For most of human history, fire formed the foundation of how societies used land and obtained energy. It enabled the conversion of biomass into energy, forest clearance, vegetation management, and the transformation of landscapes. Throughout the Holocene, wood and charcoal supplied the energy required for households, agriculture, metallurgy, and increasingly complex economies, creating cultural landscapes shaped by changing livelihoods, settlement patterns, and resource management. As populations grew, the spatial and energetic limits of biomass-based systems became increasingly evident, contributing together with technological, institutional and economic changes to the transition toward fossil-fuel energy systems. This shift supported unprecedented industrialisation, urbanization, and economic growth while accelerating environmental change on a global scale.

This plenary lecture combines long-term palaeoecological records with historical sources, archaeological evidence, and spatial analyses to reconstruct past environments and examine interactions among fire, land use, energy systems, and social change over centuries to millennia. Drawing on case studies from diverse environmental and historical settings, I explore forest transformation, industrialization, agricultural expansion and abandonment, energy transitions, and changing fire regimes. Rather than presenting these developments as a single linear trajectory, I emphasize their uneven pace, regional diversity, and dependence on specific ecological, technological, and political contexts.

These long-term processes can only be understood through an interdisciplinary perspective integrating ecology, climate science, archaeology, history, geography, energy studies, and the social sciences. Charcoal records, archival documents, settlement patterns, remains of historical charcoal production, and modern fire observations reveal how past decisions regarding energy use, livelihoods, and economic development created ecological legacies that continue to shape present-day landscapes. I argue that contemporary landscapes are cumulative, path-dependent products of successive land-use practices, energy transitions, and fire regimes.

Long-term reconstructions therefore provide not only historical context but also critical insights for understanding current environmental change and developing historically informed approaches to landscape and fire Management.