Collide-a-scape

In the unofficial climate change anxiety index, you won’t find archaeology ranked very high. That’s understandable. If the worst scenarios come to pass, the world will be in a heap of trouble and people are going to worry about saving themselves, not the remains of ancient civilizations.

But in the meantime, archaeologists are sounding the alarm in their own circles. An article in the March/April issue of Archaeology magazine catalogs the degradation of numerous ruins from melting glaciers, desertification, and floods.

Action may require quick action, the magazine reports, such as “documenting sites before they disappear,” and “in some places, simple steps like putting roofs over melting or rain-threatened areas” to preserve them.

That’s called adaptation. You’ll be hearing that term a lot in the years to come.

No one knows more about the history and ecology of fire than Stephen Pyne. “Australia,” he writes today, “is a fire continent: it is built to burn.

To this general combustibility its southeast corner adds a pattern of seasonal winds, associated with cold fronts, that draft scorching, unstable air from the interior across whatever flame lies on the land. At such times the region becomes a colossal channel that fans flames which, for scale and savagery, have no equal on earth.

Still, even Pyne calls Saturday’s fires a “horror.” And that speaks volumes. As he notes, “Australia has filled the weekly  calendar with Red Tuesdays, Ash Wednesdays, Black Thursdays, and is having to re-number its sequals. There was a black Saturday on February 12, 1977, but Black Saturday II is a bad bushfire on steroids.”

Pyne’s essay should be required reading for people living in flammable landscapes and especially for the planners, politicians and land managers that shape the built landscapes of these vulnerable communities. The bottom line, he writes:

With or without global warming or arson, damaging fires will come, spread as the landscape allows and inflict damage as structures permit. And it is there – with how Australians live on the land – that reform must go.

What this means, he insists, is fighting fire with fire:

The choice is whether skilled people should backburn or leave fire-starting to lightning, clumsies and crazies.

Over at Resilience Science, however, Garry Peterson says that Pyne “understates the change in settlement patterns, as increasing number of people live in ex-urban areas that complicate fire management.”

Hmm, from where I’m sitting (Boulder, Colorado), that certainly is true. Should the arid Southwest, with its own drought woes, growing ex-urban population, and fire-starved landscape, pay close attention to Australia’s agony?

Long before American Idol, a bunch of grubby-looking cave dwellers probably belted out a few tunes around the campfire, and it may have sounded like this.

Several years ago, when Australia was baking from an extended drought and its agricultural economy was near collapse, Australians partly blamed global warming and soon booted their conservative Prime Minister (who advised everyone to pray for rain) out of office.

Now, in the wake of southern Australia’s  catastrophic fires, which has leveled whole villages and killed up to 200 people,  climate change is again being cast as one of the culprits.

That’s too crude, similar to when some American environmentalists immediately blamed global warming for Hurricane Katrina.

For starters, Australia’s landscape is pretty damn flammable. Tragic wildfires have struck the country many times before. And, as The Australian points out,

The severity of bushfires is determined by a number of key factors: weather, including drought; fuel load; topography; the location of the population: their houses: and householders’ preparedness to manage fire.

In this latest case, what’s even more awful to consider is that authorities issued dire warnings to the public on the eve of the disaster. And still, many of the victims had no inkling that fire was upon them until the last minute.

As for the future, will hotter temperatures from greenhouse gases  lead to longer and more frequent dry spells in Australia? Most likely, say scientists.  And this, of course, will beget more nasty bushfires.