Аннотация:The article attempts an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of fire—both as an environmental factor and as a unit of the conceptual system of man (unit of knowledge). Fire is seen as a conceptual metaphor reflecting national consciousness on the one hand and collective consciousness on the other. Presented hierarchy of conceptual metaphors of fire reflects the overall dynamics of the processes of man cognition and interaction with the world, and in the context of current global climate and economic transformations allows to recognize the conceptual metaphor of fire as the unit of ecological consciousness. The purpose of the study requires the disclosure of such concepts as environmental consciousness, environmental factor, conceptual metaphor. As an example of an ecological factor of great importance, forest fires are considered, which, depending on the dominance of the type of ecological consciousness, can act as biotic, abiotic or anthropogenic factors. The problem of the article also involves the study of fire as a mental construct (conceptual metaphor). As a result of the analysis of dictionary entries and the data of the British National Corpus, some basic properties of fire, reflecting the ambivalent properties of the element underlying the metaphorical projection, are distinguished. Conceptual metaphors of fire are subjected to categorization, as a result, basic and subordinate conceptual models are distinguished. The authors consider the significance and role of fire in the English national consciousness in terms of culture and history then taking a look at the present stage of its development. The analysis of the English-language articles from the BBC news devoted to forest fires allows us to identify a universal metaphorical model in which fire is compared to enemy. At the same time, the article presents some positive observations indicating that this model is being rethought now and new environmental conceptual metaphors come into being. It is concluded that the basic conceptual models of fire, represented by binary oppositions, are universal concepts of ordinary consciousness, but their interpretation depends on extralinguistic (including environmental) factors, which together lead to a change in the ecological paradigm of consciousness.