2.12 Wildland Fire Policy in Précis

“Sauer’s legacy challenged the deterministic tendencies inherent in the culture-area hypothesis with a more dynamic version: landscapes themselves reflect a history of human activities”. Coughlan, 2015.

Forming the foundations upon which societies and their various constructions are built, policies reflect, in, epochally speaking, near-to-real time, the values, beliefs, and aspirations of they that govern states, nations, and empires. Within the western U.S, one could summarise the over-arching ‘policy’ of the indigenous peoples as ‘living with fire’, wherein for not centuries, but millennia, Native Americans, as had innumerable generations of H.sapiens and their antecedents before them, organised their societies in symbiosis with wildland fire, and more specifically, its spatiotemporal cycles within the landscapes they inhabited. Theirs was an approach as sought not control, but where appropriate, curation of fire, for they recognised its regenerative role, and thus its potentialities for purposes including construction, hunting, and defence.

Early frontierspersons, including miners, loggers, and sheep and cattle ranchers, commonly considered wildfire as integral to sustaining the ecologies of the territories they colonised (Kilgore, 2007; Pyne, 1982). Likewise, foresters and they that directly observed ecological processes [i.e. in-situ scientists] tended favour wildfire’s presence, such as the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, who wrote of wildfire’s governance of the “distribution and character of forest growth” (Pinchot, 1899). However, they that followed in the frontierspersons footsteps, more specifically they that were so eager to capitalise on the many riches that the newly colonised lands could bring forth as to afford themselves not time to understand the workings thereof, imposed policies and codes as were at odds thereto. As so often case, they that were responsible had acted in good faith, for they believed that fire was the nemesis of the territories of which they had taken ownership.

The advent of wildland fire suppression is intimately bound to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which established in the late 1800s, befell to the management of the military, which from 1886 onwards fought all but fires as were so remote as to be beyond their reasonable reach, the policy thereof becoming the precedent for the various national parks as were established subsequent thereto. But, nationally, socio-political and press and media narratives of wildfire were, by and large, fuelled not by concerns for ecological, but for human systems, namely regional and national economies, built infrastructure including settlements, together with the transport networks that connect them, and the mining and logging activities that facilitated their construction and maintenance. Then, as remains the case today, as European settlers spread ever further into fire-prone territories, a largely unintended consequence thereof was that of increasing wildfire ignition rates, such for example as occurred in the region of the Great Lakes in the period 1869 – 1918, during which logging towns, cities, and numerous lives were lost to several fire complexes. Yet, the many wildfires of the 19th century were but a warm-up act.

1910 was, through the eyes of European settlers, the veritable ‘Waterloo’ of humanity vs. wildfire. A year in which pragmatist philosopher William James stated, “If now - and this is my idea - there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against ‘Nature’, the injustice [inequality] would tend to be evened out” (James, 1910, online), writ the wildfire policies and the codes derived therefrom for the coming century. Of the numerous wildfire complexes that populated the 1910 U.S. fire season, the foremost known is the Big Blowup of August 20-21. Burning “its way into the American conscience as no other fire had done” (USDA Forest Service, n.d) the complex consumed over 3m Northwest acres, 7.5b board feet of timber, and 85 lives (Forest History Society, n.d). Ignited by a matrix of both human and natural causes, the complex’s intensity and severity was born of a combination of events including drought, hurricane-force winds and an abundance of highly flammable fuel in the form of the indigenous members of the genus Pinus.

In the aftermath thereof, and until reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both in national parks and beyond, fire suppression became the over-arching wildfire policy. Aligning to the assumption that wildfires could be controlled by human action, a series of federal acts were passed. Management of federal forests having been transferred to the USDA Forest Service in 1905, the Weeks Act of 1911 expanded both the territory and powers thereover thereof. Five years later the National Park Service Act passed, its intent to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein” (Kilgore, 2007), the word objects especially pertinent given it alludes to ‘things’, not ‘processes’, therein a psychology, and resultant worldview that embraces states of stasis over they of change. Thereon, and until the passing of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the National Park Service was the sole federal bureau mandated to preserve “natural conditions on public lands” (Sellars, 1997). Hence, under the premise of their ‘protection’, over 20m acres of U.S. forests have, ultimately, become beholden to the passing political whims of whomsoever takes the office of President.

Not until the arrival of the Yellowstone National Park 1988 fires would a fire season of such political, therein legislative, budgetary, administrative, and management significance as that of 1910 take hold. Therein, one and the same ecological site is central to both the birth and the slow, but no less apparent death of the U.S. wildfire policies of the 20th century. However, in the interim a not insubstantially sized collective of individuals and institutions recognised the shortcomings of the fire suppression strategy, of which several were Californians, such as Sequoia National Park superintendent John. R. White, who in the 1920s advocated wildfire, and that which latterly became known as ‘controlled burns’ by means of maintaining the historical fire regimes as were native to the biome and to the culture of the indigenous peoples thereof (Kilgore, 2007). Further proponents of wildfire’s role in regional ecologies including academics, such a H. H. Chapman who asserted in 1912 that if fire was eradicated from pine forests it might result in their “complete destruction” (Chapman, 1912).

Further notable figures that fought not fire, but the ideology of its suppression included ecologist, forester, and philosopher Aldo Leopold, who died [during a wildfire], as he lived, amidst the complex ecological systems about which he extensively wrote; chief of the inaugural park service’s Wildlife Division, George Wright, whose pioneering report ‘Fauna: No.1’ (Wright et al, 1933) recognised fire as integral to maintaining the integrity of the floral and faunal assemblages that had evolved in its presence in national parks of the U.S.; fire ecologist Ed Komarek yet further illuminated the interplay between fire, flora and fauna in wide-ranging fire- prone landscapes of the U.S. and beyond; and Harold Biswell, who started his career thinking fire to be destructive to forests, but who together with Harold Weaver led landmark research that established fire fundamental to the ecologies of California. Theirs was a mind-set aligned to the, then fast-emerging, field of systems theory, for they perceived not of objects, but of processes, therein evaluated ecosystem health within and of appropriately broad spatiotemporal dimensions, as did the foremost significant ecologists of the era, including Arthur Tansley, and they as were seminal in establishing the lasting effects of human action on the environment, such as the archaeologist Grahame Clark [20]. Aldo, Wright, Komarek & co., are among the founding fathers of fire ecology as extends beyond the indigenous cultures of regions to which wildfire is native. Collectively, they and their fire-advocating peers evidenced that no matter the prominence of the ecological theorist F.E. Clements during the first four decades of the 20th century, his central hypothesis, which posited ecosystems to be in autogenic succession towards climax states in which species, and particular assemblages thereof, reproduce “ad infinitum” (Wright and Heinselman, 1973, p.4) within “the presence of stable climate” (Agee, 2000, p.7).

The paradigmatic seeds sewn in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s finally sprouted in the early 1960s, when Stewart Undall, U.S. Secretary of the Interior instructed the National Academy of Sciences to review the research requirements of the national parks, simultaneously asking Aldo Leopold’s son, A. Starker Leopold, to lead the nation’s foremost respected wildlife experts to interrogate the park’s policies and practices. Published in 1963, the reports signalled the end of attempts to exterminate wildfire whereupon its presence posed no threat to human life and property, while shattering the illusion that ‘nature’ constitutes landscapes in stasis, and all as rests thereupon. By 1967 the recommendations of the Leopold Report had facilitated a wholesale revision of Natural Resource Policy guidelines, and in turn, fire policy (National Park Service, 1968), and by 1968 ‘wild’ was finally reunited with ‘fire’ in the form of the first lightening-ignited inferno to “purposefully” escape attempts at fire suppression [21] , an approach as would later be dubbed “let-burn”, thereon “prescribed natural fire”, and finally “wildland fire use” (Kilgore, 2007, p.104).

However, as the 20th century drew to a close, that, ultimately, neither fire ecology, nor science more generally determine wildland policymaking decisions would, yet again, become starkly apparent. No matter the fast-growing sum of the research as evidenced fire to be fundamental to the functioning of the ecological systems of several U.S. regions, whereupon wildfires as were within and of the historical range swept through Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988 the event thereof was met by fire suppression: not a single prescribed natural fire was permitted within the park the following year (Ibid), nor until such time as scientifically unnecessary, but in an election year, politically pertinent reviews (Christensen et al, 1989; Philpot et al, 1989) had taken place. Both reports found the premise of prescribed natural fire to be sound, advocating for the continuation of “an ecosystems approach” (Agee, 2000, p.9), as appropriate to the landscape and geographic context, and further research as interrogates the functioning thereof. However, the national review found the prescription criteria to be insufficient, and particularly so in national parks (Ibid).

Several years later, in response to a fire season that while modest compared to that of 1988 resulted in the loss of the lives of 35 wildland firefighters, President Clinton instigated another wildfire policy review. The resulting document, the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review (USDI and USDA, 1995) aspired to provision of “clear, cohesive direction in fire management to the relevant federal agencies by establishing guiding principles for all fire-management agencies” (Jensen and McPherson, 2008, p.122). Unlike its predecessors the review recognised there to be variance in wildfire’s behaviour, therein the need for not one, but many approaches to living with fire. In 2001, the review was reviewed (USDI et al, 2001), the results echoing they of Philpot et al’s findings of a dozen years previously, that being the problem resides not with the science of fire ecology, nor, fundamentally, with the policy as relates thereto, but with the implementation thereof. Notably, the 2001 review asserted wildfire a contributory factor to ecosystem sustainability. While the review was in part born of the ambition to “make fire protection economically viable” (Ibid) at a time of fast-rising firefighting costs, the presidential administration nonetheless increased the fiscal budget from $1.6b in 2000 to $2.2b in 2001 (Ibid), the pattern thereof sustaining beyond the term of Clinton’s presidency, as is discussed at length in later chapters.

As Clinton’s successor, President George, W. Bush observed, the cost of implementing fire suppression policies ever rising, the expense thereof exceeding the market value of the properties and infrastructures it seeks to protect, it would “be cheaper to let the fires burn” (Ibid). However, as evidenced by the body of ecological findings as will be discussed later in this thesis, the expense is not merely economic, but environmental and social, and to such extent as now threatens not merely they as reside within fire-prone regions, nor nations, nor even continents, but ecosystems and societies worldwide. In the interim between Clinton’s presidency and now, further policies as advocate for fire resuming its place within ecosystems that evolved therewith have ensued, including the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003, and the Federal Land Assistance Management and Enhancement Act of 2009. Collectively these acts constitute a seismic shift away from fighting fire to living with it, or more specifically, to adapting workings of human systems to they of the Earth systems upon which their continued existence is dependant, therein of upholding the Leopold Report’s recommendations that, policies need ensure that ‘naturalness’, as alludes to ecosystem functioning, need prevail above all else (Leopold et al, 1963).

A virtue of the wildland policy structure of the U.S. is that of its emphasis of the need for “a collaborative, community-based approach to fire management” (Toman et al, 2013). A vice is that it continues to support means, mechanical and otherwise, that reduce biomass fuels in wildlands despite the fact that the act thereof is largely ineffective in biomes where vegetative regrowth is rapid, of which a consequence is not merely money, quite literally, going up in smoke, but unnecessary damage incurred to ecosystems by crews and their equipment, such for example as spreading invasive species, and eroding and contaminating soils (Keeley et al, 2014; Jensen and McPherson, 2008).

The ecological debate that raged a century or so ago now all but settled within the sciences as are directly concerned therewith, but for development at the peripheries of wildlands – the wildland urban interface – humanity would, perhaps, have desisted in its efforts to fight wildfire some decades ago. However, both at the interface of wildlands, and far therefrom, human systems are now intimately entwined with that which predates them: with fire. As will be discussed in detail in coming chapters, systemic shifts incur lateral reconfigurations, wherein one thing invariably leads to myriad others [Fig. 6]. The statement thereof applies to wildland fire policies, of which the historic legacy [fire suppression] has encouraged inherently unsustainable architectures to be built, and built en masse, in some of the world’s foremost and, in some instances increasingly, fire-prone regions. Yet, regardless of the immense economic (Calkin et al, 2011), and ecological expense as results therefrom, the matter is all but unaccounted for in real estate development costs.

In the words of a headline from the High County News, “We need a better social contract with wildfire”, as “neither side [the fossil-fuel lobby and politicians of whom the policies align thereto, and environmentalists] is doing much to create lasting solutions on the ground” (2017, online), the message thereof mirroring that of the findings of several recent studies, such as a National Science Foundation report (2009) that asserted there to be an imperative for interdisciplinary research focused on gaining greater understanding of complex environmental systems by means of enabling better policy outcomes, and legacies therefrom. However, as discussed above, policy alone defines not environmental and social outcomes. Thus, “there is a need to codify and draw crosscutting lessons from the body of wildfire social science identifying the variable incentives, codes, or regulations” that might enable adaption to living in fire-prone environments (Smith et al, 2016, p.15).

Footnotes

[20] In reference to Clarke’s research mapping how Neolithic settlements impacted upon regional landscapes [i.e. slash and burn forest clearance in agropastoral societies]

[21] In reference to the Kennedy Ridge Fire, Sequoia-Kings Canyon.

Read Literature Review in full here.

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.