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Steve Pyne is a Senior Sustainability Scientist, Environmental historian at Arizona State University and leading author on the history, ecology, and management of fire. fire management, ecology, environmental history
ire is peculiar, and to consider it as a landscaping feature may seem beyond quirky. After all, among the ancient elements it is the odd one out. Earth is a solid and can be sculpted directly. Water and air are fluids, but still substances, and their flow can be stored, channeled, or otherwise manipulated. All can be moved with their essence intact from one site to another. But fire is a reaction, not a substance. Its setting makes it possible. It synthesizes its surroundings. It takes its character from its context. Fire is landscape, and airshed, and watershed, integrated. We think we control fire by starting it and, within limits, stopping it. After all, we can’t spark earth or water or air into existence— we can fire. Not only do we control ignition, we are the only creature that does. We hold a species monopoly over one of Earth’s most elemental phenomena. Our firepower is who we are. The power of fire, however, resides in its power to propagate. We don’t really hold or carry fire, we carry the ingredients that sustain it; so fire doesn’t spread as a wolf might lope over hills or water rush down a ravine. Fire can only propagate if its setting allows: it literally feeds off its context. We think we control fire by quenching it; and in select circumstances, where fire is small and contained, this is possible. We cool the reaction zone, smother airflow, remove fuels, or interrupt the heat flux that must continue unbroken if fire is to persist. Without the capacity to spread, the fire extinguishes. But move to larger landscapes and none of this is possible. You must cool with planeloads of water or retardant. You must cut fuelbreaks the size of roads or football fields (the rule of thumb is that the fuel-free zone should be 1.5 times as wide as the flames are high) and that doesn’t account for embers blown by high winds across firelines with no more pause than water over Niagara Falls. That’s what makes wildland fire control so difficult, expensive, and damaging. The firescape must be altered dramatically under emergency conditions. Today, the United States and cognate fire countries have extensive wildland fires because they have extensive wildlands. Most of these wildlands are the outcome of political decisions under a philosophy of state-sponsored conservation. But you can create similar conditions by letting land go to seed. Abandoned, former agricultural lands are powering the flareup of wildfires—or more properly, feral fires—around the Mediterranean Basin and increasingly in parts of the developed world generally. There is a double paradox here. The first is that most of these lands were set aside to spare them, in the language of the day, “from fire and ax;” instead they became permanent habitats for fire. The second is that they often need fire: just not in the unprecedented form too many of them are getting. The evolving fire regimes of the 21st century may threaten ecological goods and services as much as landclearing by fire and ax did in the 19th.