Now the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year even Greenland burned.

Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger; fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry, but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going. 

The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichés, ready to spill into the culture wars. 

The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, we’ve hit field capacity. What more can we say?

One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species, and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations. 

~

I’m a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening, but as an emergent property that’s intrinsic to life on Earth.

So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest — all the flames we see.

But then there are fires that should be present and aren’t — the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed “a second nature.”

But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower we remade second nature into “a third nature,” one organized around industrial combustion. 

Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good, and way too much combustion overall.

Add up all those varieties of burning, and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction, and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace. 

It’s said that every model fails but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age — a Pyrocene — gives us, is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.

What we have made — if with unintended consequences — we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.

We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it. 

Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.

The post Our new age of fire appeared first on Writers On The Range.

One lightning strike or tossed cigarette on the wrong windy day, and Ashland could be destroyed as completely as the town of Paradise, California, in 2018.

This reality was brought home with terrifying force last September, when a wind-driven wildfire roared through the nearby towns of Talent and Phoenix, destroying over 2,500 residences in a matter of hours.  Ashland was largely spared, but only because the wind pushed the fire in another direction.

Over the past several years, the city has implemented the ambitious “Ashland Forest Resiliency” project to reduce flammable fuels on thousands of acres of public lands. Tools in the Ashland Watershed include thinning and controlled burns. The project is considered to be a model ecological approach, not mere window-dressing to justify commercial timber harvest as is true of many “forest health” projects.

As a homeowner, I’ve supported the project, and as a conservation biologist, I’ve been impressed with how it’s been carried out.

Yet even as the city and its partners are diligently reducing forest fuels, more and more homes are being built in every nook and cranny of private land abutting the watershed. Many are McMansions commanding expansive views of the valley below. All these homes are at extreme risk of wildfire. As if the sense of crisis surrounding fuels reduction wasn’t enough, this adds another crisis, one we’ve made ourselves.

Recently, I took a favorite trail leading from the edge of edge of town into the watershed.  I always look forward to walking through an avenue of small manzanita trees. In spring, their pink urn-like blossoms are mobbed by bumble bees and hummingbirds.  In fall and winter, their berries — the “little apples” that give these shrubs their Spanish name —  feed robins, thrushes and bears. Winter storms turn these groves into an enchanted labyrinth of green leaves, red bark and white snow.

Not this year. Not again in my lifetime.  I found that this once intact and healthy wildlife habitat had been reduced to “defensible space.” The manzanitas had been harshly hacked back; those that had been spared stood isolated in a barren expanse of blood-red stumps.  I counted the rings on one of the stumps, revealing that it had been at least 55 years old when we decided it was too dangerous to live.  

The Forest Resiliency Project considered these manzanitas a threat because they were close to the city limits — and even closer to the big new homes being built outside the city limits. 

They were sacrificed to increase our sense of security, and for no other reason. They were mostly healthy and important for wildlife.  They shaded the soil and hosted mycorrhizal fungi integral to the nutrient cycles of the forest. 

Yes, someday a wildfire would have burned here.  But without our presence, that fire would not have been a tragedy, merely an episode in the long life of the land, and an opportunity for renewal.  Manzanitas are well-adapted to fire; some species actually require fire for seed germination.  

Oregonians take pride in being environmentally aware. Yet we accept the ecological destruction of the “fuels reduction” paradigm, rather than putting limits on our relentless expansion into the rural landscape. 

Perhaps my town is becoming safer than it was before.  But it’s questionable that any amount of “thinning” could protect Ashland from a wind-driven firestorm coming out of the watershed.  

The fire that destroyed much of Talent and Phoenix, Oregon, like many of last summer’s devastating California wildfires, did not start on heavily forested public land.  

Instead, it ignited and roared through a typical valley mosaic of creekside woodlands, orchards and residential neighborhoods. The hard truth is that for Ashland and many other towns around the West, avoiding catastrophic wildfire is as much a matter of luck as preparedness.

Still, we have to try, right? That means some degree of fuels reduction.  But we must acknowledge the losses to the ecological integrity, the habitat value, and the beauty of this land that we love so much.

The post We blame the trees, but whose fault is it? appeared first on Writers On The Range.