Surfaces and Essences

Future fire research as Rorschach Test

I have been incredibly lucky - and yes, privileged - to work in some first class, supportive and influential groups since entering academia. I started with the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, supervised by a two-time Director of an ARC Centre of Excellence, chatting by the coffee machine with Laureate Professors and an amazing array of talented and diverse climate scientists from all over the world. I then moved to the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at University of Wollongong, one of the leading wildfire risk groups in the country - if not the world - led by some of the doyens of Australian fire science. Now I’m at the University of Melbourne in the FLARE Wildfire Research group, one of the few places that could credibly claim to be the leading wildfire science group in Australia - if not the world. The amazing thing is that at 30 members and counting, FLARE still probably only represents about half of the wildfire expertise at the University of Melbourne.

The ten original Rorschach inkblot tests, Hermann Rorschach (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If you want to find these other experts, a good place to start is Wildfire Futures, an interdisciplinary ‘baby institute’ set up to foster links across the University and hopefully lead to something bigger down the track. In its own words, Wildfire Futures aims to

“bring together ecologists, social scientists, environmental psychologists, fire behaviour and risk analysts, public health specialists, legal scholars, engineers, architects, geographers and economists to explore new approaches to fire and adaptive management – seeking to learn from diverse forms of community knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge, to develop a shared vision for living with future wildfires.

This wide-ranging and ambitious initiative will contemplate how we transform everything from governance of planning, health, law and disaster response to ecosystem conservation to adapt to future fire regimes.”

I am a sucker for big picture thinking, and it doesn’t get much bigger than this. (Well, we could probably do with a few artists, some writers, a historian or three, throw in a philosopher, some cognitive scientists, maybe a logician… Stay tuned.) I love that we are bringing all of these different perspectives to (Smokey) bear on fire. As I have argued before, if we are going to survive the Pyrocene, we need all hands on deck. Keeping words and switching metaphors, we need a full deck of cards and, more than that, we need to play our cards right if we’re going to escape the game of fire with our shirts still on our backs.

So what are the cards? And does the order we play them matter?

The Wildfire Futures group has been batting back and forth some concepts that might just be pivotal to understanding future fire. Regular readers may recognise one or two of them: risk, values, management, culture, rapid change and (at the same time) inertia. Throw in fire itself as the cherry on top.

Our dear leader, Wildfire Futures convenor Tom Fairman, asked us to think about how we might order these concepts for the flow and logic of a paper we’re writing. Pains were taken to emphasise that any ordering was not a rank of each concept’s importance, merely a clothes stand for ensuring optimum ventilation of all the equally beloved ideas being presented. Naturally the group has commenced to present heartfelt and carefully argued reasons why one particular concept should take precedence over another.

So waddya say, reader? Just what concept is most important for understanding future fire? For acting on it? When surfaces are stripped away, what lies at the core of future fire? What is its essence?

Rather than argue for a particular ordering, I’m interested here in what you see when you look out at the world from each concept. Think of Future Fire as a vast mountain range, and each of these concepts a stunning peak within it, offering compelling yet incomplete views of the full expanse. (And yes, this view from above is itself a viewpoint, more on that below). Let’s take a tour of these peaks, with the important proviso that I’m not an expert on all of these and am almost certainly misrepresenting them to some extent.

Fire itself

Surely, in understanding fire, fire must come first, no? We study it, we watch it, we see how it starts, how it moves, how it ends, the patterns and traces and scars it leaves behind, over hours and eons. This perspective looks and feels like data, like science, to me. It’s evidence. It’s reality. We monitor, take pictures. We build records. We excavate the past to find fire’s origin stories, its plot twists and secret rendesvous that have led us to where we are. This is a story of maths, physics, chemistry, biology, ecology. It is a story of evolution and biodiversity. It is epic.

Values

Who cares about fire? Values are the things we really care about. We only care about fire because it affects *the things that we care about*. Human health and life, for a start. But also houses, property, infrastructure, industry. Social networks. Recreation, amenity. Business. These values can be summed up with terms like natural environment, community enjoyment of the natural environment, livelihood and economy, human health (physical and mental), cultural heritage and so on. No action, no motivation, no understanding without values.

Risk

Well, fire and values are all well and good, but it’s when you put them together that things really start sizzling. That’s what risk is, a coupling of chance and consequence. That is what we all face, each and every waking and sleeping moment of our lives. Risk can be narrow - think of an office risk assessment dealing with a stray computer cord or an ill-advised attempt to lift a heavy box. But it can also be vast - think of the risks posed by climate change, by asteroids, by our diets, by the way we treat ourselves and our neighbours, the way we design our cities and schools and systems of government and so on. Risk is not a bad currency, because you can stack so many different things together with it. Risk gives you a handle for action.

Management

Speaking of action, enough with all this academic crap about fire data, values and dodgy risk coins. What matters is action, what we do, and that’s management. That’s our fire services, our land managers, but also our planners, our insurers and many, many other public and private actors that set the scene for fire. That’s where we can make a difference, that’s where can learn from experience, that’s where our efforts should be focused.

Rapid change

The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, don’t you know? The next big thing is just around the corner, don’t you know, and if you’re in the library reading books or on the fireground holding a hose, you’re missing out on the chance to take stock of these trends and set yourself up for a successful future. Heck, for any kind of future at all. Lose track of where we’re headed and there won’t be a future, you’ll be just another dinosaur, another Pompeii.

History

Ah, the brashness of youth. If we want to have any hope of charting a course through these rough seas, we need to look at where we’ve come from. And sure, the history of fire matters, but it’s the history of people and places and institutions that is really going to help us. Not just history - histories. There are many different histories, told by different voices, in different forms. We need them all to get where we’re going and to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Culture

You poor, deluded fools! Don’t you realise that there is no science without culture? There is no history, no past, no future. We are all born into a culture. We bathe in it, breathe it, wear it, see through it. Even death and eternity are mediated by culture. Your other ideas are good, important even, but we won’t begin to understand our plight, let alone a plausible way forward, unless we begin with culture. Why not kick things off with the longest continuous culture on earth?

Well, how’d I do? Crude and dodgy caricatures, I’m sorry to say, but that’s ok. I’m only trying to paint a picture for you. The path you choose, the concept you conceive of as most important? Well, it might just say more about you than it does about fire. Is your approach to fire nothing more than a glorified Rorschach Test?

Undeniably shaped by my background, my approach to wildfire science is coloured heavily by natural science, climate change, risk and industry engagement. I did do an Arts degree many moons ago and spent almost ten years working in government, so I am more than happy to give history, culture, policy and politics a seat at the table. Part of the reason I’m even in science is thanks to popularisers like Doug Hofstadter, David Suzuki and Carl Sagan, so I will also happily argue for the importance of words, language and communication. Basically, I can get comfortable with complexity, I like the rainbow, so let’s go the whole hog and go all in with all of it.

Speaking of all of it, this all leaves me with a bit of a nagging thought though. We never resolved the order of the concepts. Which one do we begin with? Which really, truly comes first? Much as I love cutting to the core of things and figuring out the kernel of good strategy, could it be that sometimes there is no heart of things? Can there be surface without essence? Maybe we just need to change our definition of essence.

It’s all a little dizzying, I must confess. It’s like trying to clamber to the top of a sand dune and watching it collapse with every upward step. Where is the ground? What is real? And is my bird’s eye view just another plausible option, no realer than the rest?

I am reminded of one of Doug Hofstadter’s many analogies for human consciousness: a large stack of empty envelopes, which when picked up reveals a golf ball or something similarly small, round and hard buried somewhere in the middle of the pile. Search as you might, of course, you find no ball, because the whole thing is an artifact of the overlapping layers of paper, and in particular the extra thickness around the middle of the envelope where the paper folds down.

Time to get back to my to do list.

Envelope, Frank C Müller (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Postscript: The title of this post is an homage to Hofstadter’s most recent book*, written with Emmanual Sander, that extends his lifelong work thinking about thinking, concepts and arguing that analogy lies at the core of cognition. I’m looking at it on my bookshelf right now, feeling very tempted to pick it up.

*Actually a quick search reveals Hofstadter has coauthored a short collection of essays on the topic of Artificial Music. I’d better go and grab a copy.