Then: Southern California burns, 2008
Even for the literal-minded, it was hard not to lump the conflagrations on Wall Street with those in Southern California. The meltdown of 401(k)s with the street signs at Sylmar. The frantic, ever-escalating press conferences and bailouts of any significant credit institution with the desperate deployment of ever-greater masses of engines and helitankers, all equally ineffective. Somehow the spark of a credit crunch managed to leap over fiscal firewalls and spread throughout the economic landscape, much as relatively small blazes blew over I-5 and threatened the power supply of Los Angeles. The general destruction has moved upscale, so that trophy homes burn along with trailer parks, and hedge funds with day traders. When the winds blew, they exposed any combustible object to embers, and threatened to incinerate anything vulnerable. The entire system, it seems, is vulnerable, and everyone knew that the winds always blow. It’s just been convenient to pretend otherwise.

Now: Southern California burns, 2009
Another round, this time without the Santa Anas to drive them over and through the Transverse Range. More blowups. More houses burned. More evacuations. More declarations of disaster and states of emergency. More crews, more planes, more helicopters, more TV cameras. More posturing. Meanwhile, the Great Recession continues, refusing to be extinguished. Investors applaud each stock market rally as homeowners in Altadena do retardant drops by DC-10s. The fires continue for the same reason the economy continues to smolder, because the fundamentals have not changed. Until they do, we will be left with damaging breakouts and political theater.

* * *
Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction – an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To control fire, you control its setting, and you control wild fire by substituting tame fire.

In fire-prone public lands, where the setting will not convert to shopping malls and sports arenas, some fire is inevitable and some necessary. From time to time a few fires will go feral. Without fire some biotas will only build up combustibles capable of stoking still-more savage outbreaks, and equally, some will cease to function. Fire is a force of “creative destruction” in nature’s economy. Without it, particularly in drier landscapes, nutrients no longer circulate freely but get hoarded. It’s as though organisms hid their valuables in secret caches dug in the backyard or in socks under the bed. The choice is not whether or not to have fire but what kind of fire we wish.

When the big fires break out, or when the market crashes, the tendency is to blame external factors – a changing global climate, a changing global economy. Certainly if the weather were cold, wet, and calm rather than hot, dry, and windy, the fires would not spread, any more than an economy would overheat and fizz if money were tight rather than loose. But the real story would point to land use and fire management practices. Mixing houses and wildlands is the ecological equivalent of securitizing mortgages. Deciding that fires must be either fought or outsourced to nature to let burn denies the middle ground that historically allowed people to keep fire a servant, not a master. As the saying goes, it’s the best of friends and the worst of enemies.

The American fire community has sought for several decades to reintroduce fire into public wildlands and private preserves (think The Nature Conservancy). It has had many successes; and it has had plenty of failures, not least the failure to do enough. The recent outbreaks and breakdowns present yet another opportunity to put reform where it will be most effective: on the land and on how we exercise our oversight as fire’s species monopolist. We can rely on emergency gestures and drop dollars like retardant, or we can undertake to remake the fundamentals – the structure, the way we regulate. Controlling fire, as with fiscal contagion, requires controlling the entire scene.

Otherwise, at some point the money will run out completely, and it will no longer be possible to pretend that we can rebuild; everything will simply burn to ash. We’ll have too much of the wrong kind of fire and too little of the right.

Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires (Island Press, 2004).

Megafires appear to be breaking out everywhere, from Provence to Greece, Mongolia and the Russian Far East to New South Wales and San Diego.  But hectare for hectare, the most explosive fire scene on Earth belongs to Iberia, specifically Portugal and Galicia.  In recent years most of northern Portugal has burned over.  The 2006 fires not only surrounded Coimbra, the ancient university town, but burned every pocket of parkland within it.

Portugal?  This is a long way from the heartland of wildland fire management.  But the distance is not simply one of geography: the wildfires roaring over the Tras o Montes are as remote from the premises of fire ecology as they are from the Northern Rockies.  The fires, and the reasons behind them, have nothing to do with wilderness.  They are the result of a massive breakdown in traditional agriculture that accompanied the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship, accession into the European Union, and contact with the global economy.

Close cultivation had kept fires under control.  That unraveled when the rural population flocked to Oporto and Lisbon or other metropoli.  The vegetation became rank; hedgerows dispersed, and swollen plantations of eucalypts replaced the tight mosaic of ager, saltus, and silva that had defined the landscape since Roman times.  As people moved out, fires moved in.  Flames no longer confined themselves to prunings in the European orchard.  The Garden itself burned.

Manipulating vegetation is the fourth strategy for fire management.  It is the classic European treatment of choice and has reappeared as an option in wildlands and the I-zone, or exurban fringe that characterizes industrial nations.  For the former, it refers to strategies for “thinning” or otherwise rearranging vegetation so that the combustibility of the landscape is more acceptable regardless of whether the resulting fire is wild or prescribed.  In the latter case, the rural landscape is not deserted but repopulated with exurbanites.  Without further cultivation that scene may burn ferociously.

This strategy slams hard into the desire to leave wildlands wild.  In the so-called intermix landscapes, the question of manipulation will be set by esthetics, and very little of the scene will not be the direct result of human fiddling.  In wildlands the option will be selective.  But there are good reasons to believe that it will be necessary.  Fire behaves as its setting dictates; to define that setting is to define fire.  Like a reintroduced species fire requires the proper habitat if it is to survive in the forms we desire.  Coimbra may not be so far from Malibu after all.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

If we can’t trust nature to do what we want, and if we can’t suppress fire, then it seems we ought to do the burning ourselves.  This in fact is what humanity has done since we seized the firestick from Homo erectus.  And it is the third strategy of wildland fire management.

The benefits seem apparent.  We substitute our fires for nature’s, keep fuels under wrap, and replace the Manichean fallacy that we either must either have fire or not have fire with choices among a variety of fire regimes.  There are places that have achieved this goal, that have ample Rx fires and no wildfires (see photo).  But unless you have grasses, an endangered pyrophylic species, and tolerance for smoke, it has proved remarkably difficult.  It is easier to take fire out than to put it back.  Restoring fire is akin to restoring a lost species.

Why?  Some fires escape (remember Los Alamos in 2000?).  All fires produce smoke, which can afflict urban areas and highways (Florida suffered fatal vehicle accidents earlier this year from smoke drifting across I-4 in Polk County).  Not all fires yield the ecological benefits promised: they burn too hot, too cool, too spottily; they promote invasives or kill more woody vegetation than they consume.  Rx fire is not ecological pixie dust that, sprinkled over landscapes, makes the ugly and polluted into the beautiful and pristine.

Worse, Rx fire establishes agency.  It identifies a person or institution responsible.  This raises both legal and ideological concerns.  If something goes wrong, an agent can be held legally or politically liable.  Florida has passed a law that provides protection for burners, but even the federal agencies are now encouraging personal liability insurance.  The threat of lawsuits is not an incentive for innovative, perhaps risky, experimentation.  Moreover, the specter of people doing things in wildlands arouses suspicions.  Today, Rx fire; tomorrow, chain saws and casinos.  It’s easier to outsource the job, however compromised, to nature.

It is a curious spectacle, however, that has the one creature endowed to manage fire voluntarily surrender that charge.  Other species knock over trees, dig holes, hunt – we do fire.  Or we did, until we decided to funnel our firepower through machines and to cede back to inanimate nature control over the fire that the living world alone makes possible.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

The firefight is the great set-piece of American fire management.  It seems so obvious: Control the bad fires before you introduce good ones.  Seize the battlefield.  The drama is overpowering, a moral equivalent of war; exciting, potentially lethal, inextinguishably telegenic.  For some seven decades the U.S. threw everything it had into the fight against fire.  It won far more battles than it surrendered, and in the end it lost the war.

In truth, fire’s suppression began on the western public lands with overgrazing in the 1870s and the abolition of aboriginal burning.  The first stripped out the fine surface fuels that carry fire, and the latter, a source of ignition that had kept fire constantly simmering.  Not until the early 20^th century did active firefighting become organized.  Then, led by the U.S. Forest Service, it scaled up.  During the New Deal, a bold “experiment on a continental scale” that aspired to end the fire menace once and for all led to the 1935 10 AM policy, which stipulated a single standard for every fire: control by 10 AM the morning following its report.  Destroy every small fire and you prevent all the big ones.

That assault only created an ecological insurgency that has steadily worsened, and over the past couple of decades of western drought has become uncontainable.  Like a declaration of martial law, the firefight is a means to put down a temporary bout of environmental unrest; it is not a means by which to govern.  The outcome has been more fuels on the land, more savage fires, more damages and dangers, and more expensive efforts at suppression.  Agency doubts surfaced during the 1994 season, and became public as the 2000 fires revisited the Northern Rockies and the fire-storied landscapes of the Big Blowup of 1910.

Worse, the suppression strategy has never coped, even intellectually, with the conundrum of the big fire or big fire season.  However elaborate, the temporary demands of a major eruption of fires across a region will overwhelm the ability to hit and hold every fire while it is small.  Yet once a burn becomes big, the initial-attack strategy behind suppression collapses.  Besides, high-intensity fires are exactly what certain biotas crave.  At some point, probably when the country has burned through whatever monies it can borrow, the spectacle will lose its attractions, and suppression will become what it should have been from the start: a means to assist the other strategies.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

In 2005 the USGS published a map of large fires (burns over 100 acres) from 1980-2005. It overlays with eerie fidelity the cartography of the public estate, or in the Great Plains with mixed landscapes of extensive grazing and public lands. In brief, America has extensive wildland fires because it has extensive wildlands.

What are the options for managing wildland fire? After a century’s experience, four strategies suggest themselves. They apply to those lands that are both public and fire-prone. There are, after all, public lands that are not disposed to burn (think Vermont), and there are highly flammable private lands for which a range of other arrangements are possible (say, Florida).

For many observers, the simplest response is to leave the job to nature. The argument goes, fires are natural, and firefighting is expensive, dangerous, ineffective, and damaging. Not trying to suppress what should be allowed to free-range will be cheaper, safer, and more biologically benign. Let it burn.

There are places and times where this strategy works, and current federal programs are pushing for more. But while the strategy’s assets seem obvious, its liabilities are real. Long-burning fires produce lots of smoke, and if upwind of metropolitan areas they will compromise public health. (You can’t light up a cigarette in a California bar but we might smoke in the Central Valley.) Long-loitering fires also have a tendency to go looking for trouble. It only takes a few escapes to wipe away all the cost savings and good will of the successes and put firefighters back into risky circumstances.

Moreover, there is no reason to assume that such fires will behave as they would have in the past or that they will produce the same results. Particularly amid climate change and invasive species, “natural” fires may yield very unnatural results. From a biodiversity reckoning they may prove pennywise and pound foolish.

The strategy will work best in remote places like interior Alaska or the Gila or Selway wildernesses. Elsewhere it must jostle for a role along with other strategies. That is the real lesson for all four options: none can succeed by itself, all must work in harness with others in proportion to what particular sites require. Besides, one might observe that removing the one creature with ecological agency over fire from fire’s management might not, in the end, be very natural.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

When the fire community contemplates global warming, most know what it means. It means more fires, more big fires, more damaging fires, fires in places that have few now, and megafires everywhere. It means or should mean more engines and air tankers, more hotshots and fire teams, more funding, more prophylactic prescribed burns, more research – always more research.  It means more prestige, perhaps glory, to firefighters as first-responders and defenders against a fiery madness. The warmed new world to come will be today’s world in a crock pot or turning over a spit.

But the real challenges may lie elsewhere, because global warming – depending how rapidly it happens and how full of misdirections – may mean a difference in kind, not simply of quantity. It means fire management must become carbon neutral. This will demand that prescribed burning be justified as an ecological process, not as a “tool” (we’ll be told to find another tool). It will question plans to uproot and burn off stored woody carbon on tens of millions of acres of public land. It may compromise ambitions to make “natural” fire the responsible agent over vast portions of the public estate.  The roster has barely begun.

The deep challenge will be to our conception of fire’s ecology and history, and to our understanding of ourselves as fire creatures. Contemporary fire thinking continues to obsess over wilderness. It should begin instead with the landscapes shaped by anthropogenic fire and consider wilderness as a special case in which people have chosen to remove themselves. That would place people at the core. The dynamics of fire on Earth today are those humans have created or maintain.  Even climate, that ultimate referent, is now being unhinged by humanity’s combustion habits.

Yet the internal combustion engine (ICE) has no standing in the studied ecology of earthly fire, nor are people recognized seriously as fire creatures, as holders over a species monopoly, who complete the cycle of fire for the circle of life. If they were, then it would be possible to bridge, as today it is not, the chasm between free-burning fire and fossil-fueled combustion. The link is us. All in all, the world today has too much of the wrong fire and too little of the right, the developed world too much wildfire and too little controlled burning, the Earth too much combustion and too little fire.

These paradoxes dissolve if we reconstitute our fire science on ourselves. The human decision to reroute its firepower through machines rather than surface biomass has set up an ecological cascade that we have barely begun to contemplate, save for emissions. Until we recognize that we are the common cause, we will not be able to appreciate what industrialization means for fire’s earthly ecology. We have to move our thinking from fire to ICE.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

For the last week the Idaho Statesman has run a three part series written by reporter Heath Druzin and I about the paradox of fire policy.

Based on the research of Forest Service fire behavior expert Jack Cohen we showed that fire does not burn into communities as a ball of fire but almost always as a ground fire. The homes would not burn down if they were tended by homeowners or firefighters after clearing flammable brush and trees out 100 feet and if equipped  with a fireproof roof.

But instead the federal government tries to keep fires out of adjacent communities by fighting near all fires on public lands — around 80,000 blazes each year — with  just 327 generally allowed to burn. Out of the 9.8 million acres that burned across the country last year, only about 430,000 acres burned without suppression, in what managers call “wildland fire use” blazes.

Fire suppression costs have risen 6.5 times in a decade to $1.86 billion last year. At the same time, funding to make private homes and communities safer has dropped by more than 30 percent since 2001 – to less than $80 million in 2008 – and more cuts are proposed for 2009.

This is the paradox of wildland fire management in America: Most scientists and fire managers agree that fire is a healthy and necessary part of the forest, and that fighting these blazes serves only to build up fuels and boost the size and frequency of catastrophic fires. 

But federal agencies keep attacking almost every wildfire, many deep in the woods, and the rising cost of suppression diverts money from protecting homes and communities – which can be saved with the right, and often inexpensive, measures.

The result: Billions of taxpayer dollars are spent on what most experts agree is the wrong approach. The lives of firefighters are put in danger on fires that don’t need to be fought. And homes are left vulnerable, their fate often decided by wind direction and the availability of federal firefighters to protect private property.

Forest managers face jittery home and business owners, local officials and even governors and Congress members. The pressure to fight fires makes it easier to spend millions of dollars on fires that their training and science say would be better left to burn.

The Bush administration sought to counter the cultural and political incentives to spend money on firefighting by forcing forest managers to choose between firefighting and programs like recreation and even fire prevention. But fire suppression costs kept climbing, and now Congress is pressing for a new dedicated fund that will make even more money available to fight fires – and eliminate any financial incentive to make different decisions on the ground.

You can read our series at http://www.idahostatesman.com/fire/

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Rocky Barker is the author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America and environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman.

When did the modern era in fire management begin? For much of the American public it began in the summer of 1988 when flames soared through Yellowstone day after day on their TV. The message broadcast by the fire community was that fire was a natural force of great majesty, that fire belonged in Yellowstone as much as wolves, that trying to suppress such a outburst of natural power was as misguided as fighting a hurricane. The forest would return. Yellowstone would renew itself.

Yet the Yellowstone conflagration seems most significant in retrospect for what the orthodox narrative did not say and what it did not do. The received story did not address the ways the fires were the outcome of a long history of interaction between people and nature. The 1988 fires burned off in one season what would probably have burned over the course of a century, following the arrival of the U.S. Cavalry in 1886. The largest and most dramatic of the fires, the North Fork, started outside the park from human causes. Failed backfiring operations boosted significantly the final acreage and shape of the burns.

Nor did the fires reform policy; that had been resolved 20 years earlier for the National Park Service. Rather than inaugurating a grand era of wilderness fire, the 1988 Götterdämmerung closed out that era, and allowed the problem of exurban fires to command center stage. The fires did affect practice, however, since every park and forest had to shut down fire programs and resubmit fire plans for review. This cold start delayed fire’s presence nationally for several years, and in places, for decades. The fires’ real ecological effects were off-site because understanding of the fires got routed through institutions.

The deeper story, however, is one of missed opportunities. The official line defined the issue as whether free-burning fire belonged in Yellowstone or not. Of course it belonged. The real issue was how it belonged – by what means, at what costs, under what social compact. This never got discussed – was not allowed into the discourse. Instead, the ends, naturalness, determined the means available – eg, “natural” fires rather than prescribed fires.

This might suit solipcistic Yellowstone but it has not well served the national fire community. We are still waiting for that robust discussion, the one Yellowstone should have prompted, and didn’t.

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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

Heath Druzin (Idaho Statesman State Government Reporter) and I have spent much of the spring and summer gathering together a new look at the federal fire policy .

It began during a conference of the American Society of Environmental History in March here in Boise. Jack Cohen, the Forest Service’s top expert on how fire burns homes, Steve Pyne, perhaps the world’s top expert and author on fire, historian Patty Limerick, I and others were on an all day panel discussion how the nation had gotten to the current fire policy. Pyne and I also were on a panel on the 1988 fires in Yellowstone.

Cohen gave his presentation, much of which is covered in the Idaho Statesman’s Sunday story , and I was struck that none of the fire people from the National Interagency Fire Center at the conference disagreed with his central points about how fires burns communities. Pyne, who is writing a book on what he calls the cultural revolution for restoring fires to public lands, is more circumspect about how much fire we allow on public lands. It’s a larger question about what we want to do with those lands. But he agreed with Cohen that protecting homes was a technical problem that was largely solved and it didn’t necessarily depend on fighting fires on public lands.

Heath recalled the 2007 story of Secesh Meadows and Chief Bent’s experience fit Cohen’s narrative. Then Heath went on a tour with local fire managers that helped tell a story missed in the heat of battle last year. They frankly told how they made decisions and the outcome of those decisions, which you can read Wednesday.

For me and most of the nation the debate began in 1988 when more than 1 million acres burned in and around Yellowstone National Park. KZBK tells the 1988 fire story with Steve Pyne, Don Despain and I.

Then the debate was to burn or not to burn. The debate is more sophisticated today. Idaho Public Television also will have its own report on the issue, Wildfire,” beginning Thursday July 24.

We no longer are fighting fires primarily to protect timber that eventually will be harvested from public lands. Mostly we are fighting fires to protect homes and communities adjacent to public lands.

We know how to protect timber from fire as demonstrated last year when little commercial timber burned in Idaho despite a record fire year.

Now I know a lot of people are going to disagree with the findings of our reporting. It challenges our very senses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reached many of the same conclusions in an audit.

Tell me what you think.

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Rocky Barker is the author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America and environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman.

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, long one of the timber industry’s biggest supporters has always had a novel alternative history of forest management in the West.

In Sen. Craig’s narrative we had sound forest management in western forests from the time the Weyerhaeuser’s cut down the first growth of trees and the Forest Service put out all the fires. This age of enlightenment, in Craig’s forest history, ended in the 1970s when environmentalists came along and handcuffed the timber industry.

Suddenly, overnight the forests filled with fuel and bugs and disease and made Idaho and the West’s forests unhealthy. Beginning in the 1980s the forests started burning and the federal government began letting them burn up.

The gist of Craig’s folk forest history is that the only way to fix Idaho and the West’s forests is through logging. His basic story hasn’t changed since the early 1990s.

The actual history is of course different, according to every forest scientist and historian around. Fire burned through different forest types in the state at different frequencies depending on the forest type, the climate and other factors. In the low elevation ponderosa pine forests, fire regularly burned every seven to 30 years thinning out the underbrush and young trees but leaving the thick-barked pines.

Cattle ranchers moved in and grazed down the grasses, reducing the fuels that carried the frequent small fires. Miners and loggers cut down the biggest trees and left the species that weren’t marketable. Fire suppression eliminated the small fires. The number of trees per acre began rising.

The national forests, protected by Teddy Roosevelt were not intensively managed until after World War II. The only management previously was fire suppression, which became increasingly successful until after the war.

But with most of the private forests of the Pacific Northwest now young and growing after harvests in the first half of the century, the national forests became the woodshed of the post-war nation. Timber companies were given long, large contracts to cut down forests that included both good and questionable forest practices.

Environmentalists really didn’t have much impact on the harvest until the 1980s, when problems with water quality from poor roads and preserving endangered species led the nation to overcorrect at the same time Craig was building his career in Congress.

Now, in the waning days of that career the world’s scientists say that climate change is already happening due to the human release of greenhouse gases. Craig, still says he’s not convinced.

But he said on the Senate floor last month that there is another culprit for the carbon in the atmosphere. It is forest fire.

These fires, caused he said now that the Forest Service no longer fully suppresses fire, are a major source of carbon. His answer? Logging, of course.

Now make no mistake, logging is likely part of the answer. Forest scientists say that managing our forests to promote resilience may help them sequester more carbon and restore some of them to a healthy cycle.

But because of climate changes, some forests destroyed by the fires that were at least aided by decades of full fire suppression, will grow back as something else.

Craig’s narrative fits the frustrations of many westerners who have watched their forests burn up and seen millions of board feet of timber that could have been turned into jobs destroyed. But he ignores the role that decades of fire suppression had in turning the forests into tinderboxes.

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Rocky Barker is the author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America and environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman.