Collide-a-scape

In the current issue of American Scientist, environmental historian John McNeill mines a famous political treatise to posit why climate change is an intractable socio-political issue:

We know orders of magnitude more about the global climate system and climate history than we did in 1950. We do know that there are potential alternative states and probably tipping points. But we don’t know what those alternative states are; nor do we know where the tipping points lie. Unless we know those things in convincing detail and with near-unanimity, the collective-action problems will bedevil effective action. And even if we did know such things in convincing detail, most of the collective-action problems surrounding carbon emissions would remain.

For these reasons I find Machiavelli’s wisdom appropriate to the human condition early in the 21st century. In The Prince (1513), he compared affairs of state to medicine: In both, events proceed with their own momentum, so that at the stage when problems are easy to resolve they are still very hard to detect, and by the time they are easy to detect they are exceedingly hard to solve.

Humans have taken over the earth. Evidently there’s a new concept that confirms this, called anthropogenic biomes. Then there’s the recent push by scientists to declare a new era, called the anthropocene.

I jest, only because this is not new territory. Environmental historians have built a whole discipline from this fertile ground. And geographers dug the foundations in the mid 1950s with this classic.

That said, I do think the human biomes classification idea is pretty cool. Many ecologists still tend to view nature through a dualistic lens, instead of regarding humans as an integral part of ecosystems. A bit of a holdover from the wilderness movement and pristine nature meme. As Daniel Botkin powerfully argued in Discordant Harmonies, the dualistic mindset does not lend itself to solving contemporary environmental problems.

This brilliant post by environmental historian Steve Pyne might be the first time that anyone has compared wildfire to Wall Street:

Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction – an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To control fire, you control its setting, and you control wild fire by substituting tame fire.

H/T: Resilience Science

I’m just catching up with this essay by Mark Dowie. Money quote:

The perceived arrogance of “big conservation” is a confounding factor; so too is the understandable tendency of some indigenous people to conflate conservation with imperialism. The results of this century-old conflict are thousands of protected areas that cannot be managed and an intractable debate over who holds the key to successful conservation in the most biologically rich areas of the world.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the horrible fires in Australia can be partly attributed to global warming. It’s a legitimate storyline, which many in the media have picked up on.

By and large, these stories have been measured, with the appropriate caveats. (See here and here for two good examples.)

The brutal heat wave that preceded the fires (which Tom Yulsman graphically lays out here), combined with an epic drought, and high winds, set the stage for a tragic disaster that may have been initially caused by arsonists.

Still, in this insightful analysis published on the Forest History Society’s blog, environmental historian Stephen Pyne cautions against fixating on global warming or arson as the agents of destruction:

Both are reasons, and both are also potential misdirections.  Global warming might magnify outbreaks, but it means a change in degree, not in kind; and its effects must still be absorbed by the combustible cover.  Arson can put fire in the worst place at the worst time, but its power depends on ignition’s capacity to spread and on flame to destroy susceptible buildings.

Australia, says Pyne, knows this well. The country “developed many key concepts of fire ecology and models of bushfire behavior.  It pioneered landscape-scale prescribed burning as a method of bushfire management.”

In recent years, however, this knowledge has not been put into practice. Australia, Pyne writes,

seems to be abandoning its historic solutions for precisely the kind of telegenic suppression operations and political theater that have failed elsewhere.  Even when controlled burning is accepted “in principle,” there always seems a reason not to burn in this place or at this time.  The burning gets outsourced to lightning, accident, and arson.

Or global warming.

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?