How do things “burn”?
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As a chemist when I look at a campfire I imagine what I am seeing is essentially trapped sunlight being released. A tree takes CO2 which isn’t super useful to make things out of and uses the energy from sunlight to rip the oxygen’s off and combine the carbon with things like hydrogen and nitrogen to make long strands of things like cellulose which are good for building very large structures like trees. Burning is just that process in reverse. It’s like building with Legos. You can build very large things from smaller pieces, but they tend to want to break apart into smaller bits again if you drop them. Adding heat to wood (cellulose) is essentially the same as dropping your big Lego thing.
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