Guaranteeing sustainable fire regimes

Forever and ever

I recently happened upon a science policy book on a colleague’s desk. I picked up the slender volume, intrigued. What could be more interesting than an academic text on science policy? On science policy and sustainability?? Not without some bitterness, I accept that this sentiment may not be shared by all my readers. The cover art was tasteful and there was a foreword by U.S. academic Daniel Sarewitz, a prominent figure in science for policy / policy for science circles. This was enough for me. My colleague displayed surprisingly little resistance when I inquired as to my prospects of borrowing it.

Book cover, Enhancing Science Impact by Leith et al (Source: CSIRO Publishing))

Thus began my two week journey to the heart of the policy and practice of scientific research for sustainability, as guided by Leith, O’Toole, Haward and Coffey. Here I share with you, dear reader, some of my thoughts and notes on reading it, as initially tapped into the Notes app on my phone, and then roughly re-typed into the Sticky Notes app on my computer.

When’s the last time you used enhance in a sentence?

I appreciate that by their choice of title, the authors are explicitly not guaranteeing science impact. That’s pretty hard to do. They are merely pointing to a number of issues and practices that, if thought about and implemented, will increase the odds of having some kind of positive effect. It’s an excellent qualifier. My problem is I’m unfairly prejudiced against the word enhance. Many years ago a colleague of mine wrote something that included a reference to an increase in temperature. Someone commenting on their draft suggested they use the word enhance instead of increase. This didn’t quite sit right with my colleague and nor did it with me.

“The world has problems, universities have departments.”

I really like this quote. I believe it’s from Garry Brewer, circa 1999. We live in a complex world. We have problems (more on that later). Many of these problems are wicked, and not in the 90s teenage boy sense of being really good. To make progress on these - heck just to gingerly approach them while keeping a straight face - we need to combine disciplines, perspectives, ways of knowing and ways of being.

Yet our esteemed academic institutions, our government departments and much of the entire edifice of Western ‘civilisation’ [insert Gandhi quote; insert dig at Wollongong Uni centre] is built upon a foundation of specialisation, reductionism and the furious - and yes, indisputably productive - fragmentation of problems into tacklable and largely context-free chunks.

Nowadays you won’t get far with a grant application if you don’t make at least a few half-hearted nods towards cross-disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity. Still, the disciplinary basis of our academic systems persists. There is change afoot, but whether it is enough, and fast enough, is another question.

How are we to emphasise the experimental?

Organisations try things all the time but admitting this makes people nervous. Maybe they worry that it would deface the veneer of assuredness, control and certainty these organisations work so hard to cultivate.

Bystander: What are you doing?

Organisation spokesperson: We’re managing.

Bystander: Carry on then.

Bystander: What are you doing?

Organisation spokesperson: We’re just trying something.

Bystander: You can’t do that! [runs to media and/or local member]

We are an experimental animal, of that there is no doubt. We come from a long line of successful (if not always intentional) experimenters. Some have argued that we are selling ourselves short when it comes to experiments in living; that our forebears were far more adventurous.

And so if we’re to get ourselves out of this mess, we had better try some new stuff. As with those disciplinary ruts, there is widespread acceptance of the need to try new things, but we still prefer it if we can say we have carefully and quantitatively evaluated alternative options and selected the lowest cost, lowest risk, most effective among them.

The Projectocene

This is one of those concepts that immediately fit like a glove even though I’d never heard of it before. We totally live in the era of projects! We’re always doing some kind of project. Back in government we were doing projects. At school the kids do projects. I’m doing projects in science right now. I bet industry and NGOs do projects too. On the surface it’s perfectly reasonable. But there’s something slightly sinister and insidious about projects. They remind me of organisations in a way. They are the blindingly obvious, perfectly natural vehicle for actions at scale, but somehow they end up distorting things and becoming the centre of attention, the vacuum of resources, the raison d’etre. You start the project dreaming big. By the end of it you’ve delivered the project but the dream is long forgotten.

Short-term and Shelved. That’s the name of the popular social science book I’ll never write about the age of projects.

This also touches on a point I made in a previous post, which I’ll link to but spare you the trouble of clicking by pasting the relevant excerpt here:

I was reminded of an idea I’ve had for some time, for some kind of platform, service, tool or mechanism for unearthing, extracting and sharing goodness from the absolute Mariana Trench-deep ocean of reports that currently lie dormant on digital shelves, gathering digital dust (often within days or weeks of their ballyhooed release). I am not just talking wildfire or climate change, or even science. Governments of all sizes and stripes are constantly putting together hefty tomes on all manner of topics. Some of these reports are really, really good. And what happens to many of them? They sink, with nary a trace. What a waste.

Real work happening off the side of the desk

I’ve possibly fluffed the metaphor (I warned you these were rough notes), but the idea is that scientists may do their science at the desk, but over to the side of the desk they make phone calls, chat with people, share findings and otherwise let fly with all manner of things that “build constituency support in a way that publications cannot”.

I like this because it soothes my ego when I think about my science not being good enough. I don’t like it because I’m not doing enough effective work off the side of the desk either. Ultimately I press on with offside desk work, I fear more because I enjoy it than because I can point to concrete evidence of its impact.

Power

I am all ears when anyone wants to talk about power. It is so often neglected through omission. The authors point out the power of.. err.. power to restrict attention, frame debate, ensure the persistence of the status quo and accrue further goodies to dominant groups.

Awed crowd: Gasp! Who are those masked heroes?

Hero 1: Why, we’re DUSQ!

Hero 2: Defenders United for the Status Quo!

Hero 3: As long as we’re around, the sun will never set on The Way We Do Things Round Here!

Heros 1, 2 and 3: Ha ha! [heroes gallop off]

Where is the power in fire management? Where has it been? Where is it going?

Alternative Pruners

I am a fan of the term ‘decision maker’. I use it all the time. These are the people I want to be working with and influencing.

Not so fast. The authors argue that the decision makers frame can be misleading. It assumes a linear process, where the science happens and then gets passed to someone else. I’ve written about this in no less than two previous posts. This places the scientist at the early stage of the process and shifts responsibility away from them. After all, the buck stops with those suckers, leaving me and my scientist friends safely incapable of bearing any kind of responsibility. It also neglects the absolute bucketload of politics that affects all of the earlier (and later) stages of the science-policy slip and slide.

And now, please enjoy this 15 second song by They Might Be Giants.

What is an effective future fire scientist?

When it comes to building credibility and legitimacy among our colleagues, us academics have a pretty good idea of what to do (it’s probably not by writing a substack). Write papers, win grants, collaborate - yes. But also challenge and explore the limits of existing ideas; contribute new ideas and new methods for probing ideas; move the field forward; uncover new shores of ignorance.

Outside academia, however, epistemology, methodology and peer review do not generate unchallengable legitimacy, as the authors so pithily put it.

What hope does a fire scientist have in reaching people outside academia? They can talk to fire and land managers, but if they don’t have experience on the ground, in the field, outside the lab, beyond the confines of the ivory tower… how seriously will they be taken?

What is a sustainable fire regime?

Reading a book about science and sustainability, I couldn’t help but think about what it all meant for fire. I think there are people out there who have pretty good ideas about what sustainable / desirable / non-threatening fire regimes look like. These ideas incorporate a worldview, a desirable future and a way to get there. They have their own causal stories, apportioning blame and responsibility.

The authors use the term stakes to talk about things that matter (to the holders of these stakes). When it comes to the future of wildfire, who are the stakeholders and what is at stake? And won’t we burn our hands if we keep trying to hold onto these stakes when they catch fire?

Different stakeholders will arrive at different definitions of the wildfire problem (I told you we’d come back to problems). The authors remark on our society’s seeming obsession with solving problems. They argue that if we’re not careful, we’ll end up defining problems too quickly and narrowly. So quickly that we shut down discussion and jump straight to solutions. So narrowly that only science can solve them.

What if science is just a part of the puzzle, one tine in a fortuitous fork of good governance?

Can science stay scientific, while simultaneously and openly, honestly, genuinely and maturely acknowledging and relating to the non-scientific? To the moral, the political, the cultural, the personal?

Can we dwell a moment on the problem of future fire?