Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour
Stephen J. Pyne. 2008. Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour. Forest History Today, Fall 2008.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Wildland-urban interface” is a dumb term for a dumb problem, and both have dominated the American fire scene for nearly twenty years. It’s a dumb term because “interface” is a pretty klutzy metaphor and because the phenomenon of competing borders it describes is more complex than that geeky term suggests. At issue is a scrambling of landscape genres beyond the traditional variants of the American pastoral. It is a mingling of the quasi-urban and the quasi-wild into something that, depending on your taste, resembles either an ecological omelet or a coniferous strip mall. That means it also stirs together urban fire services with wildland fire agencies, two cultures with no more in common than an opera house and a grove of old-growth ponderosa pine. It is an unstable alloy, a volatile compound of matter and antimatter, and it should surprise no one that it explodes with increasing regularity.
It’s a dumb problem because technical solutions exist. We know how to keep houses from burning on the scale witnessed over the past two decades. We know convincingly that combustible roofing is lethal; we have known this for maybe ten thousand years. The wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire problem (a.k.a., the interface or I-zone) thus differs from fire management in wilderness, for example, where fire practices must be grounded, if paradoxically, in cultural definitions and social choices; there is no code to ensure that the right fire happens in the right way.
That the intermix problem persists testifies to its relatively trivial standing in the larger political universe, even as construction pushes ever outward into the environmental equivalent of subprime landscapes, which from time to time then crash catastrophically. In that regard it remains on the fringe. …
After all, the problem is not restricted to the American West, the clash of public with private lands, or the United States. Cognates can be found wherever industrialization is busy redesigning landscapes, where the global economy meets the global climate. Outbreaks have occurred throughout the Mediterranean basin, from Portugal to the Peloponnese; in the outskirts of Australia’s city-states, from the Blue Mountain exurbs of Sydney to the Dandenongs outside Melbourne; along the fynbos coasts of South Africa; and even amid postindustrial exurbs in British Columbia and Alberta. …
In fact, although bits and pieces of the WUI are everywhere, the real damage—the events that can shake insurance companies and mesmerize action news video cameras—is in California. California is to the interface fire scene what Florida is to hurricanes. The defining fires of the era, those that have branded themselves into national memory and registered among insurers, are those that incinerated Oakland in 1991, the Los Angeles basin in 1993 and 2003, and San Diego in 2003 and 2007. The others, including Colorado’s 2002 Hayman Fire and the sad saga of Los Alamos in 2000, rack up losses on rough par with tornadoes. California has gotten its long-anticipated Big One, but it has come not with earth-shaking tremors but with flames riding a shattering wind. Much as settlement fires plagued particularly the Lake States during the old frontier, so the epicenter of the intermix fire resides with special intensity in California. …
TWO CULTURES OF FIRE
To its credit, however, the wildland fire community (practitioners, researchers, administrators) recognized the challenges posed by changing demographics and after the Yellowstone debacle of 1988 moved to install the WUI as an informing concern. It sought alliances with fire institutions outside the provenance of wildlands, notably the National Fire Protection Association, and through the state foresters, many of whom had responsibility for fire protection on unincorporated lands, crafting partnerships to publicize the problem and promote firewise responses. It has warned that shifting resources to protect communities would divert efforts from controlling the larger fire and deflect attention from the critical task of managing, not just suppressing, fire on the land; that the WUI would put firefighters at risk in new ways; and that it might, through stealth and mission creep, result in a reinvigoration of fire suppression and thus reverse the great cultural revolution in American fire management that had swelled out of the 1960s.
The WUI was not an assignment that America’s wildland fire agencies either sought or wanted. …
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PAST?
The nineteenth-century jeremiads over the agricultural frontier went nowhere. Fulminating over valuable forests converted to stump farms and slash burning that bolted into the bush made not a whit of difference. It did nothing to halt the tide of settlement and only made politicians suspicious and neighbors cranky. The public, after all, was obeying powerful incentives, just as people are today. The pressures were quite beyond the capacity of fire agencies to contain. If we really want to slow the pace of WUI, we should eliminate the mortgage tax deduction for second homes, charge developers the full cost of public services, and instigate a carbon footprint tax. Exurbia will respond less to environmental hazards like fire and bark beetle than to economic ones like a credit crunch and wallet-emptying gas prices. …
WHAT IS THE LIKELY FUTURE?
The near future will likely resemble the near past. But it may well be that, just as reservations and frontiers clashed at their mutual peak, one rising and one falling, so the contemporary scene may be cresting. I suspect it has already done so. …
At some point the intermix will lose its inherent instability. … Either it will fall under the purview of one side or the other, or it will become a stable landscape in its own right. … Perhaps it may evolve into a new kind of vernacular landscape … Such a relocation of effort will place the problem within the realm of the built environment. Modern urban fire services will eventually follow urban migrants to the fringe. Wildland fire management will retire to the woods. …
