Paradigms Lost

How do I solve wildfire? Let me count the ways

Many moons ago I read a book called Paradigms Lost, by John L Casti. It was one of those books you find on the bookstore shelf, start reading and decide that you must take home. The premise of the book is simple and compelling - take six unanswered mysteries and present the case for and against the main theories vying for epistemological supremacy. When I say case, I mean it - we’re in the courtroom watching the arguments flying back and forth, with Casti serving as prosecution, defense and judge, but not in a fascist, 2025 way. It’s quite a list of mysteries: the origin of life, the origin of human language, the influence of genetics on behaviour (hello sociobiology), the possibility of artificial intelligence (jury’s still out; as it is for the possibility of human intelligence), the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence and, last but not least, quantum physics and the nature of reality.

Me and paradigms go way back (Source: John L Casti’s book Paradigms Lost, published by Atlantic Books in 1990)

We have Thomas Kuhn to thank (well, Thomas and a bunch of science and philosophy of science popularisers including Casti) for the term ‘scientific paradigm’. Take it away, Wikipedia

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn gave the word its contemporary meaning when he adopted the word to refer to the set of concepts and practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular period of time. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published in 1962), Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as: "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners i.e.,

• what is to be observed and scrutinized

• the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject

• how these questions are to be structured

• what predictions made by the primary theory within the discipline

• how the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted

• how an experiment is to be conducted, and what equipment is available to conduct the experiment.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn saw the sciences as going through alternating periods of normal science, when an existing model of reality dominates a protracted period of puzzle-solving, and revolution, when the model of reality itself undergoes sudden drastic change.

It’s during revolutions, or ‘paradigm shifts’, that things start getting interesting. All of a sudden everything turns upside down, old puzzles are solved or relegated to the dustbin, and thorny new ones appear. So what about here in fire world? Are we in a period of normal science or are the winds of revolution stirring? Have we pressed Shift + P yet? Spoiler alert, yes I believe the paradigm is changing, although just what the current paradigm(s) are and where they’re headed, I’ll leave for another time. What I wanted to spend most of the rest of this post on is the *calls* for paradigm change, which are positively deafening these days. Why, you can barely click ‘download pdf’ before you’re hit with a barrage of heartfelt pleas (well, muted suggestions mostly) for change in how we research, regulate and relate to fire.

Shall we take a look at an unrepresentative sample? Let’s walk and talk. For your filing (if not remembering) convenience, we’ll do it in alphabetical order.

• Atkinson & Montiel-Molina 2023 talk about “the transition towards a new paradigm of wildfire risk management in Victoria that incorporates Aboriginal fire knowledge”.

  • They mention the ‘living with fire’ paradigm, which is “a holistic and systemic approach to integrated land-fire management. The vision is to rescale what currently tends to be national questions looking for universal solutions, to local practices centered on coexisting with fire.”

  • Towards the end of their article, A & M-M say that “connecting Aboriginal fire culture and government fire agencies is more than a paradigm shift. This is about thinking differently, reconceptualizing fire, changing social mindsets

    and modifying the policy framework to open a new shared journey —all of this takes time, trust and willingness to learn.”

• Bacciu et al 2022 call for a ‘systemic approach to fire risk management’ which integrates “the multiple perspectives in fire management (multi-level, multi-actor, cross-sectoral and multi-purpose)” in four areas

  • disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation connection

  • community engagement support

  • adaptive management towards system resilience

  • adaptive governance

• Balch et al 2024 say that the prevailing paradigm of defining fires by size is inadequate when it comes to the “deadly and destructive impact of megafires”. Here, speed is queen (and hence the focus of their study).

• Copes-Gerbitz et al 2024 (of which more below) propose four principles for transdisciplinary and transformative fire research

  • embrace complexity

  • promote diverse ways of knowing fire

  • foster transformative learning

  • practice problem-centred research

  • (My colleague, up and coming fire researcher Caitlin Symon and I are quite fond of these and are applying a version of them to a group paper we’re writing about evidence briefs)

• Daniels et al 24 propose six strategies “to amplify the pace and scale of change in response to recent wildfire extremes”.

  • Immediately diversify wildfire response strategies and restore the ecological and cultural role of fire

  • Invest in suppression capacity at local and national scales

  • Support innovations to overcome the economic barriers for mitigating risk and building resilience within communities and the wildland-urban interface

  • Apply landscape fire management to drive a paradigm shift in forest management to increase ecological resilience to wildfire

  • Transform wildfire governance to support collaborative and community-based solutions

  • Strengthen expertise and capacity to uplift diverse ways of knowing, managing, and coexisting with fire

• Dube 2024 talks about the fire exclusion paradigm, noting its entwinement with centralized fire management in a paper that among other things provides some sorely needed historical context to our current predicament.

  • Here’s Dube: “The fire exclusion paradigm created an illusion that humans can, through legislation and technological advancement, control fire and hence derailed the previous human relationship with fire, which considered fire as an ecosystem process needed by humans and acknowledged adaptation to living with fire.”

  • Dube also notes the need for effective fire governance at multiple levels: anticipatory, inclusive, flexible and adaptive.

• Essen et al 2022 write about improving wildfire outcomes by shifting the paradigm from simple to complex risk. They put forward five principles in service of adaptation to and coexistence with fire:

  • embrace knowledge plurality

  • inclusive, accountable and transparent engagement strategies

  • strategically invest in the inclusion of underrepresented stakeholders

  • account for potential uneven distributions of risk or risk management support

  • refocusing and rebalancing investments across spatial, institutional and temporal scales

• French et al 2024 talk about the patch mosaic burning paradigm, which is underpinned by the hypothesis that “spatiotemporally variable fire regimes increase wildlife habitat diversity, and that the fine-grained mosaics resulting from small, patchy fires enhance biodiversity.”

• Iglesias et al 2022 call for an urgent transition from emergency response to “proactive measures that build sustainable communities, protect human health, and restore the use of fire necessary for maintaining ecosystem processes. We propose an integrated risk factor that includes fire and smoke hazard,

  exposure, and vulnerability as a method to identify ‘fires that matter’, that is, fires that have potentially devastating impacts on our communities.”

• Ingalsbee 2017 talks about the transition away from the fire exclusion paradigm towards ecological fire management i.e. the restoration of fire ecology processes across broad landscapes.

  • Ingalsbee suggests that a ‘fire inclusive perspective’ began several decades ago. He also considers the risk management paradigm as fitting within this emerging alternative view of fire.

  • In a subsequent paper that came out last year, Ingalsbee refers to a ‘fire restoration / resilience paradigm shift’. Putting his money where his mouth is, he suggests that scientific research and policy reform won’t cut it - “the wildland fire community will need to become (or join) a social movement engaged in collective actions.” He even coins the name of an imaginary potential social movement: the Greenfire revolution.

• Kirschner et al 2023 call for a novel framework for analysing wildfire governance in four areas (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I love the font choices in this journal)

  • actor participation in decision-making and decision taking

  • actor collaboration and coproduction across and within levels, scales, and networks

  • path dependencies and local place-based dynamics of wildfire incidence

    and comprehension and

  • actor adaptation to and anticipation of wildfire risk to fashion effective institutions that address the global wildfire challenge

  • It’s not the focus of the paper, but Kirschner and friends drop in a choice reference to another paradigm: “The legal literature on wildfire governance also finds that environment is understood as something apart from humans,

    which needs to be managed, exploited, or protected (Benson 2019). This paradigm could shift toward a more inclusive understanding of wildfires as a result of the landscape, with governance and environmental laws focused on system function rather than human needs (Benson 2019).”

• Kirschner et al’s 2024 paper on fire governance in Cyprus notes that the current paradigm posits fire as a probabilistic risk, but that it can also be envisioned as a process. Porque no los dos? Later in the paper they talk about a range of concepts that have been proposed in service of shifting fire management paradigms (spot the terms that appear elsewhere in this post!)

  • fire resilient landscapes and communities

  • living with fire

  • holistic management

  • systemic fire management

  • sustainable fire management

  • integrated fire management (I’m hearing this term a bit in discussions of a sibling report of the State of Wildfires report, focused on management and governance)

  • shared wildfire governance

  • democratising wildfire strategies

  • ecological fire management

  • fire-smart territories

  • co-existence with wildfire

  • cohesive fire management

• Kirschner is absolutely hitting it out of the park at the moment, and a third paper, also from 2024, focuses on fire governance in Italy. It calls for a paradigm shift towards adaptive, anticipatory and comprehensive approaches.

• In a bibliometric study, Lin et al 2024 refer to shifts over time in three wildfire research paradigms, one for each corner of the fire triangle (ignition, climate, fuel). My sense is there is plenty of climate and fuel research (and plenty more to do), but not as much research on ignitions. Also, I personally think of the fire triangle as having oxygen, heat and fuel at its vertices, rather than ignition, climate and fuel. Maybe the fire triangle is like a Necker cube and means different things depending on how you look at it.

• Modaresi Rad et al 2023 talks about the traditional hazard paradigm being concerned with biological and physical drivers of extreme events, but neglecting the social characteristics of exposed populations. The vulnerability paradigm, in contrast, “focuses on the social, economic, and demographic factors that turn extreme events into catastrophes. The latter paradigm views hazards as natural, but not inherently disasters, and attributes the occurrence of disasters to the mismatch among the biological and physical environment, built environment, and

  social systems.”

  • another paradigm pops into the discussion of Modaresi Rad et al, that of cost-benefit analysis, which “preferentially allocates resources to those in higher socioeconomic strata (e.g., those with higher property values), who generally have lower social vulnerability.”

  • They call for a diversification of “modes and languages of communication in order to serve the most vulnerable communities.”

• Moreira et al 2020 is one of several of these papers that just comes right out and puts the word paradigm smack bang in the title. They suggest a departure from the current paradigm of fire suppression-focused policies, towards greater investment in mitigation of fire’s negative impacts. As part of this, they suggest leaving behind area burned as the primary measure of policy effectiveness and moving towards “avoided socio-ecological damage and loss”.

• Staying in the Mediterranean (the focus of Moreira et al 2020 above), Ottolini et al 2024 talk about a new fire culture. In fact, it’s a New Fire Culture, capitalised to indicate that it is a transformative paradigm being suggested by the authors. The existing paradigm they are critiquing is a technocratic, managerial one. While noting other alternatives (we’ve heard of these by now too: integrated fire management, living / coexisting with fire), they like theirs better. It seeks to “(re)build more reciprocal relationships with our fiery kin” from the ground up, using the following principles

  • acknowledging fire as part of the socioenvironmental system

  • strengthening transdisciplinary collaborations and polycentric governance

  • moving beyond fire management towards a holistic socioenvironmental framework

• Way back in 2007, friend of Future Fire Stephen Pyne noted the historical dominance of the physical paradigm of fire research, which though successful needed to make space for two other paradigms, one biological and the other cultural. Pyne’s paper might be the most paradigmy of the lot, thinking hard about not just what the different paradigms are, but how they interact and how they shape our questions and answers about the megafire crisis of the preceding 15 years (which seems a bit quaint given what we’ve seen over the 15 plus years since it was published). For those wondering, Pyne advocates a pluralist approach.

• Smith et al 2016 state (in a caption to an attractive figure, always appreciated (the figure, not the caption (although I do like a good caption (but to be honest I dislike a bad caption far more than I like a good one))) that “a paradigm shift is needed from a system where communities are predominately passively affected by fires to one where they actively work hand in hand with land management planners, architects, and agencies to coexist with wildland fires.”

  • They characterise the current paradigm as one focused on suppression, fire as the enemy and a lack of resources and urgency.

  • The desired new paradigm is one of a resilient firescape culture, with fire adapted communities, new industries, balanced education and sustainable landscapes.

• Sterry 2024 presents the delightfully named Panarchistic Architecture paradigm of wildfire resilience, which “takes the task of living with wildfire back to

  the design drawing board, asking not how we, humans, would solve the problem, but how fire‑adapted flora already have.” Let’s cross to Sterry now:

  • “Panarchistic Architecture is an exploration of Nature [as] Collaborator that both rejects the notion that supernatural forces shape our environmental and social destinies, and with it, that ours is the agency to wholly control those forces ourselves. Instead, it’s predicated on the idea that humans are actors in a highly complex and ever‑evolving system of systems of relationships which [are] both biotic and abiotic, operate at both local and global scales, and in near, intermediate, and deep time. In the tradition of polymaths, including da Vinci, von Goethe, von Humboldt, and Darwin, its research and practice is transdisciplinary and extends across several scientific, artistic, and humanistic fields of enquiry. As with the seminal works of those referenced, the scale and complexity of the task in hand necessitates working beyond the parameters now typical in both academic and commercial research. Most research programmes today are framed by narrow briefs, limited budgets, and specific timeframes, all of which tend to serve narrow research enquirers well but rarely provide of the expansive scope that’s necessary for projects of which the aims are paradigmatic in proportion, for it is neither possible to aggregate wide‑ranging research within such tight parameters, let alone subject such breadth of research to sufficiently robust enquiry.”

  • Paradigmatic in proportion - I love it.

• Thiery et al 2021 talk about paradigms of climate change impact assessment (which I happen to be thinking about myself right now - stay tuned). Over to you, team:

  • “the standard scientific paradigm is to assess climate change in discrete time windows or at discrete levels of warming, a ‘period’ approach that inhibits quantification of how much more extreme events a particular generation will experience over its lifetime compared with another. By developing a ‘cohort’ perspective to quantify changes in lifetime exposure to climate extremes and compare across generations (see the first figure), we estimate that children born in 2020 will experience a two- to sevenfold increase in extreme events, particularly heat waves, compared with people born in 1960, under current climate policy pledges. Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future.”

  • The authors depressingly state that “For a 3°C global warming pathway, a 6-year-old in 2020 will experience twice as many wildfires”. As if we needed more reason to rein in our fossil fuel burning.

• In Wunder et al’s 2021 paper, we’re told that “to date no blueprints for fire-resilient landscapes exist: the concept is promising, but in practice it remains widely untested.” Wunder and colleagues therefore put forward a theory of change for moving towards fire-resilient landscapes in the Mediterranean.

  • They urge policy people to seek “diverse, tentative, and learning-oriented solutions, rather than searching for a singular and impossible one-size-fits-all model.” At last, someone calling for tentative action! That’s something I can vigorously commit to.

  • Referring to extreme wildfires as a wicked problem, they also advocate for long term system improvements rather than short term fixes, which requires consideration of the cost benefit gap and “spatial externalities” i.e. understanding the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of fire and our responses to it.

  • The authors conclude, fittingly, on a tentative note: “One key strategic distinction surfaced: are we trying to directly achieve landscape changes for preventing catastrophic fires, hoping it will also raise rural incomes – or are we, conversely, trying to reinvigorate rural economies, incomes, and settlement, hoping it will also indirectly keep landscapes open and fuel loads down? Both strategies certainly should be complementary to some extent, but also each faces critical drawbacks. Fighting powerful long-term forest transition processes of rural exodus may often become a Sisyphean challenge. Conversely, targeted direct strategies may offer better prospects of effectiveness, but lack consolidation.”

• Yacht et al 2024 offer a “post-smoke critique of ‘asbestos’ paradigms in the northeastern USA and beyond”. If, like me, you’re confused, fear not.

  • the paper was written in the aftermath of the massive influx of smoke into the USA’s northeast from Canada’s off the charts 2023 fire season (hence ‘post-smoke’)

  • the authors argue that some management paradigms overminimise fire’s historical influence (hence ‘asbestos’ paradigms)

  • Skipping to the conclusion, the authors state that “Continuing to exclusively favor passive management and fire-sensitive species (i.e., asbestos paradigms) over the active use of disturbance to promote fire-resilient forests is not a strategically diverse approach – nor is it likely to ensure continued and maximal climate mitigation capacity.” Active management is the watchword.

• Yebra et al 2024 contrast the current paradigm, which they characterise as focusing on suppression and prescribed burning, with an alternative, more desirable one that places “greater emphasis on the adoption of high-tech solutions for early fire detection and rapid ignition suppression.”

So there you have it. A paradigm pu pu platter. If you’re looking for a wise summary of the above, you’re out of luck. In fact, I’ve partaken in such a plethora of paradigms it’s possible I’ll puke. Would that count as a paradigm shift?

~~~

Let’s move onto terminology paradigms. Recently, a conversation with Mike Flannigan and a snippet of a paper by Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz and friends, brought to my attention by aforementioned budding science star Caitlin Symon, has highlighted to me the potentially problematic nature of the word wildfire. Here’s how Copes-Gerbitz et al put it

In this piece, we use the term “fire research” to encompass landscape fire (including wildfire, cultural fire and prescribed fire) to avoid problematic assumptions associated with the term wildfire [their emphasis] and to extent beyond disciplinary associations with “fire science” to reflect the transdisciplinary perspective needed.

They cite the following papers in support:

• Dods, Roberta Robin. 2002. The death of smokey bear: The ecodisaster myth and forest management practices in prehistoric North America. World Archaeology 33 (3): 475–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240120107486.

• Hoffman, Kira M., Amy Cardinal Christianson, Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, William Nikolakis, David A. Diabo, Robin McLeod, et al. 2022a. The right to burn: Barriers and opportunities for Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Canada. FACETS 7: 464–481. https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2021-0062.

• Bento-Gonçalves, A., and A. Vieira. 2020. Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface: Key concepts and evaluation methodologies. Science of the Total Environment 707: 135592. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135592.

To this list I might add

• M. Fletcher, R. Hamilton, W. Dressler, & L. Palmer, Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.118 (40) e2022218118,https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022218118 (2021).

In essence, the problem is with the connotations - and very real consequences - of the use of the word ‘wild’. I covered some of this ground already in my post The Future Of Fire Is Democratic, but I didn’t quite make the connection between wilderness and wildfire. Duh. It’s quite inconvenient to have to change the words you use to describe things, dozens of times a day. But words matter. I hope we agree on this. I’m not yet sure how I’ll proceed, but I just wanted to, as the kids these days say, ‘put it out there’.

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Peer review has a dominant paradigm in aching need of shifting. Reading a colleague’s old promotion application, kindly shared with me in anticipation of me applying this year (wish me luck; send your cheques to Future Fire c/o University of Melbourne etc etc), I was struck by their mention of the large number of papers they reviewed, and were asked to a review, as a measure of their esteem. I’m not sure about my esteem, but I get a hell of a lot of invitations to review papers. How many? I decided to have a look.

I moved to the University of Melbourne in July 2022 and received 16 invitations over the second half of the year. In 2023 I got 45 invites, and last year there were 62 . In the first two and a half months of 2025 I’ve already clocked 25 . If that rate keeps up I’ll hit 125 by the end of the year! I doubt it will get that high but what do I know. Shit’s getting crazy. Will the exponential growth of science paradigm change any time soon? The mass layoffs happening in the U.S. right now may well answer this question.

I hasten to add, I do not accept all these invitations to review. I’m not sure how many reviews I’ve done. I have 87 sub-folders in my reviews folder, with some dating back to my University of Wollongong and Western Sydney University days. According to the publishing service Web of Science / Publons, invented to help us researchers double our commitment to the pursuit of metrics, I have 71 verified peer reviews, which apparently puts me in the 96th percentile of reviewers. This percentile is actually less than it used to be, because the number has not grown much lately, because I’ve been accepting less external invitations since I became an associate editor at the International Journal of Wildland Fire, because I’m now responsible for reviewing - and farming out for review - some of the papers in this journal.

I’m still tempted to accept an invitation from time to time, usually if it’s a juicy topic or a high profile journal like Science. Sexiness and fame, two timeless paradigms I dare say will be sticking around a while longer.