I recently went to Tucson for to join wild land fire specialists gathered to talk about the particular science of fire moving across the land, through the trees, through neighborhoods, and through our minds. Certain scientists think about fire behavior which is chemistry and physics mixed with botany and meteorology and they talk about group psychology related to the public fearfully waiting for their neighborhoods to burn down when a firefront is eating toward them across the vineyards, the piney woods, or the grassy outback.
Sitting in these meetings at this Association for Fire Ecology meeting I realized this is the far reaches of esoteric weirdness that most people have no idea about. I suspect that a majority of Americans think that a forest fire is a forest fire and the people who deal with fires just come running with hoses and airplanes and are ready to run for their lives. In fact there is a whole science of fires that has been explored in depth by hundreds of scientists for decades. These are people who earn their PhDs from the University of California, Berkeley or University of Idaho and they study fires with an array of techniques. They get down to small details. They watch the big picture. They look at the before and the after.
The sessions at this meeting (called Cultivating Pyrodiversity) included topics like “effects of fire intensity on resprouting woody species” and “high severity wildfire reduces richness and alters composition of ectomycorrhizal fungi in ponderosa pine forest” and “adaptive strategies for climate and fire in the Southwest.” Who knew that so many people in their own worlds could come together with the same interests in tow.
They talk about setting up prescribed fire coops where people who want to burn their land with professionals standing by can band together and get it done. They talk about encouraging lightning started fires to expand across as many acres as possible when conditions are right. They learn to use social media to break through the fear factor, break through the propaganda highway, break through the fog of ignorance, and spark up our sense of the West as a world of fire, both good fire and bad fire.
Bad fire is big fire out of control that kills too many trees over a large area and especially fire that enters communities and destroys property and kills people. Good fire is fire that burns wild land at a low to moderate intensity stimulating vegetation, making animals happy with new growth of a variety of plants and burning up deadfall that could burn explosively in windy dry times. Sometimes good fire is super intense, other times it is tiny and far away.
We all love good fire and we gather around good fires and set good fires and encourage Congress to fund good fires across hundreds of millions of acres of land. We want good fires to eat grass rather than cattle who spread weeds and kill streams. We want good fires to make smoke far off in the wilderness like it has for millions of years. We want rainy years so the land nurtures moderate fire.
And if you want to take this to extremes you go to the backcountry of Alaska where fires that start on remote public lands and receive little attention from humans at all. They may burn for weeks across the land doing what they have always done and people from the agencies just fly by once in a while and have a look to make sure no cabin is in danger. Of course in Alaska the heating climate is making fires much more frequent and intense that they were in the past, just like the fires in California are more frequent and severe than they were in the past.
In Tucson, while we sat inside and looked at graphs and tables on projection screens and we looked at photos of fires or the places they had burned… it rained outside. It rained the whole time we met and the chairs beside the swimming pool were empty.
Later in the evening I went out to the big hot tub by the cliff near the swimming pool at the resort and the hot tub was full of graduate students and college kids who were there to learn the fire science trade. I sat over by one edge listening to their excited talk. Great to have young people coming up behind to care for the fires that will burn in their lifetimes.
Suddenly someone noticed a large insect in the pool with all of us. The students gathered around to identify the insect, to notice its life and details. They shuttled the insect to safety then went back to their beers and conversation in the steamy night.
There is hope for the world, I thought. These are good people. And the public can know that behind these frantic wildfire scenes that unfold on TV or in their neighborhood, there are hundreds of scientists young and old working to understand and to help encourage good fire, and corral bad fire.
The suguaro cacti studded desert rose up and away from the back of our meeting resort and the trails there led into a strange world of decaying granite and cacti gnarled at the edges of sandy arroyos. No fire here, just a desert soaked with three days of rain.
Yay!