Problems , paradoxes , paradigms : triangulating fire research ∗

Wildland fire research has historically orbited around a physical paradigm of fire. This strategy has yielded remarkable results, yet increasingly it cannot speak to the core issues that concern fire management. Two additional paradigms are needed. One would build on fire’s origins in the living world.The other would evolve out of fire’s significance to humanity, and humanity’s unblinking importance to fire’s presence on Earth. Note that each paradigm is coherent in itself, that each is capable of absorbing the others, and that each is insufficient on its own. It is unlikely that a master synthesis of these conceptions will emerge, and is not necessary. The need is to sustain research that addresses how fire really exists, not how select sciences can handle it. This essay sketches what the resulting fire-research triangle might look like. Additional keywords: anthropogenic fire, biology of fire, culture of fire, fire modelling. The proper study of fire: what should fire-research study, and how? Echoing Alexander Pope, we might argue simply that the proper study of fire is fire. But fire can assume many definitions, which seems only suitable for so malleable a phenomenon and one whose deification repeatedly turns to shape-shifting tricksters like Agni and Loki. Instead, almost every discipline has its own definition of fire, each framed by conditions outside fire itself, which seems to possess, by itself, no intrinsic intellectual identity (the only fire department at a university is one that sends engines when an alarm sounds). So what then are fire’s real fundamentals? On what characteristics should we undertake its control and use? What sort of inquiry – what science, what scholarship, what vernacular lore – should guide our understanding? Such concerns seemed like pedantic quibbles when the founding task of fire research was to support fire control. Fire was simply there, smouldering and flaring across landscapes, and research was asked to predict where it would go, how fast, and how fiercely, and to devise means to halt its spread. As other questions emerged, particularly economic, and later ecological, they were grafted onto this rootstock, a conception of fire that was implacably embedded in the physical sciences. Fire affected biotas and societies rather as floods or windstorms did. Yet, increasingly, this tradition, while flourishing, can answer fewer of the critical questions that trouble fire’s management. When the deep driver of planetary fire is the burning of fossil biomass, when free-burning fire is disappearing from the developed world except on reserved lands, when public concerns over nature protection hinge on biological indices like ecological integrity, biodiversity, and sustainability, when the prime threats from wildfire are to houses along a fractal exurban fringe, when the common element among every fire problem is ∗ Portions of this essay were delivered in a lecture to the V International Conference on Forest Fire Research, Coimbra, Portugal, November 2006 and are contained on the CD-ROM of its proceedings. humanity – people as fire kindlers and fire suppressors, people as direct and indirect shapers of landscapes on a geological scale, people as judges of what is and is not a fire problem (or a solution), people as operators of industrial combustion on such a scale that they are unhinging even climate, that ultima Thule of fire’s physical environment – then the contemporary design and emphasis of fire research might well appear to an unbiased outsider as eccentric, the residue of a cockeyed historic evolution. Like the drunk who keeps searching for his lost keys under the streetlight because ‘that’s where the light is,’ fire research continues to elaborate a physical paradigm because that’s where the funded science is. But the keys to understanding may lie elsewhere. The time has come to recharter our conception of what fire is, how we might study it, and how we ought to manage it. Fire is what its circumstances make of it. But given the fire community’s predilection for triangles, consider a research program that arises from three conceptual constructions of fire; each is internally consistent, each fully encompassing, each equally necessary. In their intellectual power they are coequal. The historical reality, however, is that one ring has ruled