6.3.4 Three Little Pigs and a Big Bad Wolf: Purging Pyrophobia

“Sometimes “catastrophe” still seems to live up to its original meaning as a dramatic plot device in a Greek tragedy, as though this world is magical realist fiction”. Muir-Wood, 2016.

While once upon a not long-ago time, as discussed earlier, Western citizenry celebrated Promethean potentialities, of decades late, within some press circles, fire within its native wildland has been a source of nigh persistent condemnation and critique. A legacy born of those that, in the land-policy sense, leapt before looking, thus sought to eradicate phenomenon about which they were ecologically illiterate, no matter the enormity of recent advancements in scientific understanding of fire and its ecology, the popular media still largely lags in its grasp thereof, thus perpetuates scientifically unsound and inappropriate approaches to addressing fire’s presence in ever-more residentially populated wild and semi-wild lands. Although persisting in print since the late 1800s, with arrival of the television age, thereon the Internet, and all as rests thereupon, the problem has propagated to become a veritable inferno of public misinformation.

The foremost example as illustrates the issues as can arise from the above is that of the media coverage that surrounded the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fire complex, which Jensen and McPherson described as, “emotional, hyperbolic, and unrelenting”, using inappropriately alarming rhetoric, and littered with “outright disinformation” (2008, p.12), theirs being a position that aligns to that of several other authors (National Park Service, 2016; Henry, 2015; Smith, n.d, 1992; Kilgore, 2007). But, regardless of the inaccuracies as occurred, there remain they with lessons yet to learn. Hence, now, as then, not uncommon is press and media advocacy of fire suppression measures which, given the broader environmental context of wildland fires, would have limited capacity to make any difference to the outcome of fire crews’ operations, beyond putting more lives at risk, and raising already fast rising costs.

Put succinctly, a “media deluge” (Jensen and McPherson, 2008, p.3) of poorly researched press and media coverage of wildfires “can [adversely] colour social perception of fire outcomes” (Spies et al, 2014, p.2), and particularly whereupon the public are presented with gross-over simplifications of fire’s behaviour; climatological and ecological context; and humanity’s interface therewith. As in communications more generally, language reinforces ideas, which in mainstream press and media coverage of wildfires tends be that of their presence bringing forth ‘catastrophe’ in the absence of ‘opportunity’ (Kilgore, 2007). In contrast to the saying, ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping’, communications have consequences, which within the domain of wildfire becomes manifest in policy and budgetary decisions of the foremost profound implications to environment and society.

However, the press and media alone carry not the [public misinformation] can. For example, in 2016 Ogilvy and Mather’s Madrid office announced a 3G-connected ‘birdhouse’ that, embedded with solar-powered sensors, was ‘designed’ to act as “a smoke alarm” which could alert firefighters to “remote” wildfires that “might not be noticed immediately”, thus spread “more quickly” (Peters, 2016, online). Although promoted as in ‘co-existence’ with “its environment in a natural way” the prototype product was the antithesis thereof, and to the extent that, an archetypal technocratic proposition, it embraced not biological technology, let alone thinking, but one in the same kind as has sparked several fires [134]. Upon reading that its creators hoped to “bring the birdhouse to other parts of the world” (Ibid), the impression is that their intent is not nested in enhancing the integrity of ecological systems near and far, but of making a profit of a problem born of the unintended consequences of, amongst things, technology.

>Continue to Chapter 6.3.5 here.

Footnotes

[134] In reference to several instances of fire having been ignited by solar panels.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.