6.3.2 Panta Rhei: Wildland Urban Interface Forecasts to 2100 and beyond

“The big name contractors all fell out with one another, the lawyers presumably got very rich, and the nations, Genesis tell us, scattered unto the ends of the Earth... so much for the world’s first bid at technofix”. McIntosh, 2008.

It’s a tale, or rather a power struggle narrative, [at least] as old as [anthropogenically- recorded] time: prophet warns humanity to curtail its environmentally and socially wayward conduct; humanity ignores said prophet, thus elicits the wrath of all- powerful forces that unleash a series of punishments, of which the spatiotemporal dimensions are eschatological: marking the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Scribed in Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets circa. 5tya, the oldest recorded incarnations thereof, including The Flood, Gilgamesh, and the myth to which the origin of ‘Pandora’ is attributed [129], the Epic of Creation (Dalley, 2008), emerged from an “inherently unpredictable natural world” (Leick, 2002, p.xviii). But, not merely in myth has global environmental change catalysed the destruction and the creation of civilisations, and of that which has emerged therefrom. The archaeological record evidences that, from the moment of their conception in the mythically- augmented [130] southern Mesopotamian city of Eridu, which founded in prehistory led the Ur-ban Revolution of the Uruk Period [circa. 6tya] cities have risen and fallen with tides and temperatures. Civilisation having developed during “a fortuitous lull following the end of a post-glacial storm” (McGuire, 2013, p.11), once again finds itself facing an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. Urbanisation proceeding apace from the 1700s, by 2000, more than 50% of the terrestrial biosphere constituted not biome, but “anthrome” [agricultural and urbanised land] (Bistinas et al, 2013, p.2), and if the projections of some are correct, that figure will rise as the century unfolds.

Currently, just under 2m Californian households are at “high or extreme risk” from wildfires (Gardner, 2014). A study by Mann et al (2013) predicts that by 2050 this sum will have risen by 50%, as a further 12m wildland acres join the exurban land classes. However, in the still inherently unpredictable world that humanity inhabits, the figure could be yet greater than 3m.

Climate change may make manifest the largest diaspora in all human history, as not millions, but hundreds of millions of people migrate en masse [131] in response to rising seas, desertification and land-degradation more generally, and as resultant conflicts ensue (Rigaud et al, 2018; Adger et al, 2014; Confine, 2014; Kimura, 2010; Brown, 2008; Stern et al, 2006). Worldwide, one person per second was displaced by conflict, violence or disasters during 2016, of which 24.2 million fled floods, storms, wildfires, and severe weather events (IDMC, 2018). While, of the sum thereof, just 1.1m were U.S. residents (Ibid), given the bandwidth of climate trajectories and environmental impacts as may result therefrom, here through 2100, both internal and inward migration, legal and otherwise, may rise sharply. Bringing perspective thereto, analysis by Geisler and Currens (2017), estimate that 1/5 people will be climate refugees by 2100. The direction of travel inland as coastal regions become submerged by rising seas and storm surges, the scale of movement may be so great as for military strategists to consider U.S. national and international security at threat (Carrington, 2016). Amongst others, the World Bank considers humanity so “badly prepared” to deal with the scale and speed of the changes as may occur as to place the global economy at risk (Elliot, 2016), the conclusion thereof echoing that which peers have privately expressed since the early 2000s.

Nationally, should humanity exceed the expectations of some, and limit climate change to a mean surface temperature [MST] increase of <2°C, swathes of the U.S. mainland would, nonetheless, become submerged by the resultant sea level rise. Hauer et al (2016) estimate that 13.1>m will be forced inland by 2100, the magnitude thereof mirrored in several independent studies. For example, real estate group Zillow predict by 2100 36 U.S cities will have lost their entire housing stock to rising seas, and a further 300 will have lost “at least” 50% (Rao, 2016). Zillow estimated the combined [current] value thereof at $882b, of which California’s share is $49.2b, which translates to approaching 42.5t properties. The state’s topography makes evident that Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which were largely built on wetlands, could be all but lost to the sea, and not least whereupon the climate transitions beyond the parameters of the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period and to they of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum [+5-6°C on present-day MST], which Bill Mcguire posits “perfectly possible” towards the latter half of the century (2013, p. 47). However, not merely may homes and businesses be wiped off the map, but also beaches and other interstitial landscape features that provide protection against coastal erosion. Not raining, but ‘pouring’, as coastlines become more vulnerable to storm surges, warmer atmospheric temperatures could result in storms producing 70%> precipitation (Prein et al, 2017). In California, the event thereof would result in more flash floods, landslides, and debris flows. As discussed earlier, calcium carbonate sand supplies now fast dwindling, here-out not merely will the economics, but logistics of land reclamation be ‘challenging’, to say the least.

But, the above constitutes not the worst of all possible scenarios. Environmental terrorism is at least as old as civilisation, with accounts strewn throughout the history books, such for example as when, led by William of Orange, Low Countries rebels used flooding in their fight against the Spanish during the Eighty Years War. While, within recorded history, water has been the primary weapon of environmental warfare [i.e. redirection of rivers and destruction of dams by means of cutting off urban water supplies], fire not merely comes a close second, but is hypothesised to be the foremost ancient means by which humans have weaponised the landscape. Today, vast tracts of South Asia are burning at the behest of both legal and illegal organisations by means of removing indigenous peoples of the region. However, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that, within decades, such ancient, unprincipled, yet effective measures reoccur in the Global North.

Several fire ecologists have advocated against urban sprawl (Pyne, 2008; Moritz et al, 2014; Scott et al, 2014), but, while the ecological and wider environmental case therefor is robust, whereupon caught between lands subjected to incineration at one end, and inundation the other, one can assume not that migratory peoples will settle where policy, let alone scientific studies advocate: logistics not laws guide the footsteps of peoples fleeing from immediate danger. Bowman (2017, online), amongst others, has expressed there an urgent need to fireproof “vulnerable cities”. But, as discussed earlier, the mineral materials that facilitate the act thereof [i.e. stone and cement] present not insignificant problems in and of themselves [i.e. supply shortages, high C02 emissions upon extraction, processing, distribution, and building, together with landscape erosion at point of source]. All the while, headlines of the ilk of “The National Forests of the Future Need to Be in Cities” (Wilkinson, 2018) keep rolling on in.

Torrent, storm, and flood [132] forecast to once again ‘come on’ as the metaphorical Ea speaks, humanity is yet again, noisily, debating how many storehouses will be depleted and households left upon a catastrophe’s passing, as it envisages another urban revolution [Fig. 68].

Fragment from ‘Highline to the Hills’ [133]: speculative fiction

The city had looked every bit as apocalyptical as in the scenes of the Hollywood blockbusters of old. But, that was just the beginning. Next came the several storm surges, “perfect storm” surges. Millions had moved inland and upward, to the high ground. Yet, for others the prospect of cohabiting with the now frequent infernos that engulfed California’s chaparral and woodlands was just too daunting. In a world of elemental extremes, while some lived with fire, others lived a life semiaquatic.

>Continue to Chapter 6.3.2 here.

Footnotes

[129] In the Epic of Creation the mother goddess ‘Mami’ and god of water, wisdom, and creation, ‘Enki’ [Ea in Akkadian], craft a mortals from clay and blood, their purpose to undertake hard labour for the gods.

[130] In reference to the fact that in Mesopotamian myth the archetypal city, Eridu, was born of sacred origin.

[131] Both recent and historic reports by organisations including the World Bank, IPCC, Stern Review, and Christian Aid anticipate in the region of 140m – 250m migrants by 2050, the figure thereof rising towards the latter end of the century.

[132] In reference to v, Tablet II of the Mesopotamian myth Atrahasis III.

[133] A climate fiction novella set late 21st century, from author’s work-in-progress ‘Storms Anthology’, which received an Honourable mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards.

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.