Controlled Burns

While historical tribes used controlled burns, from the dawn of the industrial age, natural fires have been seen as something to prevent until very recently. It's only been in the past 20 years or so that controlled burning has been seen as a way both to prevent larger out-of-control fires, and also as necessary for the survival of certain plants that only reproduce after fire cycles.

In this regard, our controlled burns are both inadequate - insufficient in scope to prevent major fires - and primitive. We wait for the weather to be just right, and even then fires sometimes get out of control, or at minimum, create more smoke to surrounding urban areas than is desirable. Given a warming climate and more frequent, large fires, it's time for radical improvement in controlled burning.

Fire is rapid oxidation - so there's that option, though tanks of oxygen and an artificial process using oxygen might not create the sustained heat necessary for the reproduction of certain plants. I think the answer lies somewhere between more effective backburning, burning off alternating strips, and technology to both promote and extinguish fire on-site.

In some areas, the plant life produces volatile oils and fumes that rapidly combust - perhaps some sort of curtaining material could burn off patches while containing the fire to prevent spread - and potentially also a large device to capture smoke and filter it (a giant "bong" mechanism? Sorry - the notion makes the idea less serious, but a device to capture smoke and vapors coming off the controlled burn patch would be great). Another idea is to lay down a line of heat-labile material that will "explode" releasing smothering gasses once the fire reaches a certain boundary. It would be necessary to do small patches to prevent heat from leap-frogging the boundaries, but this might be more useful near urban zones, where flammable material is most dangerous, yet also most in need of being rendered benign.

I'm also imagining a large box that is just set down on grassy areas, like a BBQ lid - combusts the grass, contains the sparks, and extinguishes it once oxygen is depleted. Perhaps the "box" could be flame-proof tenting material. I'm just brainstorming here, but clearly more thought needs to go into controlled burning than just setting things on fire and creating a back-burn boundary, letting the smoke cover miles with haze, or the alternative of doing nothing, then reacting to the emergency conflagration that results.