Is There A Future In Future Fire?

On trying to live up to academic expectations

Having made it into the academic machine through some combination of luck, privilege and skill, I shall now whinge / demystify the scientific quotidian / remind myself what’s on my to do list. I’ve done this here a couple of times already, but the prompt this time is the feeling I may have inadvertently said yes to too many things. Like many other humans in this day and age (and indeed ages past), I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.

Lord Mum overwhelmed with Parisian embraces, Isaac Cruikshank (Source: Yale Center for British Art, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve taken on these things partly because I can’t help myself and partly because I am trying in my idiosyncratic and ham-fisted way to #PlayTheGame. What’s the academic game, I hear you ask, dear reader? Behold, and I shall tell thee.

There are Three Commandments for research-only academics i.e. those who don’t have to teach as well.

1. Publish (‘scholarly outputs’)

2. Win grants

3. Graduate PhD students

You will probably ‘be ok’ (i.e. remain employed) if you do these. Off you go, get cracking! When I first started as a postdoc, my supervisor and colleagues kept things even simpler for me: just publish, they said, and the rest will come later. At Melbourne Uni there is a fourth commandment, which suits me quite well.

4. Have impact

If you want to apply for promotion as a researcher, you need to show you’ve been following these four commandments. Before you run off, please note that research academics are expected to spend only 80% of their time on research, with the other 20% allocated to a fifth commandment:

5. Leadership and service

You know, ‘citizenship, service and leadership for sustained change and improved capability within departments, faculties and the University overall, leadership and service with communities and industries and policy engagement of public value.’ Right? Look, just go and join a committee.

You know what’s not on the list? Reading! Creating a performance metric for research academics around reading papers would probably backfire in surprising and hilarious ways, but it if it nudged me into reading a bit more it could be worth it.

I’m hoping to apply for Associate Professor next year. That means I need to assemble a Royal Commission’s worth of evidence that I am absolutely nailing those five commandments. What counts as nailing? Doing bit more than a Senior Research Fellow (my current level) and a bit less than a Professor, I guess.

So let’s dress up my To Do list in these categories, and see whether I’m cutting the mustard. I don’t normally think of my tasks this way; maybe I should. Feels like I’m doing way too much 4/5 and way too little 1/2/3.

1a. Publish (me as first author)

These are papers that I lead - I do the bulk of the work and writing, the buck stops with me etc. These scholarly outputs will be graced with my name first: Clarke et al.

Almost There

There’s three in this pile and I’ve just submitted revised versions of two of them.

• One is a biggish paper with Global Environmental Change that described the work I and others did on modelling bushfire risk as part of the NSW Bushfire Hub (before I moved to Melbourne). [Ed. This one just got accepted. Yay!]

• The other is a small paper on the health costs of wildfire smoke under climate change, with npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, also based on work done with the Hub. It’s just gone back to the reviewers for a second go at it.

• I am still plugging away, with co-conspirator Michael Bedward and a cast of thousands, on a paper on overnight fire weather conditions during the 2019-20 Australian fire season. This one also stems from my UOW days. I wanted to submit this ages ago. I would dearly like to get a draft to my co-authors this month, and to submit it (to Weather and Climate Extremes) next month. I gave a keynote on this at the annual meet up of the fire managers in NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in Wollongong last week.

Next Up

Some of these are well in train, others are yet to begin, but they are my clear next priorities.

• One is an offshoot of the risk modelling work I mentioned above, only now we are drilling down to the burn block level, rather than supplying landscape-scale insights into prescribed burning effectiveness (at mitigating a range of risks).

• One is to develop new visualisations of fire risk. Can we portray fire and its key biophysical drivers in a striking / clear / interesting way? Can we hold up current conditions and compare them easily to past seasons?

• Another is to develop new models of fire risk. Still kicking around a few ideas, including painting a landscape / fire regime-scaled picture of the relationship between wildfire and prescribed fire.

• NHRA has funded us, along with Tim Neale at Deakin Uni, to find out what makes a good fire simulator. Can we support both model development and model use? The two are often treated separately, unfortunately. With any luck this one will be written up some other poor sap, with me sitting pretty in the ‘senior author’ position i.e. last in the list of authors.

• I am working with a few Masters of Data Science students on some fire weather analysis. With any luck, they’ll produce something by the end of the year that I can then write up with their support, but it’s too early to say.

• Lurking at the bottom of this pile is a review on climate change and ignition likelihood. Some years ago I was going to write one about fire weather, building on my PhD work on the same topic, but Jones et al. kind of ruined it for everyone (I mean that in the nicest way). Reviewing climate change and ignition could be really useful, but I’m probably kidding myself if I think I can fit it into my current schedule. Just watch someone else publish something better on the same topic while I’m still plugging away.

1b. Publish (but not as first author)

It’s generally much more fun joining other people’s projects. You get to go along for a cool ride, but hopefully not so much of a ride that you become one of *those* co-authors (a cautionary tale, cursed at the coffee machine). So you pull your weight, but you don’t have to do the heavy lifting. If everything falls into place, you get invited back. My rule on these projects is don’t keep ‘em waiting.

I don’t feel it’s my place to spill the beans on these projects. Just be patient and I’ll tell you once they’re published! (Or train your favourite AI program onto the lead author’s publication record / web presence and maybe you can predict it.)

A word of warning: some projects from 1a and 1b may never see the light of day. Us academics like to compete over the number of unfinished papers we have, stuck in Development Hell (it’s a real place!).

Almost There

• A big multi-author paper led by leading climate scientist and head our School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Todd Lane.

• A paper led by FLARE colleague Shona Elliot-Kerr stemming from the Prescribed Burning Atlas project.

• A paper led by by Hei Yeung (Alan) Chan, a student at Cambridge interested in fire and restoration in the wet tropics and subtropics.

• A paper led by Rodrigo Balaguer-Romano, a student from UNED in Spain.

Next Up

• A paper led by FLARE colleague Tom Fairman.

• A paper with Hooman Ayat, an up and coming climate scientist here at UniMelb.

• Also cooking something up with Andrew King, hotshot climate scientist here at Melbourne University, and Andrew Dowdy, who has an affiliation at Melbourne but is best known and loved for his many performances as a leading fire weather (and many other climate things) scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology.

2. Win grants

I have a mostly hate relationship with grants. Why?

• Applying is hard work.

• You usually don’t get them.

• It’s not really science.

• The whole thing is a festering hotbed for impostor syndrome.

I look back wistfully at my government science days, when we could do stuff without applying for grants (I’m not sure those days exist any more but they should). And grant applications are the perfect vessel for my insecurities. My flavour of insecurity is not so much He doesn’t know what he’s doing, it’s He doesn’t really believe in what he’s doing. Either way I end up a fraud. But hey, maybe this is a necessary developmental period before I reach the next level of academia, where you believe in your heart of hearts in the awesomeness of what you’re doing. (Or is that the level where you believe you’re God’s gift to research? Might want to avoid that one.) The other day a grant specialist here at uni told me of someone who had carved a career out of proposing only things they thought would be ridiculously fun. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

At any rate, it’s part of the science game. And grants are not all bad. Why?

• Grant writing can be useful, a crucible of sorts, where you distill ideas into a form capable of withstanding the withering glare of grant assessors.

• It’s kind of a relationship marker - it’s only when you write grants with someone that it starts getting serious (a bit like bring them home to meet your parents).

• Sometimes I don’t mind filling in forms. It’s one of my secret superpowers. I might start a Pro Bono Form Filling In service.

• The low success rate means you appreciate the rare wins.

• When you do get them, hey presto you are off and running into a wonderful world of grant administration and, potentially, science.

Australian Research Council

This section is embarrassingly short - we could call it Sweet FA. I can confirm that I am giving earnest, if not quite serious thought to putting in an application for a Mid-Career Industry Fellowship. I’ve also been told to think hard about a Future Fellowship, a Linkage or a Discovery. And it’s no secret that the University of Melbourne funds Hallmark Research Initiatives like Wildfire Futures partly to lay the groundwork for Centre of Excellence bids. But that’s all speculation at this point and my career ARC ledger currently reads: two DECRA applications (unsuccessful).

University of Melbourne

I’ve had a bit more luck here. Got two small ($20,000) seed funding grants to do the visualisation and modelling work mentioned above. One was from Wildfire Futures, the other was from the Melbourne Centre for Data Science.

Melbourne Data Analytics Platform is another good candidate for seed funding. I’m hoping to take part in an international grant support program here at the uni, which promises to unlock overseas collaborations (who ever goes around locking up all these opportunities ought to be locked up). There’s another scheme that’s opening shortly that I could pitch something fire-related to (Fire Streetview, anyone?). But it might be more fun to pitch a Centre for Government Science or Comparipedia (I’ll tell you some other time).

Oh yeah, and I applied for a small Uni grant to do some work with the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management on natural hazards in Oceania.

Not ARC or UniMelb

I’ve obviously been extremely lucky in this category, with my current Fellowship funded by the Westpac Scholars Trust ($450,000 over three years). We are shortly starting up on that fire simulator project with NHRA ($150,000), and there’s another already underway, led by my colleague Andrea Rawluk on climate change communication ($40,000). We just found out a great proposal we contributed to was rejected by NHRA, so we’ll dust ourselves off and try to find another home for it.

I made it to the final interview for a Churchill Fellowship, which would see me visit researchers, fire managers and policy makers in southern and western Europe to talk about fire risk modelling and communication.

Prizes

I am listing prizes here because… psst… come over here… closer…. closer…. [looks around to make sure no one’s listening, then whispers] prizes aren’t handed down from on high from those with a God-like view of those most deserving. They’re applied for, like grants, jobs and everything else. If anything prizes are even less objective than these other things (which is saying something) because it takes a special kind of arrogance and privilege to believe oneself to be award-winning.

I applied for two Australian Academy of Science awards targeted at early to mid career researchers in the earth sciences. This involved filling in a form, polishing up my CV and having the audacity to ask a bunch of people to write referee reports supporting the application. I still feel dirty about the whole thing. I feel positively glowing, conversely, to be nominating my boss Trent Penman for a Marles Medal, an internal uni award for those who’ve deftly combined research with impact. This one involves filling in a form, polishing up Trent’s CV and having the audacity to ask a bunch of industry people to write a few words supporting the application.

3. Graduate PhD students

Not much to say here. I had the honour of being primary supervisor of Harriet Simpson-Southward for a while at Wollongong Uni, after Ross Bradstock left and before I left. Harriet has stoically kept at it and is now on the verge of submitting. I owe her some comments and I couldn’t be a prouder co-supervisor.

I have a blurb that went in my last promotion application:

I am dedicated to student supervision and have taken as many opportunities to supervise as possible, despite limitations due to the nature of my contracts.

There are some exceptions, but basically you need to be a permanent staff member (have tenure) to play this part of the academic game.

What I have done in lieu of this is supervise Honours and summer students, and offer informal support to PhD students. There are some opportunities to supervise Masters students here at the Uni (like the data science students I mentioned above) and I’ve recently submitted a list of potential Masters and PhD projects to be advertised to students. I’m also marking a short Masters thesis this week.

4. Engagement, partnerships and pathways to impact

Crucial as this stuff is, it’s not always easy to document. It can be vague, non-linear, slow, and in some cases terminal i.e. that impact you sought just never came.

I can’t say much of this makes my to do list - it’s a lot of conversations, coffees, meetings, cold calls (in both directions) and many, many, many emails. Occasionally I talk with media (the Guardian and Bloomberg last week).

5. Leadership and service

FLARE

Everyone is too busy working to take the time for things like training, conferences, grants and going for prizes. I’m trying to encourage people, but a lower workload would probably be more effective than my encouragement.

One other lead I’m pursuing is some kind of stress-themed catchup where we try to support colleagues, hopefully bringing a systems perspective so that it doesn’t become an individual-focused blame game: manage your workload, say no to things, do some mindfulness meditation, eat and sleep well etc.

School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences

My two main points of engagement at the school level are as Chair of the Academic Integrity Committee and member of the newly formed Culture, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee. Next week I have an entire day blocked out for formal meetings with students alleged to have plagiarised. Yeesh.

Faculty of Science

I am very grateful to have a spot in a development program the faculty is running this year for early and mid-career academics. This has involved a couple of sessions on mentoring as well as meetings we run ourselves in groups, where we try to mentor and support each other, plus talk to a couple of senior academics assigned to our group. I told the group I wanted help finding a to do list system that works.

I’ve just joined the Faculty’s Enterprise and Innovation Committee. They focus on things like commercialisation, translation and impact. They run a small grant program for academics with a pretty sweet bunch of prizes: Funding for proof of concept studies, grant writing support, help with outreach, travel to meet partners/end-user groups, professional development, mentoring. I have agreed to be a judge but might have to drop off ‘cause I wanna pitch all my hamfisted ideas.

University of Melbourne

One of the first things I got involved in when I started was Melbourne Climate Futures. It’s a first point of contact for the terrifyingly diverse set of climate change-related activities happening at the uni. They connect, amplify and synergise the crap out of it all. Couldn’t meet a lovelier bunch of people.

Within Melbourne Climate Futures I am co-lead, along with four other people, of the Land Theme, one of about a dozen themes in MCF. We are currently planning a workshop in July that aims to bring together anyone at the uni with an interest future land systems scenarios in the context of climate change. Please enjoy some blurbage:

These scenarios would represent potential configurations of diverse land uses including settlement, cultural practices, conservation, agriculture, wood products, and water supply.  

How might climate change drive changes in the distributions of land uses across multiple sectors? Which land uses will come to the fore? Which will be most valued by society? Where might uses overlap, complement each other, and compete? Which transformational changes will be required? What will be the implications for where people live, for food and fibre production, land policy, water use, biodiversity, renewable energy and beyond? And what will be the implications for future greenhouse gas emissions? 

I’ve been talking to people about developing training in a few areas: industry engagement, finance (but, like, Dark Arts, what academics teach you rather than those do gooders in finance), and ethics. I’ve signed up for a few self-guided training courses but have pathetically been unable to find the time to do them for several months now. One’s on data visualisation and the other is about impactful careers.

I’m part of a group led by the Melbourne Centre for Data Science that is planning a wildfire-themed hack event (not a hack-a-thon). I’ve already told you about Wildfire Futures, a cross-uni initiative. Another one is the Oceania Institute, which I’m interested in despite my utter lack of knowledge or experience of Oceania, because of my time on the Oceania Regional Committee of the IUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management.

As astute readers will know, I’m in the process of preparing a lecture for the subject Introduction to Climate Change. I’m aiming to channel all the best lecturers from my undergrad days to make it engaging, insightful and maybe even gripping. I’ve been working with some designers at uni about developing stuff that could go in lectures like this.

Stuff outside academia

• I recently became an Associate Editor at the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Home of my first ever scholastic output! It’s not at the top of the bibliometric charts, but if you want to be read by fire researchers and fire managers, IJWF is one of the go to places. Might write about this some time.

• I’ve pitched NHRA on starting up an early and mid-career academic and practitioner’s network, styled after the EMCR Forum I co-chaired back in 2018. I’m thinking engagement, I’m thinking advocacy, I’m thinking building bridges between disciplines and sectors, paving the way for a bright new day in natural hazards research in Australia… They seem to like the idea.

• As mid-level poobah Regional Focal Point for Australia and Special Advisor to CEM Oceania, there’s usually a few IUCN-related things on my list. There’s a big meeting coming up in Sydney in September, I’m trying to connect them with Melbourne’s new Oceania Institute and we’ve just added legend Emily Nicholson to our steering group.

• Not only have I been chatting with academic designers about creatively communicating key concepts in future fire, I have been doing the same thing with a few pros outside of uni: designer extraordinaire David Shooter and photography guru Eddy Summers.

• Science at the Local has been a recurring presence on my to-do list since we started it in 2014, notwithstanding my shirking of duties since moving. I’ll save a proper write-up of SatL for another time. For now I’ll just say that one of the secrets of its success is that it is equal parts community and science.

• For the last few years I’ve been doing little spots of pro bono research for the Australian arm of the Tax Justice Network, usually to support submissions they’re making to the Federal government. It’s only a modest contribution - basically trying to dig up relevant academic papers - but it makes me feel really good.

So what?

I have no idea whether I am doing the right things, in the right proportions. I operate by intuition a lot of the time, which is great when it works, but also leaves me vulnerable to the sneaking suspicion that I am going about this academia business in an unusual, misguided and unproductive fashion. All I know is I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew and am getting lost in the less important things while the more important ones develop attachment issues because I’m neglecting them. When making sense of and assembling your to do list becomes one of the biggest items on that list, it’s probably time to make a change.

*Other titles considered for this post: Cutting Off Future Fire At The Knees, Shooting Future Fire In The Foot, Spreading Future Fire Too Thin, Caught In A Hail Of Friendly (Future) Fire, and The Splintering Of Future Fire Into A Million Tiny Pieces.