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Misguided Fire Control Is Making Wildfires Bigger: Interview with Ecologist Stephen Pyne

After over a week of burning in and around my Colorado Springs hometown, the massive Waldo Canyon wildfire is now 55 percent contained. As of Monday afternoon, the fire had claimed two lives (with more people still unaccounted for), 350 homes, burned...

After over a week of burning in and around my Colorado Springs hometown, the massive “Waldo Canyon wildfire” is now 70 percent contained. As of Monday afternoon, the fire had claimed two lives (with more people still unaccounted for), 350 homes, burned 17,000 acres, and cost over five million dollars to fight. It’s the most destructive fire in state history in a state with a lot of fires; on Friday afternoon, 30,000 people had been evacuated. That number is now down to about 3,000. The whole thing is very sad, surreal (if perhaps you’d spent large portions of your childhood roaming areas now on fire), and symptomatic of our standing with nature in the year 2012.

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The cause of the fire is as yet undetermined, but thinking about the fire in terms of cause at all is misleading. A cigarette butt, campfire, firework — these are usually the culprits, but the actual culprit is the fuel conditions of the area that burned with this kind of intensity and this fast. Add to extreme fuel conditions — forests choked with deadwood that would normally be cleared out by natural, smaller-scale wildfires — some wind and a dry weather patch and calling a cigarette butt the culprit is just funny. Something is going to make it burn, and those somethings aren’t particularly rare. The point is that 1,100 people aren’t currently fighting a massive wildfire at the outskirts of a large city because of a spark; they’re fighting a massive wildfire because of, generally, the urbanization of wild areas over the past several decades, and misguided fire policies over the past 100 years.

Stephen Pyne isn’t just a scientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on wildfires, he’s also a wildfire deep-thinker. Perhaps you've never considered the metaphorical alignment of American plutocracy with how we manage wildfires; Pyne has. When I spoke with him last week, he was at a cabin in Alpine, Arizona, which found itself torched last summer by the Wallow fire. We talked wildfire plutocracy, urban recolonization, and the supreme difficulty of doing right by natural fire ecosystems in the year 2012.

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How is Alpine a year later?

The damage happened from scorch rather than flame; the heat just killed stuff. So there’s a lot more dead fuel around than just before the fire. So it shouldn’t be surprising; fires do that. Anyway, we’re fine and we’re hoping to getting some rain, to see what actually is going to grow up in the silt and ash and everything else …

Do you consider this like a productive fire? A good fire?

I don’t know if I would consider this productive … I mean, parts of it burned in ways the Forest Service is probably happy with; parts of it burned way too severely; parts of it didn’t burn at all. It’s inevitably a real mosaic of patches. And part of the question is Is this how we want to do it? Under emergency conditions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and getting all this, just letting the nature decide what is gonna happen.

It’s kind of faith-based ecology at this point. What if we’ve just lost control [of fire]? Maybe we’ll just respond [to new fires] or, maybe we have better ways to do it. I think there’s probably better ways to do it. There’re some experiments trying other things but, I have to say, my sense of the fire community in the West is that most have lost faith that they can catch up, or get ahead of it. So there’s a big rethink under way, some large-scale experiments, some 20 year experiments, to sort of get the land into shape to where it’s more resilient to fire, to where we can handle it, have the fires we want, prevent the ones we don’t want. But do we have 20 years for the experiment to run?

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Major Western U.S. wildfire activity as of Monday afternoon

And it may be a two million acre experiment, when we’ve got 200 million acres to treat. Are we really are going to catch up on this? Or is it that we’re just going to let these fires go? And part of that is even if you accept that, the return interval for many of these forests, the fire regimes, particularly in places like Ponderosa Pines, places like that, is pretty short. Maybe five years or eight years. Maybe three years.

So we’ve got big fires in this state that burned ten years ago; well, we may have missed two [natural] cycles of burning since then. So there we’ve got a burn, but did we take that [opportunity] to reset the clock and start over again and impose on that a fire regime? Well, we haven’t done that.

Actually, I was at a conference in Sante Fe last February. And wrote a short piece looking back 100 years. What do we get to show for it? Two interpretations: one, we can say, well, technologically, we’re much better equipped and we know a lot more; we’re better protected. We’ve made mistakes; we’ve corrected them; we’re in the process of fixing them. The other view is that the whole thing is just worse off than when we started. This is another exercise of irony. We’ve made a midcourse correction [in how we manage wildfires], and that’s going the same way as the first [course] did. Just in the opposite direction.

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It turns out to be much more difficult to return fire [to an ecoystem] than to remove it.

And that the mid-course correction is to now leave things alone when they burn?

No. We’ve spent the first 50 years trying to put fire out of the landscape. And we’ve spent nearly 50 years trying to put it back. It turns out to be much more difficult to return fire than to remove it. It’s like returning a lost species; the habitat has got to be there, and the habitat has changed. Not just because of fire suppression — though that’s a part of it — but the way we’ve used the land over those 100 years, the grazing and logging, and then the way we put houses up against borders. The way we’ve reclassified public lands into, say, wilderness areas; they have a different fire policy than other [public lands]. And there’s invasive species, and climate change, whether you want to take that into account — you don’t need to. Our options, our range for maneuvering, is a lot tighter.

That’s part of the argument. It’s not whether or not you have fires or whether or not you burn it, it’s what kinds of fires, what’s kind of fire regime. Saying something has adapted to fire is like saying it’s adapted to rainfall. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like, well, does the rain come every month or every two months? And if you change that, then you change the system. That ecosystem is no longer adapted to it. That’s the argument, that we’ve changed the character of fires in a way that’s outside the evolutionary experience of these species. We could be facing an overturning of whole systems.

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And then what does it take to get ahead of it? Well, you’re talking about a whole lot of money, a whole lot of effort in places where not a lot of people live. I think what’s happening in the West is, for a number of reasons, a backing off. Some of the reasons are because some of the fires are good; we can’t stop some of these really high-intensity fires as we wish, and part of it is because we’re not willing to put firefighters at risk, like they would decades ago.

So we’re seeing fires that are much larger in area, but often much more symmetrical because they’re part of burn-out operations. That’s not the case where you’ve got a town downwind, where they’re going to do what they can to keep that front from slamming into the community, trying to harden the community. So it’s a mixture of things. That’s why there’s no simple solution, like, we’ll get a big air tanker and bomb it. We’re looking at an ecological insurgency and you’re not going to bomb it out of existence. That doesn’t solve the problem; you’re just back with the same damn thing.

They’ve spent a lot of effort on this, the federal agencies. They’ve invested a lot. They have over the last dozen years been mapping how far out of the historic range many of these areas are, what are the biggest risks. As well as where the communities are moving into — what are the risks there? There are lots and lots and lots of models for fire behavior; we can argue how good they are, but they’re probably good enough to make decisions.

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I’m thinking of that original article on earthquake forecasts — they argue was that it didn’t matter so much as when it happens, so much as where. If you knew a place was vulnerable to an earthquake, you could take steps to protect yourself. I think a lot of that is true for fires. It’s very hard to forecast the weather; it’s very hard to forecast long-term. But we know certain areas, the terrain, what the combustibles on the landscape are like. We know that there are traditionally winds in certain places; we know how hard they blow and in what ways. We can predict what sorts of fires we’re likely to have, but we don’t know that it will happen this year. We know that these are areas that are going to burn intensely. We know enough to plot that out, and take steps, but proactive steps are expensive and complicated.

Can you talk about a bit about what's driving these new mega-fires?

We’re basically recolonizing our rural landscape with an urban out-migration. The first colonization in the 19th century was agricultural, based on land clearing, which churned up lots of fuel. Lots of fires started, many of them very disastrous. Burned up many communities, a real nightmare. And then we quit doing that. But now it’s come back, and the areas that we’d protected from those kinds of fires, our public lands, are now the source of them. And there’s a new wave of colonizing, putting exurban or sort of urbanized enclaves out against and within those wildlands. And that is giving rise to another set of fuel and fire conditions. This is the new frontier. We thought [destructive wildfires] had been banished and to see it come back is like seeing smallpox or the plague come back. We thought we solved this, but we hadn’t.

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Most of that is not under the control of the fire community. It probably has more to do with interest rates and macroeconomics, how much China is willing to lend us. All kinds of things. Why are we subsidizing second and third homes with our tax dollars?

Are the areas around these new exurban enclaves more at risk for massive wildfires than regular old forests?

Yes and no. What happened with this 19th century frontier, with the horrific fires: people were clearing [the wilderness] out. They were working the landscape — they were farming it, grazing it, burning it under controlled conditions. They did lots of stuff to reduce the fire threat. The immediate fires were horrific, then they began doing [fire mitigation]. We’re not doing any of those things. Most of these communities savor the woods, savor these conditions. They have innocently aggravated it, not by cutting things down but by letting fuels build up, or letting them grow up.

We know how to keep houses from burning. We just have to apply it.

I think the word is out by now that you need some kind of defensible space, that you need to start opening up a bit. In many of these communities too, it’s clear that the houses are the target; those are the big pots of fuel. That’s where you want to put your effort. Look at these aerial views of communities that have been overrun by fire. Usually you see a very patchy setup. Most of the stuff that’s burned are the houses. It’s the houses that are catching the trees next to them on fire. It’s not that the trees are carrying the fire through the houses. In many ways, these fires are an urban fire problem and you have to define them as such, apply the same solutions we’ve learned over hundreds of years for houses.

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Wildfire recovery in Glacier National Park

We know how to keep houses from burning. We just have to apply it. But it requires building codes, fire codes, some kind of zoning, all of these things that are anathema. You’re not going to solve the fire problem by responding, by reacting. And often when the conditions are worse, your aircraft can’t fly because of the wind. They’re grounded. So during the extreme conditions, your big high visibility — I don’t mean to be flip here — but your political theater tools aren’t available. In many ways, if you wanted to think about it in military terms, it’s, what does counterinsurgency look like? Does it mean sending in B-52s and carpet bombing? Or does it mean a lot of smaller smaller stuff where you gradually take control over the countryside?

People wonder why people are building in these sites and others say it’s because they value them. It’s not easy to shut down sprawl. We have sprawl everywhere. And that kind of recolonization is interbreeding with whatever hazards are out there. We haven’t shut down building on barrier islands, haven’t shut it down on floodplains, or tornado areas. Why would it be different for fire?

Almost never have we been able to impose some kind of code-driven thing that would restrict this kind of development. This is what the whole country is doing. You’re not going to be able to shut that down easily. The only thing that’s been able to slow it down is the recession. Why are we subsidizing it? Does that make sense? There are lots of things we could do that would not politically possible. There was some move in California with earthquake zones — some codes — but generally not; it’s almost impossible.

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Fire is particularly graphic, but I tried to count up — about 10 years ago, and the number has increased since then — the number of houses for all of the sort of graphic quality of them, is probably equivalent to number of houses taken out by tornados. So it’s pretty small on the larger scale. Only very recently have insurance companies started to pay any attention to it, because it’s so small, it doesn’t register. The only place that matters is California, with a lot of houses and a lot of high value houses. Everyone else, it’s just not part of the … I tried to graph it, the number of houses that burn annually, and I had to use a log scale because it wouldn’t show up. [Wildfires are] very telegenic, but there are not that many.

I’m not trying to dismiss it; if it’s your town it matters a lot to you. But a category four hurricane is going to do more damage economically than a century of these kinds of fires. That’s not an argument to ignore it; that’s just why the economics don’t favor [wildfire fixes].

You wrote an essay last year comparing the wildfire situation in the U.S. to the rising plutocracy in the U.S. I was hoping you could talk a bit about that.

How is fire different than any other big problem in the country? What are we doing with the other problems? Are we doing anything or are we just trying to get through next year’s election? What is the short fix? Fire is caught up in exactly the same kinds of discussions. Who wants to go and spend tens of billions of dollars at a minimum to go back and try and fix the public domain so that it’s more resilient to fire. You could do that if, say, the employment crisis was bad enough that you wanted to do a CCC and needed something for hundreds of thousands of people to do. That’s not a fire problem, that’s a political problem.

There’s not going to be a consensus for it. I see on the national news that we don’t have enough air tankers and that’s [not] the problem; the problem is that we have lands in a shape that will support these really bad fires, but not the ones we need. Colorado is a really good example because you had an attempt at a prescribed fire that blew up, killed four people, burned a bunch of houses. And now if I’m reading the listserv stuff correctly, the state’s about to transfer the responsibility for fire protection to the department of public safety, rather than the forest service. That’s like transferring our big fire problems to FEMA, which by the way is a recurring proposal. But that’s disastrous.

You need the land management agency to go in and do it because that’s where you’re going to get the really deep fixes. On the other hand, I understand that. There are big, big political costs here. It’s very hard to find a coherent constituency about it.

And we don’t have a great story with this. The great story is about firefighting. It’s either a disaster story or a war story. We don’t have a good narrative to tell about going in to fix it.

Some parts of this are technical fixes, but most of it is about values and institutions and people coming to an agreement about how they want to live on the land.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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