What is fire? What are we seeing in the flames and smoke engulfing Los Angeles right now?

Since the Enlightenment, it has been defined as a chemical reaction determined by its physical environment. Fire as physics gave us torches and forges, and put into machines it made possible the burning of fossilized biomass. This means that we define the landscape in terms of fuels, and we try to examine the physical power of fire on the landscape with physical countermeasures such as water, flame retardants, and engines. It allowed human fire to reshape the Earth. But it doesn’t show us how to live with fire.

Another view is possible: fire as biology. Life provides the oxygen and fuel needed to start a fire. The chemical reaction of fire is a kind of biochemistry: Fire breaks down the substances produced by photosynthesis. For humans, fire is even part of our genome: Cooking gives us big brains and little guts. Fire has been around for as long as life has existed on earth. For 420 million years, fire and biological landscapes have co-evolved. Life has provided by far the greatest number of ignitions in human hands.

So is fire still alive? It births, breathes, eats, moves, reproduces, leaves behind waste and dies. Traditional cultures and vernacular expressions often treat it as a living thing. Formal knowledge is more cautious: judgments depend on how life is defined. I myself prefer to compare fire to a virus. It is not alive in itself, but depends on the living world to sustain it, so it has many characteristics of life.

Like many new viruses, it breaks out where a fragmented biota no longer provides the barriers and barriers that control its behavior. Like a virus, it spreads through contagion. Appropriate countermeasures could emulate the public health response to contain the epidemic through isolation, vaccines, and emergency intervention. Step up to combat the embers, clean up around your house, and engage your community in protective measures—that's like wearing a mask, social distancing, and achieving herd immunity.

Fire as biology means treating the landscape with ecological engineering rather than just rearranging patches of hydrocarbons. Use beavers instead of bulldozers and goats instead of chain saws to build fire barriers. Cultivate fields and orchards instead of fuel-destroying mineral soils or destroying undergrowth with petrochemicals. Using fire itself, not as a burning wood chipper but as a transforming presence, much of the landscape may have adapted to, a process that massages biota rather than just blasting it away.

Thinking of fire as a biological creation, it looks less like a hammer that we can make and use as we wish, and more like a companion, a tamed species with mutual benefits and Obligation - Fire is not like a Terra Torch but a sheepdog. It sees fire as a relationship as old as humanity, an almost symbiotic friendship that can become wild, even violent, when abused. It's not just imagining living with fire, but imagining fire as a part of life.

The shift to burning fossil fuels enhances physical models. It reduces the biological effects of fire to simple power. It abolished all old restrictions: fire could burn day and night, winter or summer, wet or dry. Its emissions have nowhere to go; they pollute the air, oceans and land, and help flames mutate into conflagrations. This is the geological version jurassic park: Biomass comes from another world and has no place in this world. Not least of all, this invented fire breaks the mutualism that binds humans and fire to the benefit of both for our existence as a species. Instead, we're writing a slow-motion Ragnarok.

If I were faced with putting out a burning fire, or if I needed to design a house to withstand the onslaught of swarms of embers or radiant heat, I would choose physical models. But if I want to manage landscapes as part of our ecological infrastructure, or repair the twisted relationships that turn man's best friend into his worst enemy, I need a biological model. We do not have a theory that is not based on its own principles, but is not derived from physics.

We have a great model of how fire consumed the Pacific Palisades. We don’t have good enough models to repair the broken relationships that lead to such fires. But if we're going to coexist with fire, a better understanding of fire and life might be a good place to start.

Stephen A. Pyne is professor emeritus at Arizona State University and author of The Pyrocene: How we created an age of fire, and what happened next.

This story appears in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.