The Wildland/Science Interface
Stephen J. Pyne. 2009. The Wildland/Science Interface. Copyright 2009 Stephen J. Pyne
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
A long narrow road winds steeply up into thickly-wooded backcountry to an exclusive enclave of costly structures, all well beyond the periphery of settlement. It’s the formula for the worstcase scenario of the wildland/urban interface, except that this is no subprime landscape stuffed with trophy homes. It’s a telescope complex atop Mount Graham, and on the Sky Islands of Arizona the scene is repeated four times. Call it the wildland/science interface.
Fire management accepts as axiomatic that it is science-based or at least science-informed and that good science is the antidote to the toxins of politics, land development, and a Smokey-blinkered populace that doesn’t understand the natural ecology and inevitability of fire. Science is better than experience or history, and more science is better still. Science, preferably natural science, since even social science is tainted with the implied values of its human doers, is the solution. At Mount Graham, however, it is the problem. And the challenge is not simply that “science” here underwrites its own version of the WUI and opens paved roads to remote sites that complicate fire management and compromise biodiversity. The real challenge is the assumption that science stands apart from the scene it describes and from its Olympian perch can peer objectively outward and advise wisely.
The Mount Graham International Observatory suggests instead, that science’s lofty perch is not removed from land management and that science, too, has its self-interests that can influence what it sees, does, and says. Science, in brief, is not an ungrounded platform for viewing the universe of fire and recording its observations. It is sited, and that siting determines what it sees, and decisions over such sites make science and its caste of practitioners as motivated by their own values and ambitions as loggers, ranchers, real estate developers, and ATV recreationists. Science has its own dynamic apart from nature, its own presence on the land, and its own politics. The 1.83 meter primary mirror of the VATT telescope, while nominally looking out, is also a reflecting lens that looks back on its viewers.
The Sky Islands, as their name hints, are ideal for astronomical observatories. They sit atop high mountains amid a dry climate surrounded by dark deserts (the exception is Tucson, but the city has adopted light abatement measures). The costs of constructing and operating such facilities favor clustering, and the region is dense with telescopes. Mt Lemmon in the Santa Catalinas holds one for the Steward Observatory, Mt Hopkins in the Santa Ritas hosts the Whipple Observatory’s MMT for the Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory, Kitt Peak in the Boboquivaris has a compound of 22 instruments including the famous National Solar Observatory, and in the Pinaleños three telescopes sit in a concrete aerie atop Mt Graham. In recent years wildfires have threatened them all.
The fires have come almost annually. In 2002 and 2003 the Bulloch and Aspen fires together burned 85% of the Santa Catalinas. In 2004 the Nuttall fire complex burned 29,000 acres of Mount Graham. In 2005 the Florida Peak fire in the Santa Ritas threatened both the MMT telescope and cabin inholdings in Madera Canyon, and forced evacuations. In 2007 the Alambre fire moved up the slopes of Kitt Peak before being contained at 7,000 acres and over $2 million in suppression costs. But such scenes are hardly news: the same dynamic is playing out across the country, and for that matter, throughout the industrial world, as a revanchist vegetation meets an outmigration of urbanites. Matter and antimatter - the astrophysicists needn’t peer into nebulae at the fringes of an expanding universe to detect such explosions, they need only look around them.
But the deeper collision is occurring within the domain of cultural values not subatomic particles. The observatories break up public wildlands into incommensurable blocks: they are in this respect no different from a private inholding or a clearcut. Only four Sky Islands have roads that extend to their summits; all lead to observatories. So long as Science seemed a greater good, as incontestable in its claims to public land as to public money, there were few objections.
Certainly there were no doubts from the scientific or university communities. They were the good guys, far removed from grubby commodity producers and selfish summer homeowners. Their motives were unimpeachable. They were studying the heavens. Theirs were the highest values of civilization.
Then the science-industrial complex met the Wilderness, the American Indian Religious Freedom, and the Endangered Species Acts. They spiraled together with particular force at Mount Graham when in 1984 the University of Arizona, heading a consortium, petitioned to create a cluster of seven telescopes, one of them an enormous 6-dish, rail-mounted interferometer, at the summit. That catalyzed an opposition. An Apache Survival Coalition declared the peak a sacred mountain. Advocates for roadless areas wanted access limited rather than enlarged. And enthusiasts for wilderness and biodiversity noted that the mountain was a Pleistocene relic of Englemann spruce and cork-bark fir with 17 protected species, including a unique subspecies of red squirrel that inhabited the summit, and could go nowhere else; expanding the facility over two peaks would diminish its required habitat and perhaps introduce other disturbances. Under terms of the ESA environmental groups protested and eventually brought suit.
The controversy — “scopes vs. squirrels” — became more bitter as the years passed, not lessened by the inability of the science community to admit that they were in fact upsetting a biotic order. …
Yet the contest might as equally be viewed as one between sciences, and between science and wildland management, and between institutions of science. One science, astronomy, and a nominally science-supporting institution, the UofA, turned to politics to overturn the claims of another science and its non-governmental auxiliary. The winner was the more powerful: Astronomy meant Big Science. Conservation biology only acquired a name in 1978. Deep sky met deep biology, and sky won. …
Some of this was obvious when the UofA declared its intentions. The potential biological (and cultural) competition was clear from the onset. What all sides failed to consider, however, was fire. It claimed no more than a nominal paragraph in draft assessments. …
In May, 1996 the Clark Peak fire, kindled from an abandoned campfire, burned 6500 acres, spreading into known squirrel middens and giving the MGIO a thorough scare and inspiring a fire inspection by a scientist who had specialized in the WUI. In June, 2004 lightning sparked two fires, the Gibson and the Nuttall, that together drove through nearly 29,000 acres on the mountain’s northeast slopes and nearly converged exactly at the MGIO. All three fires emerged from the mountain’s middle zone. In the end, both squirrels and scopes survived. The squirrels took the bigger hit since the beetles and aphids had struck hard even before the burns. …
It would seem that fire science also exerts a claim to the summit. Yet science consists of information and ideas; it is not an entity. How can it demand space akin to that of the Heinrich Heitz Submillimeter Telescope or the Mount Graham red squirrel? In fact, it can because it affects fire’s management on the ground. Here is another wildland/science interface, where science as a mode of inquiry confronts fire management’s need to act, and of the two wildland borders, this is much the trickier. …
There are those who say that the barrier should not –- does not –- exist, that fire management is simply the best application of the best knowledge science produces, and that more science will spark better practices. But there are also those –- fire’s curmudgeons -– who point out that humanity handled free-burning fire, and probably handled it far longer and more successfully, before modern science than after it, and that more money poured into research has not produced savings in fire management’s costs or a reduction in area burned by wildfire. Rather than improve performance, science as an intellectual enterprise sits within fire management as the MGIO does on the peaks of the Pinaleños. It not only interrupts the landscape of fire but demands a peak and shoves aside competing claims. What then should be the relationship between knowing and doing, and what is the proper place of science? …
Repeatedly, while science showed it could predict fire’s behavior, it has failed to understand fire’s ecology and overall place in the landscape. In effect, the astronomical sciences of fire triumphed over the biological. …
The response? An ardent appeal for more and better science. If the agencies had had more of the right science, so the apologists claim, they would have applied those findings and could have resisted the perverting pressures of politics. Rather, the story seems to be that the agency did have the best science of its day and applied it with consequences later scientists rejected. Still, one could legitimately discriminate between science as a mode of inquiry and science as a body of positive knowledge, and suggest that its ever-inquiring character was its most basic. The breakdown was the product not of science but of its political application. And one could observe, philosophically, that given a couple of decades the scientific community had shown itself capable of righting its errors. The misreading of fire was simply a longer example of fads like cold fusion and polywater, which the community ultimately self-corrected. In the long run science was right. Yet a land agency is not a research institution: it must act, it needs workable knowledge to perform its tasks, and the consequences of error cannot be overturned by the latest journal article. …
The reality would seem to argue that local knowledge based on centuries, if not millennia, of practical experience coded into cultural mores was far superior to field- and lab-generated (and later, computer-simulated) data. It just didn’t have the same cachet, and it could threaten to undercut the claims to privileged knowledge that led to money and power. …
Besides, fire embraces many sciences: which should guide practice? As at Mount Graham the zoologists had to yield to the astronomers, the biologists to the physicists. The general response, however, has been to do more of the same. The solution to the problems of science is more science of the same sort. That the agencies responsible for administering the land are also the ones sponsoring research means that there is no way to segregate the two. Science cannot exist apart from politics because politics pays for the science. It cannot merely observe and analyze from a neutral vantage point because those operations and the vantage point itself deform the scene being examined.
The reality, too, is that major reformations in fire management have come not from new scientific discoveries but from changes in cultural values. Upheavals in social understanding determined the paradigm shifts in fire science, not vice versa. Critical thinkers came to value fire because they saw it as part of wilderness, not because they chronicled its evidence in scarred trees and soil charcoal. Those cultural revolutions further allowed society to sift through the competing claims of the various sciences. The ideas and beliefs that surfaced chose which kind of research to support and which to put on the shelf. …
After nearly a century of evidence, it should be clear that fire science is not adequate to the task before it, and that it will never be adequate. Science, as science, simply can’t answer the questions most needed to live on the land. It can improve technology and advise about possible outcomes of decisions, it can overgrow with data, but it cannot decide, and its record is such that acting solely on its existing data will almost certainly lead to errors if not disasters.
The critics of fire suppression often point to graphs of increasing expenditures and swelling acres burned to make a case that more money fighting fire doesn’t reduce either costs or burned area (Figure 1). Defenders will reply that worsening conditions –- climate change, the WUI — are determining the fundamentals, and that these deep-driving circumstances are causing the megaburns that bring larger suppression costs. Yet, in the perverse way of correlations, critics could impishly hint that the rising expenditures are just as likely to be the cause of increased burning. The more we spend, the less control we get. A fire suppression-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground.
This same logic can be applied to fire science. An uptick in fire research parallels the same upswings in firefighting costs and burned area (Figure 2). The USGS has joined the USFS as a funding agency, and the Joint Fire Science Program, established in 1998, has pumped significant monies into research. The number of scientific articles published shows an exponential rise: in the early 1960s some 13 papers/year were published, and in the early 2000s over 300. Partisans will argue that the growing crises, worsening circumstances, and emerging megafires are the reason for more research funding, and that the proper solution is still more funding for still more studies. Yet this is exactly the logic that long governed suppression. One could just as easily argue that the enhanced investment in science has not made any difference on the ground, or even that an emphasis on fire sciences has diverted attention from the real “drivers” of fire’s management. An objective measure of applied fire science –- analyzing science as science would natural phenomena –- would probably show mixed results much like that from fire suppression. The more we spend, the fewer practical outcomes we get. A fire research-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground. …
Yet, unexpectedly, the imperial model of science, in which science informs and management applies, is finding itself constrained. Nationally, a countermove is underway in the guise of adaptive management that blurs the hard border between science and quotidian experience. Science is an experiment in management, practice is a scientific experiment; both need to be constantly calibrated, compared, and adjusted. Granted some space, the concept may return fire management to its ancient status as grounded in experiential knowledge. …
