Scale is a human device that allows us to measure and estimate the world. Measurement makes phenomena closer or farther, and estimate reduces their importance or warns against them. This essay discusses the scale given to fires in the current era, considering the escalation of their intensity and extent. The scale of the fires is presented in three scenes: polemical writing, policy and pedagogy discussions in Israel, and Israeli art. The polemical scene contributes to cultivating a dramatic scale that is evident in terms such as “mega-fire” and “giant fire,” and even in the flagship term “the Anthropocene era.” These terms establish a total scale of unilateral movement towards extinction and termination, whereas fires stop being part of organic existence and marking a cyclical movement of destruction and renewal. Israeli political culture converges scale into the local concept of living on the sword, compared to the universal, broad but apocalyptic scale of the Anthropocene era; the attitude towards fires is absorbed into the prevailing attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which views it as recurring, unpreventable violence. The third scene the essay discusses, the art scene, offers an alternative to the emotional and political organization both of total catastrophe and of local terrorism. The works of three Israeli artists – Ronit Goldschmidt, Tamar Hirschfeld and Ella Littwitz – seem to attempt to liberate nature from the human scale. The works imbue vegetation and inanimate objects with autonomous, unexpected and multifaceted action, thereby extracting the spectator from concepts that equate humanity, the future and nature.