Let’s go back to writing about something I actually know something about.
The headlines say climate change causes wildfires. And indeed, a new study (pdf) found a strong correlation between the increase during the 1980s in the number and length of wildfires in the western US and increased temperatures.
But before we rush off to base our wildfire policy on these findings, two grains of salt are in order: 1) explaining a phenomenon is not the same as explaining the problem associated with that phenomenon, and 2) the solution to a problem is not simply the cause applied in reverse. This post will deal only with the first issue, hopefully I’ll be able to post on the second tomorrow.
By almost any measure you care to use, the most wildfire-prone state in the US is Alaska. But you hardly ever hear about Alaska in the news (I should know — I have a Google News alert set up for “wildfire”). Why? Because hardly anybody lives in Alaska, especially in the interior where most of the fires are. Alaska has lots of wildfires, but it doesn’t have much of a wildfire problem. By itself, a phenomenon in nature is morally and politically neutral. It becomes a problem, an issue to be concerned about, when it intersects with humans and the things we value*.
This becomes important in the climate change study because the authors note an important regional difference. The correlation between climate and fire is much stronger in the northwest than in the southwest. In the southwest, “land use” — the conventional wisdom of fire suppression leading to overgrown forests — is declared by default to be the major factor in that region’s fires. The study comes to an overall conclusion similar to the northwest regional conclusion because its data is drawn from federal forest lands, of which there are far more in the northwest. (The southwest has more non-forest but still fire-prone lands such as shrublands, as well as more land under other tenure, such as Indian reservations).
Let’s take, then, that the basic regional dichotomy of fire causes — climate in the northwest, land use in the southwest — is accurate. This is useful in itself, since fire policy ought to be tailored to the local situation rather than being based on overbroad generalizations. But we might still wonder what can we say about the overall fire problem. To do that, we have to take our understanding of the phenomenon and couple it with an understanding of the people at risk.
The biggest buzzword in fire policy today is “urban-wildland interface” or “wildland-urban interface,” abbreviated UWI or WUI**. The UWI is the landscape formed when residential settlement abuts “wild” areas such as forests. There has been a great expansion in UWI in the First World over the past few decades, and most of our major recent fires (such as Southern California in 2003) have been UWI fires. So one quick and dirty measure of how many people are at risk is how many people live in the UWI in each region.
I went to this document (pdf) for estimates of the number of houses in the UWI in the northwest (WA, OR, ID, MT, and WY) and the southwest (CA, AZ, NM, NV, UT, and CO). Adding it up, we find that there are nearly 2 million UWI houses in in the northwest, but nearly 7 million in the southwest. Multiplying by the Census’s figures for average household size, we get a very rough estimate of 5 million people at risk in the northwest, and 9 million in the southwest. If we measure vulnerability by population at risk, the causes of fire in the southwest are three to four times as important to the fire problem as the causes of fire in the northwest. Put another way, there would have to be three to four times as many fires in the northwest in order for that region’s fire causes to be as important to the national-level fire problem.
Of course, sheer number of people in the UWI is a very crude proxy for vulnerability. You’d then have to factor in things like poverty (a quick glance at some data suggests it might be a wash in terms of regional comparisons) and race (I suspect the southwest is more diverse).
*I’m setting aside possible detrimental effects of changed fire regimes on animals and ecosystems, because most of the discussion on this topic has been very anthropocentric in this regard.
**”WUI” seems to be gaining popularity in the US, but I find “UWI” to be more euphonious both as a full phrase and as an acronym.
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I just wanted to point out that even the wildfires in the Alaska wilderness cause problems, to the extent that they release a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Thus, global warming contributes to wildfires, and wildfires contribute to global warming.
We are both the “invasive species”…
…and the “fire insurance.”
As long as humans put themselves above the environment, as if the wildland urban interface is our playground where we can live in our picture postcard dream home (with fire insurance), then “we” are the invasive species. When we declared war on fire a hundred years ago and labeled (for the records) fire “evil,” we lost touch with our “purpose” as human beings. As a wildland firefighter ceritified in many areas in wildland fire operations as a “single resource,” it is clear to me that we humans are out of touch with why we are here on this planet. We invade other countries out of selfishness and greed. We invade the forests out of selfishness and greed. We invade other human and animal “spaces” out of selfishness and greed. Like the fuels that have built up in our forests because of prolonged fire suppression, the same insatiable human appetite for more and more, with disregard for the effects, has reached the point of an inevitable catastrophic (economical, social & environmental) collapse.
We are out of touch with who we are as a cuture. We are out of touch with what we are and why we are. We are more concerned with buying more useless material items while staying in debt, rather than taking responsibility for the well being of everything around us. Those who choose to live in a wildland urban interface to satisfy personal motives need to snap out of DENIAL (a contageous dis-ease that is running rampant throughout this culture) and learn to become “Stewards of the Land.”
What is your relationship with the Land? What did the land look like before fire suppression became the policy of a corrupt government owned by greedy corporations? What did the land look like before European settlers “invaded” this country?
Fire was once a natural part of our landscape. Low intensity fire helped maintain balance and order in the forests and kept forests “healthy and biodiverse.” (Many Native Americans understood this principle and, prior to the arrival of European settlers, practiced “prescribed burning” methods that supported the health of themselves AND the health of the forests and animals.) However, that knowledge was lost when the European settlers came to understand “timber” as a valuable commodity and perceived fire as “evil” and actually declared war on it. (Good old Smokey the Bear became the perfect propoganda prop to further their cause.) Unfortunately, without low intensity fire to keep forests healthy and diverse, we now have a catastrohpic problem on our hands. The amount of acummulated “bio mass” needed to be removed from our forests, to help nature recover somewhat, is MASSIVE! Like the Karma that will come to all Americans for, directly or indirectly, invading and destroying other peoples cultures, a similar Karma is now at our doorstep.
You want fire insurance? Look inside yourself. Learn to connect to your true nature and how that supports and nourishes your environment…the land your home is on. Each and everyone of us has a purpose on this planet, unrelated to the fashionable addictions most Americans have to any and everything that keeps them constantly preoccupied with being busy doing absolutely nothing worthwhile.
We each need to realign ourselves with our purpose and mission in life; not to serve ourself (always first), but to serve the greater good of all living creatures. Time is growing short on all fronts. Our forests need to be intelligently and carefully “thinned” (leaving all old growth) with mimimum impact on the sensitive ecosystem. Low intensity fire must follow. Therapy for the forests will be therapy for ourselves. They go hand and hand, limb and limb. (Channel the billions of dollars allocated to an illegal war, by a corrupted administration, towards hiring a few million “poor” people to recover our forests. It’s a “win-win” situation.)
Time to make a stand for something good, anything. Either this makes sense or it doesn’t. The lines are being drawn. Whether you are rich or poor, it does not matter. What does matter is what side you choose to align yourself with?
A fully functional and dedicated “Steward of the Land,” steeped in principles gleaned from Nature (and not the corrupted corporations), is the only true “fire insurance” there is. Our ability to positively Steward the Land is the “fire insurance” policy that the old growth forest has always expected from us, as a coherent human race. The policy expired over the last hundred years. Time to renew it for the sake of the forest and ourselves?
Jeffrey Learned