(Re)Introducing Future Fire

The story of my blog

The meme known as This Is Fine, based on a comic created by KC Green, shows a dog with a hat and a cup of coffee, sitting at a table, in a room on fire, uttering the words “This is fine”. It beautifully captures the phenomenon of denial in the face of undeniable calamity. I like to think part of its staying power is because fire is the quintessential calamity we cannot deny. How could this be fine? The ceiling is covered with smoke! Flames are raging through the room! What could be more urgent than fire?

Panel from KC Green’s web comic, “On Fire”, immortalised as a meme circa 2014 (Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic)

And yet, we do deny it. We tell ourselves fire is exceptional, exotic, evanescent. An alarming but obscure rural matter best left to experts and professionals. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Fire belongs to us all.

Fire is a many-layered onion.

Fire is the mother of all Rorschach tests.

One of my tasks in this blog is to peel back some of those layers, to describe some of those inkblots.

Of course, the This Is Fine meme is best known for its application to the slow motion catastrophe of climate change. We are cooking the climate system – not just cooking, positively flambéing it – and yet our response is modest, measured, muted. Yes we’ll get to it, but we have a lot of other things on our plate. Have you seen the state of the budget? Be realistic!

A vast new discipline has emerged, climate change impacts science, dedicated to crafting sneak peeks of an earth scorched by the greenhouse effect. This is where I come in. I am a wildfire and climate change researcher. Another of my goals in writing this blog is to shed light on the question of what will happen to wildfire in a warming world. It’s not great news, I’m afraid. This Is Fine performs the neat trick of indirectly referring to itself, pointing at the rising wildfire risk associated with continued inaction on climate change.

I ply my trade in academia. Try as I might, I just cannot leave this strange environment out of the story of future fire. Cradle of knowledge, haven for nerds, manufacturer of metrics, engine of innovation and yet strangely divorced from society, academia has allowed me to design my own flexible, well-paid job for the low, low price of ceaseless anxiety and a never-ending inbox. How flexible? Well, it allowed me to start up this blog where I share observations from my vantage point on the second floor of the ivory tower. I call it Future Fire and it is blazing a trail that leads I know not where.

In case you haven’t noticed, I like to keep things light and informal. This is possibly an inappropriate mix with devastating wildfires and civilisation-collapsing climate change. But I can’t help it. Scholarly writing pays the bills but it’s not my oeuvre, it’s not my forte, it’s not my bag. I still care though, I really do. One of my mantras is that if we’re going to survive or even thrive alongside fire, we need all hands on deck. We need to hear from ecologists, fire managers, journalists, the great literary non-fiction writer and historian Stephen Pyne, coiner of the term Pyrocene and chronicler of fire’s earthly travails. But we also need me, a genuine academic fake who’s not afraid to write fire-themed stand-up comedy.

Allow me to take you on a tour of this blog’s innards. Basically, Future Fire is my attempt to make sense of fire. I’ll admit, there is sweet f*ckall structure here. But if you put a drip torch to my head, I’d tell you that there are four parts to help me make sense of fire. The first - let’s call it Into The Pyroverse - is about fire. It’s a problem, right? It’s natural, right? It’s cultural, right? Is there an all of the above option? Here I consider some of the different ways of looking at wildfire and what they mean for how we deal with it.

Part 2, Gazing Into The Flames, is about climate change. Climate change is making fires worse, right? Do we really need more than six words on this topic? I will try to convince you that there’s a little more to fire and climate change than meets the eye. We need to think carefully about the past and baselines, and we need to pay attention to the words we use when we talk about future fire (a bit rich, coming from me, I know). I even make my own personal contribution to apocalyptic art, sketching out a worst case scenario for climate change impacts on wildfire.

Next up is Sitting By The Fireplace, possibly the most harrowing part of the blog. Here we find out just what it’s like being a future fire academic. This may appear irrelevant to our topic but it is anything but. The shape and fate of academia is intimately tied to the progress we make in understanding fire and climate change. Chances are, the latest breakthrough, false dawn, piercing insight or hyped solution you hear about will be produced by a team of people deeply concerned with grant applications, publication metrics and precarious employment.

Finally comes the none of the above experimental section, Playing With Matches, where you’ll be rewarded with dialogues, fables, poems, satire and potentially the first future fire-themed stand up comedy routine eligible for publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal.  

The blog includes the story of The Kiln, my imaginary research institute dedicated to wildfire and climate change. Using the experience and wisdom I’ve gained through twenty years of research, public service and procrastinating, I ask what kind of organisation might be able to look the complexity of fire and climate change squarely in the eye and laugh, but not in a mean way; in an inviting, inclusive and formidably effective way. It’s a bit avant garde, I’ll grant, but that’s exactly the spirit we need if we’re to survive or even thrive alongisde the fires to come. Interested? Read on…

Into The Pyro-Verse

Getting To Know Fire

1. Surfaces And Essences. Fire research as Rorschach Test

2. Pushing Fire's Buttons. On causes physical, abstract, distal, proximal, micro, macro and lost

3. The Fire To End All Fires. Just how big can a wildfire get?

4. The X Factor In Fuel Dryness. Falling down the rabbit hole of drought factor calculations

5. Future Fire Financials. Wading into the cost-benefit conversation for fire and fire management

6. One Program Logic To Rule Them All. On organisational goals for fire management.

7. Getting A Feel For Fire. The time for a National Fire Data Centre is well past due

8. Nuance Is The New Black. A passionate pitch for a holistic approach to fire

9. Hope Is The Thing With Singed Feathers. A speech to the Trans-Tasman Forum of the Ecological Society of Australia

Gazing Into The Flames

Thinking About Climate Change and Fire

1. Crystal Ball Gazing 101. Rating the best methods for predicting the future

2. The Case For Regime Change. Some thoughts on wildfire change detection

3. Are Fires Getting Worse? In which I go asking for trouble

4. Future Fire: Into The Pyro-Verse. How many superheroes does it take to solve future fire?

5. The Black Score. A footnote to The Collapse of Western Civilisation

6. The Future Of Fire Is Democratic. What happens when people power meets ember shower inferno tower power?

7. Guaranteeing Sustainable Fire Regimes. Forever and ever

Sitting By The Fireplace

The Reality Of Being A Future Fire Academic

1. Peeking Behind The Curtain. Notes on the construction of a 'big' paper

2. Future Fire Reads His Own Papers. A public service announcement

3. Is There A Future In Future Fire? On trying to live up to academic expectations

4. Future Fire's To Do List. Just what the Dickens does a scientist these days do, anyway?

5. Future Fire Bibliometrics. One! Ah-ah-ah! Two! Ah-ah-ah! Et al! Ah-ah-ah!

6. Does Science Care About Your Feelings? On being a climate change scientist

7. Not Exactly Setting The World On Fire. On shadow CVs and resumes of failure

8. On Being A Genuine Fake. Recriminations from a medal and fellowship

9. Fuelling Fire Research. A stroll down funding lane

10. Is Supplying Future Fire Science Enough? Thoughts on Naomi Oreskes' critique of the supply-side model of science

11. Drinking From The Firehose. Taking the pulse of ever-expanding scientific literature on climate change and wildfire research.

12. Working Both Sides Of The Science Policy Fence. Fruits of a mentoring process

Playing With Matches

Experiments In Future Fire Writing

1. Making Friends With The Four Friends of Fire. Cartoons and comics for communicating science.

2. Alone Academia. Ten Australians are dropped off alone in separate areas of remote academic wilderness where they must deal with the forces of nature, hunger, and…

3. Future Fire Fables. *May contain traces of morals

4. Achilles And The Tortoise. An appy dialogue

5. Yodelling Fire In A Crowded Theatre. A sneak preview of Future Fire's new Netflix stand-up special

6. The Burnt Onion. Satirical headlines faintly related to future fire

7. Dear Santa, From Future Fire. A Christmas Wish List

8. Not A Refuge. A curious tale of fire's lack

9. A Novel Method In Verse. Testing the hypothesis that the medium is the message

10. Waiting for Pyro. A fire academic reimagines Lucky's speech from Waiting for Godot

11. Treatment Options. On the couch with Future Fire.

12. Pyric Victory. An FF story with strict constraints.

13. Playing God. A fire-themed deity ditty.

Who writes Future Fire?

A biography so harrowingly up itself, it is written in the third person

Dr Hamish Clarke is an award winning researcher of wildfire risk, fire management and climate change. He is currently a Westpac Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and will soon be starting a prestigious ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellowship on decision support for climate-adapted wildfire risk mitigation. Hamish was part of the Eureka Prize-winning NSW Bushfire Hub and was awarded the Frederick White Medal and a Young Tall Poppy in recognition of his efforts at connecting science and society. Before joining academia Hamish toiled for nearly a decade with the NSW state environment department. Before that he studied biochemistry and neuroscience and was a freelance science writer. Before that he studied business, international studies, German and Spanish. Hamish currently lives in Melbourne with his wife and three daughters. He is available to speak at weddings, graduations, corporate mergers and departmental restructures.