The Kiln

Harnessing fire to forge sustainable fire futures

By now, universities and funding bodies realise there is something precious and fragile when it comes to baby scientists and there are thus a range of resources, grants, schemes and goodies aimed at nurturing people at the start of their careers. Early Career Researchers, we often call them (or Early Career Academics, if you want to include teaching specialists or others who don’t focus mostly on research). The eligibility for all of these programs tends to cut out at about five years post-PhD, with the implication that five years is plenty of time to learn the rules of the game and establish yourself as a bona fide researcher in your own right.

Gulp.

Brick kiln at Clydagh Monmouthshire, by Amelia de Suffren, 1795 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I’m about 8 years post-PhD, closer to 7 if you count a break from research immediately after I graduated when I was working as Climate Science Coordinator for the NSW Government. That means it’s high time I started making my own way, doing my own thing, carving out a niche and pulling together a downpayment for an academic home of my own one day. No more special ECR schemes, no more pocket money, no more coming home to the olds’ place for a meal and some laundry. Granted, there are ‘family businesses’ out there in academia where the kids are groomed to take over the business once the old folks retire, but that is not the norm.

I’m still coming to terms with the reality of this. It’s exciting but intimidating, a moment ripe for impostor syndrome. One of the many questions you ask yourself during this phase is, if I were to lead my own group/institute/empire, what would it look like?

I’ve already alluded to a pretty nice model in my recent post about how one’s approach to fire research is a little bit like a Rorschach test.

… 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.”

Yes, I think if I were to set up a lab of my own it might look a bit like Wildfire Futures, with its ecologists, social scientists, economists and so on. The only problem with Wildfire Futures is that it doesn’t go far enough. We need more!

1. More disciplines. I reeled off a few others in that post - artists, writers, historians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, logicians - but so many more are possible.

2. More time. The three years that Wildfire Futures has is a drop in the ocean.

3. More money. The uni is generous in providing funding to partly staff the convenor, run morning teas, seminars and workshops, and offer some seed funding. But it’s still a modest total as far as these things go.

4. More external engagement. Don’t get me wrong, everyone involved in it is already talking to and working quite closely with government, communities and the private sector. It’s just not baked into Wildfire Futures itself, and I don’t blame them really, given the limited funding mentioned above.

5. More internal connection. Wildfire Futures is not really an institute in the sense of a building or office where people work together on the regular. It’s a mechanism for bringing people from across the uni, through those workshops and morning teas and so on. It does that pretty well I reckon, but it’s still not the same thing as having people be actual team members.

One of the points of baby institutes like Wildfire Futures is to go for big competitive funding grants like ARC Centres of Excellence. These are extremely hard work and extremely competitive, but if they get up then they handsomely tick off points 2 to 5 above - we’re talking $35 million in funding over seven years, give or take.

Let’s daydream a bit then and take a tour of my mythical future future fire group. First things first, let’s begin with a name. How about

The Kiln

Kilns are places where fire is used to create something - something useful, or beautiful even. Fire is so often framed as an enemy, a destroyer of worlds, a problem. And no doubt that description fits the bill at times. But it is so much more than that. I think we need to get comfortable looking at fire from different angles. And one of these angles is fire as a creative force, in this case a force acting on the ideas and outputs of a ragtag bunch of misfits academics, hopefully generating some options for coexisting with future fire. Tagline: Harnessing fire to forge sustainable futures.

So who’s workin’ at The Kiln? I already reeled off a bunch of disciplines above - they’re a given (all world leaders, up and comers and representative of the diverse human-, land- and fire-scapes of Planet Earth, naturally). Borrowing from the climate science Centres of Excellence we will have a sizeable computational modelling and support team. We need data, scientific computing, visualisation and software development witches and wizards. Doing all the pyroprocessing for that Nature Comms paper nearly killed me. I am confident we will need a significant number of stats gurus.

I’m particularly keen to bring in artists, writers, designers and creative professionals (or amateurs), notwithstanding the fact that science can be a very creative enterprise.

History needs to be part and parcel of the work at The Kiln. There are so many contributions history could make. We’ll fly out Steve Pyne once a year for masterclasses. One concrete example I’d love to pursue for south-eastern Australia is something analogous to this paper by Gerblitz and friends on the history of fire governance in BC, Canada, which includes a neat conceptual figure showing the many phases and a possible future.

We need genuine engagement with Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander academics and communities, and we can steal shamelessly from Melbourne Uni’s Indigenous Knowledge Institute and the many other groups worldwide blazing a trail for Indigenous science, First Nations cultural land management and the processes of treaty, truth-telling and voice. (I am seriously out of my depth here but if we’re dreaming we might as well do it properly)

I would love to try to thread the needle and find a balance between 1) a coherent identity, sense of cameraderie and genuine opportunities for deep and sustained engagement and 2) a sizeable external footing for most of not all of its members. That is, they should have academic lives outside The Kiln. It’s not healthy for people to spend too much time on one thing (he says to himself, more than his readers). Let’s call this the Venn Diagram approach to research institute staffing.

While we’re involving lots of academics, let’s find ways to involve fire managers, policy makers and the many other professionals who influence and are influenced by fire. Obviously we will work closely with them on projects, but we’ll also try to get them to work the odd day out of our offices, regularly join our meetings and just generally do whatever we can to muddy the waters between the inside and outside of the team.

How about I pinch an idea from my wife’s work and we set up some residencies - for writers, but also scientists, fire managers and whoever else is interested in spending time by the fire with us.

Let’s make sure community has a seat at the table too (maybe even literally). We’ll regularly invite them in - school kids too, aged care residents, hell let’s make a roster of every profession and invite them in for tours. We’ll run lectures and screen fire-themed movies and documentaries.

Of course we’ll teach. Undergrad, postgrad, resources for primary and high schools, microcerts, my God will we teach. We will be known and loved for our engaging courses and cloud sack-populated student areas.

The Kiln is the perfect vehicle for trialling Ross Bradstock’s brainchild, the Prescribed Fire Museum, where we find a patch of bush and demonstrate different treatment regimes, making sure we bring in fire managers, ecologists, Indigenous knowledge holders, foresters, you name it. We can all sit around a campfire and sing Kumbaya. Ok, I made that last bit up, but I’m told there are precedents for place-based initiatives that bring different stakeholders together in a spirit of dialogue, openness and search for common ground.

It would be great to build in a whole bunch of not strictly fire-related ideas for doing things better in the running of the institute. Some of these we can rip off from Urai & Kelly’s doughnut academia paper, like

• taking time away from research to be a gardener of the academic system

• being consciously experimental

• slow cooking some Slow Science

• restructuring incentives and processes to be team- rather than individual-focused

• being agnostic about growth

• focusing instead on trust

I have long suspected there is a threshold of organisational size at which behaviour almost inexorably switches from humane to inhumane, functional to dysfunctional, healthy to unhealthy. We can grow in influence rather than size.

We can ponder making the group more democratic and less hierarchical (rotating presidencies? holarchy?), supporting Radical Professionals, finding a way to shift away from project-based work to something longer lasting. We’ll think about earth system governance, actors and agency, architecture and power, and the levers of transformational change. While we’re at it maybe we can get the eff away from traditional funding sources, or at least find a way to support people to both do research and apply for grants. And also to do the various other wanderings around that make academia cool, but are usually restricted to those with tenure (or difficulty focusing on one thing at a time).

Oh and everyone can be part-time - no more than 4 days, but of course paid handsomely.

At this point, you’re probably asking: yeah, but what will the people at the Kiln actually do?

Meeting close

Oh, would you look at the time! It’s been a productive meeting people, thank you for joining us, particularly those of you who weren’t typing or scrolling while I was speaking. I hope someone was taking minutes. The task is substantial but I believe in you and your capacity to do whatever it takes (ethically) to get things done.

Repeat after me: 1, 2, 3, Kiln! Let’s go!!