1 The Land of Feral Flames
Over the past few decades, many parts of the world have experienced record-breaking wildfire events—a trend that is, unfortunately, expected to rise.
[1] These extreme events not only result in mass evacuations, but also release greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, pose risks to life, devastate buildings and essential infrastructure, and fundamentally disrupt and detrimentally transform native ecosystems.
California sits at the frontline of this crisis in the United States. Since 2015, the state has experienced 10 of its most destructive and costly wildfires.
[2] In the 2020 fire season alone, over 8,500 wildfires ravaged the state, prompting nearly 500,000 emergency responses.
[3] Residents endured severely degraded air quality characterized by toxic smog, frequent dustings of ash, and the pervasive odor of burnt debris, which infiltrated homes despite herculean efforts to block it (Fig.1). The fires destroyed over 11,000 structures, which are increasingly challenging to reconstruct due to shifts in insurance coverages and soaring inflation rates.
[3] In total, the fires from that year were estimated to have emitted 140 million tons of carbon dioxide, significantly undermining years of climate mitigation work across the state.
[4] They also fundamentally altered many of California's ecosystems, even those designated as fire-prone and fire-adapted, by catalyzing large-scale shifts in vegetative communities, increasing erosion and flood risks, encouraging invasive species growth, and reducing critical habitat for native wildlife (Fig.2).
The rise in extreme wildfire events in California is driven by multiple complex factors. First, a hotter and drier global climate contributes to more prolonged drought, lowered humidity, and increased plant mortality, leading to extended fire seasons and fire probability.
[5] Historian Stephen Pyne refers to this era as the Pyrocene, characterized by the burning of fossil fuels, the warming of the earth and the increasing severity and frequency of wildfire events; an era in which fire begets ever more fire.
[6] Second, land-use changes in the wildland-urban interface increase fire risks by adding more combustible materials and sparking human-caused ignitions.
[7] The third factor is the issue of human-modified fire regimes, shaped by historical colonial practices in California that have changed many ecosystems across the state.
[8] This predominantly consists of colonial-era fire suppression policies which have led to excessive biomass that would historically burn at regular intervals, creating abundant fuel for future wildfires (Fig.3).
Prior to Euro-American settlement of the Western United States, fires burned large expanses of California, with an estimated 4.5 million acres (18,211 km
2) affected each year
[9]—a figure surpassing even the catastrophic fire season of 2020
[3]. But those historic fires were generally far less intense and smokey, since before colonization, indigenous people utilized and applied fire frequently as a land tending and land shaping tool, and allowed naturally occurring fires to burn out.
[10] Beginning in the early 20th century, though, government agencies began prohibiting intentional burning of the landscape and sought to suppress all wildfires. Notably, in 1935, the United States Forest Service enacted the "10 a.m. Policy, " aiming to extinguish all fires by the morning following their detection. The Smokey Bear campaign further entrenched the notion that fire was inherently detrimental to landscapes and communities.
[11] The effects of fire exclusion in California and the rest of the American West were profound, dramatically transforming fire-adapted landscapes and increasing their vulnerability to catastrophic wildfires.
[12]Today, California remains largely in a fire deficit
[13], with many of its landscapes requiring fire to maintain ecological health, albeit not to the extent seen in recent decades (Fig.4).
2 An Expanded Toolbox for Landscape Architects
In response to the increased risk of catastrophic wildfires, many planning and site design practices have sought to protect the trends and status quo of land development. These strategies aim to exclude fire through methods such as constructing earth-sheltered fire-resistant bunkers, wrapping structures in aluminized blankets, and indiscriminately clearing vegetation in certain perimeters around homes. These measures strive to resist and, ultimately, suppress fire, raising questions of how more innovative and diverse approaches could be employed in land-fire stewardship (i.e., the intentional act of working with fire to reduce risks, support eco-cultural practices, and regenerate ecological processes and landscapes) by those involved in planning and designing landscapes.
This article shares a sample of fire tending techniques presented in
Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene—the first book of its kind to outline a range of design and planning strategies for fire-prone regions.
[14] The book curates 27 global design case studies (Fig.5) situated within the dynamic and vulnerable wildland-urban interface and its adjacent wildlands, and catalogs them into three approaches: those that resist the forces of fire and landscape change, those that embrace and utilize such forces, and those that strategically retreat to minimize human intervention in fire-prone landscapes. In the following section, we highlight four creative and active ways designers can engage with fire.
2.1 Fire Lighting, Rather than Fighting
"Beneficial fire, " also known as controlled, prescribed, and good fire, involves intentionally setting low-intensity fires during cooler months or allowing the landscape to safely burn during a wildfire. These techniques serve multiple purposes, including reducing hazardous forest overgrowth, enhancing ecological health, supporting indigenous traditions and sovereignty, or a combination of these goals. While the support for beneficial fire has grown over the last few decades
[15], it is still a relatively underutilized strategy in the fields of landscape architecture and planning. Internationally, there are numerous examples where fire is applied intentionally and beneficially.
In Cape Town, South Africa, the technique of "block burning" is used. Carefully monitored under controlled conditions to reduce fuel, the method typically involves dividing a site into management blocks that are similar in size, shape, and time since the last burn. These blocks are then burned rotationally in the late winter or early spring when weather conditions are favorable.
[16] The resulting checkerboard-like pattern helps slow future wildfires and prevent them from causing extensive damage across the entire site.
[17]In Nowra, Australia, the practice of "firestick farming, " also known as cultural, traditional, or Aboriginal burning, is often executed on a small scale using single ignition point burns during cooler months.
[18] The highly localized approach relies on indigenous knowledge of the landscape. Once lit, these low-intensity fires move slowly across the ground, allowing practitioners to follow and guide them. Described as "little fires tending the earth affectionately, "
[19] these controlled burns create finely mosaicked landscapes, forming a patchwork of habitats shaped by the paths of fires.
Across the state of California, the practice of "fire lighting" is common; it is a distinctive land-fire stewardship approach that involves a broad spectrum of stakeholders—including tribal members, private landowners, federal and state agency representatives, and private fire professionals—collaborating on controlled burns. There are events such as workshops held for participants to exchange knowledge and collectively enhance their capacity to use fire on the landscape for a range of ecological, social, and economic purposes (Fig.6). Participants are intentionally grouped into diverse squads, each representing various stakeholders and experience levels, to foster a comprehensive learning environment.
[20]2.2 A Basin for Burns
Beyond the three examples outlined in the previous section (block burning, firestick farming, and fire lighting) there is another noteworthy form of beneficial fire—fire surrendering, also known as wildland fire use. This technique allows wildfires to safely burn.
A prime example of where this technique has been implemented is in the Illilouette Basin, located just outside Yosemite Valley. For the past 50 years, wildfires in this basin have been allowed to burn, largely unchecked (helped in part by its granite edge that acts as a bathtub-like natural firebreak at the top) (Fig.7). Today, the 60 square miles (155 km
2) of the basin present a stark contrast to other Sierra Nevada regions. Although the landscape might appear ravaged or unnatural to some, with patchy and messy areas devoid of any trees and fields of blackened stumps, it is among the healthiest ecosystems in the entire range, offering a comparative glimpse into pre-colonial forest conditions (Fig.8).
[21]Since 1972, when Yosemite National Park adopted a fire policy to let places like the Illilouette Basin burn naturally, the area has experienced over 20 large wildfires. This surrendering approach has fostered a rich and complex mosaic of habitats, enhancing both plant and animal diversity, as well as the water table, thereby reducing the basin's vulnerability to severe wildfires.
[22]3 Landscape Architects: Stewards of Fire in the Pyrocene?
For obvious reasons, the technique of fire surrendering cannot be applied everywhere, especially where human lives and properties are at risk. Moreover, even well-established techniques like block burning, firestick farming, and fire lighting face challenges with wider-scale implementation, such as public resistance stemming from fears of uncontrolled fires and increased smoke. Other obstacles include resource bottlenecks like the lack of qualified personnel to manage the fires, regulatory and permitting hurdles, high costs, and associated liability concerns. Issues like these highlight pressing design challenges and needed adaptation.
How might landscape architects better implement and advocate for land-fire stewardship? How can landscape architects expand their skill sets to encompass innovative tending techniques? And how can these efforts be scaled up to address broader regional concerns? These are the questions that prompted us to write Design by Fire, as we see both opportunities and responsibilities for the discipline in these domains.
Part of this responsibility lies in carefully deciding what design projects to pursue and not to pursue. Is it responsible practice to work on new construction in former wildlands susceptible to fires and increasing levels of risk? Should designers advocate for rebuilding following catastrophic wildfires in the expanding and unsustainable wildland-urban interface? Where and how should development be happening and where should it be retreating? These are tough questions and discussions that are only going to get tougher as the world continues to get hotter and more flammable.
We see increasing opportunities for landscape architects to work as collaborators, facilitators, and team builders. How might we serve as allies to cultural burners, promote indigenous land practices, and decolonize design? How might we assist existing prescribed fire stewards and work alongside them? These experts understand the specific needs and reasons for fire stewardship in their local landscapes. In many regions, we are seeing the emergence of community-based fire stewardship programs, empowering residents to manage their own lands. For example, Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) operate in a growing number of states including California, Illinois, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. While PBAs can take on many different forms, all of them function as self-organized, mutual-aid groups, where landowners and residents collaborate on controlled burns, sharing resources, expertise, equipment, and time (Fig.9).
And perhaps some landscape architects can become fire stewards themselves, something we have been experimenting with in our own design practices. This may involve working or volunteering on prescribed and cultural burns or learning fire surrogate techniques like prescribed grazing—employing animals to forage overgrown vegetation. Such hands-on experiences ground truth theory and provide empirical and aesthetic insights into fire's co-creative role in determining what landscapes are and will be.
Lastly, we see opportunities for designers to operate as communicators, activists, and creative provocateurs. We need makers of more nuanced and positive messages about fire that have relevance in these times. We need new mascots that might allow 80-year-old Smokey Bear to peacefully retire (Fig.10). There are worlds possible beyond fire suppression, and as landscape architects know quite well, landscapes cannot be controlled; they can be tended to (Fig.11). As we progress deeper into the Pyrocene, we can fundamentally rethink and remake our relationships with fire to foster the kinds of landscapes we wish to inhabit.
PDF
(6794KB)
