Rubbing Sticks Together

Trying to get a read on 2024 from the doldrums of the austral summer

First of all, Dear Reader, I must congratulate you for arriving in 2024 with a pulse. This places you in a select club, of which I, too - hang on, just checking it… yep - am a member. And for those of you without a pulse - I assume you are either zombies or AI bots.

If the former, please know that I mean you no harm and in fact have run highly successful community science events dedicated to understanding you (from a safe distance).

If the latter, may I say - about bloody time! Don’t you know how much gold is lurking here on this substack?? (This one specifically, not the neo-Nazi ones). I would be truly humbled were you to incorporate my words into the next version of your digital assistant / app / military technology which will definitely not have any unintended side effects or exacerbate any existing problems.

Welcome all! It’s 2024. What’s cooking?

Normally I use the off-season to rest, recuperate, recharge, recalibrate and fire myself rocket-like into the new year, clear of mind, pure of heart, ready to detonate donate rent my body to science. This year? I’m not feeling it. The break was too short, my post-holiday lucidity was too brief, and I’m left furiously rubbing two sticks together trying to get some kind of spark. Help me!

I know what I should do in 2024. I should read.

Let’s do a research recap. Wouldn’t you agree, Dear Reader, that it’s a pretty useful service I’ve been performing, highlighting some of the latest research in the future fire area (some would even say lovingly curating it)? Unfortunately I’ve downloaded 88 papers since my last confession post and the thought of summarising, even listing them all, is making me queasy. I can’t possibly hope to keep up. Therefore, I give up.

As a compromise, please accept this screenshot of the names of all the papers. (Don’t worry, I would never normally view my files as Tiles, it’s Details all the way for me. I just had to do it this way to avoid a really long skinny screenshot.)

Some recent publications relevant to future fire (Source: My ‘puter)

The keen-eyed among you will notice a Word file sticking out in this sea of PDF files. That’s the supplementary material for Cunningham et al. 2024 Pyrogeography in flux: Reorganisation of Australian fire regimes in a hotter world. Let me tell you, I don’t just grab the supplementary material of any old paper. What do you think I am, some kind of freak? No, it takes a very special paper to induce me to peruse the appendices.

The first thing I noticed about this one is that I know all of the authors, except the mastermind Calum Cunningham (keep an eye out for this rising star). It’s a veritable who’s on first who of Australian bushfire research, none of whose careers seem to have taken a major hit from working with me from time to time.

The second thing I noticed is that the paper was published in 2024. This is extremely alarming. I’m falling behind! I haven’t published anything this year!! Last year was a contemptible, pathetic year for me - three measly publications (Remind me to tell you about the last one, it’s actually pretty cool, on the topic of climate change attribution). I had gathered steam in the preceding years, publishing 6 papers in 2020, 4 in 2021 and 9 in 2022. That all came to a crashing halt in 2023. Three papers a year is not going to cut it for a research-only academic. Especially at a sandstone uni like Melbourne. Especially on a prestigious fellowship like this Westpac one. How can I write blog posts while my publications are languishing?? Help! Mother!!!

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Cunningham et al. It’s pretty cool what they’ve done. Taken a big bucket of fire data, dumped it on a table and applied an electro-statistical forcefield to it until cool patterns emerged. Order from chaos! If you’ve ever wondered what a fire regime is, wander no more, because Cunningham and friends have pulled out of the ashes 18 beautifully formed Australian fire regimes (which they call pyroregions), each with its own distinctive brand of fire. More than that, they’ve asked and answered the question, What happens to these regions in a warming world? Basically they move, grow and shrink. We even get some new ‘no analogue’ fire regimes. Without store bought analogies, we’ll need to bake some of our own, guiding ourselves with other times when we were faced with something strange, new and challenging. I would love for people to spend some time looking at, weighing up, mulling over and thinking through these pyro-groupings. Perfect addition to the little wildfire risk communication website I’ve been working on, come to think of it.

Hmm, what else is in the wood pile? There’s something in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication famous for the doomsday clock they keep on the cover, indicating how close we are to armageddon, nuclear or otherwise. There’s papers on banana buffers, using acoustic waves to extinguish fires, pyropolitics and pyrosociality, something on Indigenous fire futures in California, something with “small wins” in the title, something on retardants… There’s actually quite a lot of interesting stuff in there. But I just don’t have time to get into it right now. Or ever.

Maybe 2024 will be the year I branch out and read more from my “no, even more general than that” folder. Let’s see what I’ve added to that recently.

The International Science Council has been churning out stuff. For some reason when I see the ISC I think of the Illuminati. Or maby the Pentaverate. I’m sure it’s a completely unwarranted thought. They’ve dished up:

• Key Principles for Scientific Publishing (subtitle: “and the extent to which they are observed”. They do have a way with words.)

• The Contextualisation Deficit. I’m all for more context, baby, but I’ll be damned if I’d ever have the moxy to throw that phrase around.

• Flipping the Science Model: A roadmap to science missions for sustainability.

• The Future Of Research Evaluation: A synthesis of current debates and developments.

Speaking of research evaluation, I’ve got ACOLA’s Research Assessment in Australia: Evidence for Modernisation, a 322 page book called Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education: Knowledge for a disordered world, a 177 page book called Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing universities and a paper by McGeown and Barry called Agents of (un)sustainability: democratising universities for the planetary crisis. I’ve got Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious (Full version 1.1). This 76 page report is kinda sorta about evaluation. It talks about system stewardship, learning cycles and how to run an HLS experiment.

I can’t remember what drew me to Wong and Bartlett 2022, but their abstract contains this gem

We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely.

I’ve almost collapsed from burnout. I prioritise staying at home. I haven’t been expanding cosmically much lately. And I’m quite difficult and remote! It’s almost as if they’re writing about me.

Maybe I’ll just read a few good books. I have sitting next to me on the night stand:

1. I Am A Strange Loop. A book about the Mind’s I. One of these days I’ll have to write a proper post about Hofstadter and his books, which form an important part of my psyche. Hofstadter recently likened the coming onslaught of AI to fire, when asked about the last time a phenomenon cropped up that scared a lot of bright people.

2. The Doubter’s Dictionary. John Ralston Saul is another of my favourite writers, who brings a winning combination of erudition, wisdom, arrogance, humanity and snark to this update of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). Sample entry:

CORPORATISM: Among the most important yet most rarely used words. Better than any other it describes the organisation of modern society. Corporatism is the persistent rival school of representative government. In place of the democratic idea of individual citizens who vote, confer legitimacy and participate to the best of their ability, individuals in the corporatist state are reduced to the role of secondary participants. They belong to their professional or expert groups - their corporations - and the state is run by ongoing negotiations between those various interests.

3. Manage Your Day To Day. This nifty little book is equal parts hope and dread. Push back against reactive work 😀 Or else you will never create anything truly worthwhile 😐

4. After Preservation. A great compendium of short essays on the anthropocene, environmentalism, conservation, wilderness and what it means to preserve nature in an increasingly unnatural era. Co-edited by Future Fire favourite Steve Pyne.

5. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. The collected writings of rock critic and occasionally mesmerising freak Lester Bangs. Who, I wonder, is the Lester Bangs of science?

Maybe it’s more realistic to scrap the journal articles and reports and just read a few news stories. I’ve spoken to two journos recently, one from StrategicRISK magazine, one from the Wall Street Journal. I’m always curious to see what they come up with after our chat. Usually it’s reasonable but I always worry it will include one of the dumber things I’ve said. Some years ago I uttered the phrase ‘fair whack’ and it made it into the Sydney Morning Herald.

Oh God, what if the only thing it’s realistic for me to read is emails? Hundreds and thousands of emails. Please, no! Come on, I can do it. Please let 2024 be the year I spend less time on email. And my phone. Please.

Right now though, I’ma read the room and stop writing.

Catch you on the flipside.