It takes three things to terraform a planet: fire, flood and feces.

Some people like to watch the world burn. Me? I prefer to see it covered in shit.

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Fire is the quintessential human element, the most critical human tool. I wrote the above snippet because kind of hate the way it's treated in elementalism-based magic systems (i.e. The Last Airbender) and indeed most speculative fiction. It's usually framed as “look how we can come back from the ashes” with no real acknowledgement of how important the ashes ARE and how fundamental the burning times to human rhythms.

Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old. Thanks to hominids, much of the world's flora and fauna consist of fireadapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn't register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by "precivilized" peoples also known as "savages."" (James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States)