6.4.9 Tritogenian Philosophy: A triangulation of cyclic elements

“Of Pallas Athena, guardian of the city” Anon, Homeric Hymns, <3BC.

Sensu Heidegger, this lichtung [philosophical forest clearing] at the interface of wild and urban systems, presents potent potentialities that strike to the heart of Banham’s pyric tribal parable (1984). However, whereas that latter perceived of a combustion vs. construction dichotomy, the findings of this study suggest there to be potential for reconciliation between parts which, for a period of several centuries, have been considered disparate. However, only in natura can the strengths and weaknesses of a panarchic paradigm be fully established, for in vitro experiments could model not the complexity of wildfire at the wildland urban interface.

Upon triangulating insights from the sciences, arts, and humanities, spanning past, present, and possible future, that wildfire and its behavioural variations need be factored into the thinking, practice and policy that sets the parameters of architectural and urban schema becomes evident. A foundational element in the emergence of the Cradle of Humankind, thereon of Civilisation, howsoever humanity’s future unfolds, pyrophilic arts will be central thereto. Though a step, not a destination in an evolutionary journey, in the three taxonomic architectural groups described above are behaviours, relationships, and systems that have enabled some of the longest-living plant genus to endure, evade, and resist wildfire at frequencies and intensities above and beyond they humanity has witnessed during our geologically-miniscule existence.

In this, a principally patriarchal age, this paradigm calls for our present Prytaneis [seat of government] to, metaphorically speaking, look to the light of the matriarchal Hestia’s hearth-fire and architecture flame, this being an act only possible whereupon policy, and other decision makers exhibit such integrity as, according to Homeric Hymn, had the mythological she. At a time of well-documented gender inequality both within, and beyond the sciences, and society more generally, that several prominent figures in the fire ecology community are championing gender equality, such for example as the editorial board of the open access journal ‘Fire’, renders that an ambitious, but nonetheless achievable aim.