Nuance is the new black

A passionate pitch for a holistic approach to fire

I’m most grateful to the Australian Institute of Policy and Science for their enduring support of early career researchers via the Tall Poppy Campaign. I first came across the campaign in 2013, when I spied an impressive trophy sitting in a cabinet at the University of NSW. It belonged to Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who I knew as the poor soul tasked with helping me wrangle climate data using the beautiful language of Matlab during those heady early days at the start of my PhD. Sarah is of course a leading light in climate science these days, and has just been announced (by herself!) as the Director of Comms/Outreach for the new ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century.

I applied unsuccessfully for a Tall Poppy in 2020, but managed to tip the vending machine over on the second attempt in 2021. Since then I’ve been invited to take part in outreach events, I’ve dialled in to fascinating mentoring sessions and, coolest of all, I was invited to contribute to an edition of Australian Quarterly, which has been around since 1929 and tags itself a bridge between academic journal and glossy magazine. Editor-at-large Grant Mills does a really nice job of pulling together well written pieces on important topics from academics and other writers. Grant was kind enough to allow me to reproduce the article I wrote back in February this year for the April edition of AQ. It’s my attempt to paint a picture of the science needed to meet the challenge of living with fire in this day and age.

Embracing the complexity of bushfire in the Pyrocene

Two years removed from the Black Summer fires of 2019-20 and Australia is once again on fire. As I write, fires threaten communities near Perth and in western Tasmania, while earlier this season massive savanna fires burnt through large parts of northern Australia. The question of humanity’s coexistence with fire has re-emerged, like a phoenix from the ashes.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that. While we’ve thankfully avoided anything like the extent and ferocity of the Black Summer fires, the last two relatively wet years have still seen hundreds of fires – some with significant impacts – across the Australian landscape, as verified by agency and satellite records.

Even now in wet NSW, the Fires Near Me app currently lists 11 incidents, 3 of which are out of control. And it’s not only Australia. The planet is burning as we speak, with thousands of active fires concentrated in the tropics, varying in fuel type, size, intensity and impact. So where are the sirens? Where are the headlines?

Actually, it’s more complicated than that. While some of these fires undoubtedly are disasters, the fact is that Earth has been on fire for at least 400 million years, well before dinosaurs evolved. There’s something compelling about the chemistry of plants, oxygen and heat: sparks literally fly off. Thanks to the work of perpetually-underfunded paleoscientists, we have some idea of the waves of fire that have spread across the planet since then, altering the carbon cycle and spurring adaptations in iconic species like Eucalypts. Indeed, many plants and animals require a certain amount of fire to survive and thrive.

Fire’s story on Earth took its first major detour when Homo sapiens appeared. Fire is a part of our cuisine, our language, our psyche, and our culture, including the oldest continuous living culture on the planet right here in Australia.

But our relationship with fire has changed. The transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene has been marked by humans’ remarkable creativity and astonishing destructivity, with accelerating rates of change now representing the status quo. And so, when it comes to fire, there’s plenty new under the sun. Changing populations and land use patterns mean radically different plant communities – and hence fuel configurations – and a rapidly expanding interface between humans and flammable vegetation.

The cherry on top is that we are cooking the planet. The critical gateways to fire, without which fire is impossible, are all influenced by climate change – biomass production, fuel desiccation, weather and even ignitions. For fire, we are already seeing the consequences of a warming world. Summers, and indeed springs, like those that propelled the 2019-20 fires are vastly more likely thanks to human-caused climate change. They will become commonplace if we continue to dither while fossil fuels burn.

Thousands of years after the emergence of an important ignition source (i.e. us), we continue to diversify the ways in which we start fires (e.g. pyrotechnics at a gender reveal party) to the point that it is a real challenge simply identifying the cause of most fires. This thankless task goes to a new breed of human: Homo pyroadministrarens.

Vast paid and unpaid labour pools with which to douse the flames, not to mention a library of regulations, building and planning requirements and gadgets.

Fire itself has become a tool in the battle against fire. If we can engineer it so that a wildfire happens to pass through a patch of bush that we’ve recently burnt, the resulting change in fire behaviour in this modified fuel environment could provide just the edge that firefighters need to protect life and property. Which is what fire management is about, right?

Actually, it’s more complicated than that. We are on the cusp of a revolution in how we think about fire. The paradigm of risk now prevails; conceptually simple – a partition of the world into likelihood and consequence – but not always easy to put into practice. The cutting edge of research and management today is enunciating the many values – things we care about – that are affected by fire, as well as our efforts to manage fire.

While protection of life and property remain paramount, there has been a blossoming of interest in the sensitivity of plant species and communities to different fire intervals, severities and seasonalities, trade-offs between the health impacts of prescribed fire smoke and wildfire smoke, the role of Aboriginal cultural burning and whether it can be shoehorned into the dominant western fire-management system, fire effects on infrastructure, agriculture and tourism, and the costs and marginal benefits of different policy interventions, including non-monetary valuation and the consideration of equity and distributional issues.

In short, we can now envision a future where the true complexity of fire is appreciated and forms the basis of an informed, context-sensitive and whole-of-society response.

Underpinning these efforts to illuminate fire’s complexity are fire ecologists, fire behaviour analysts, climate scientists and many other natural scientists, not to mention social scientists, economists, communicators and environmental managers. Many more will be needed. The Eureka Prize-winning NSW Bushfire Hub (of which I am part) is an example of the benefits of a multiperspective approach. Within a few months of the last of the Black Summer fires being extinguished, the Hub had produced 19 reports that vividly demonstrated the interconnected social and biophysical phenomena behind the fires’ causes and consequences. These reports played a critical role in the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, providing the bulk of the evidence base for its recommendations which set the direction for fire management and research in NSW for the foreseeable future. NSW Inquiry co-lead Professor Mary O’Kane noted that the Hub’s work is informing other Australian jurisdictions as well as countries as far flung as Sweden, Greece, Chile and the USA.

COVID-19 has reinforced the need to reckon with the full complexity of risky phenomena, by soliciting transparent contributions from diverse perspectives and communicating in a way that enables democratic debate and effective decision-making. The pandemic has equally highlighted the power of countervailing forces and the dangers of narrow framings, overemphasis on individual tools and disciplines, and overly simplistic solutions.

Fire is complicated. To survive the Pyrocene, we need all hands on deck.

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Andrew King @AndrewKingClim. Andrew is a climate scientist and lecturer who’s done lots of interesting work on extremes, forecasts and projections. We passed through UNSW around the same time and I’m looking forward to seeing if we can work on something future fire related together, now that we’re both in Melbourne. Andrew is also a part of the new Centre of Excellence I mentioned above.

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Probably the main reason I picked substack for Future Fire was my fondness for Tim Dunlop’s writing and ideas, which I’d often find floated on twitter and then expanded upon here at substack.