking at.

And then what we are going to do about it.

Dana Tibbitts

Dana Tibbitts is an author and investigative journalist specializing in wildfire risk, evacuation safety, and government accountability. Shis co-founder of the Tahoe East Shore Alliance and serves on the Board of the National Wildfire Alliance. Dana is also co-author of Harnessing the Sky.