Learning to live with landscape fires

Catastrophic wildfires have become more frequent in the last few decades. The standard depiction in the media of fires as a disaster that has to be avoided and stopped at all cost fails to do justice to a more complex ecological balance of destruction and new growth. The emerging discipline of pyrogeography aims to gain a holistic understanding of the role that fire plays in nature and the ways in which we can manage it sustainably. Michael Gross reports.