ASU Research E-Magazine: Burning Issues

Some authorities believe they would better understand fire ecology if they could remove humans from the environment.

ASU environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne knows better. He likens a humanless fire ecology to the ideal, frictionless surface of theoretical physics: “It doesn’t exist.”

True, for about 350 million years before humans emerged, the fire equation consisted of just heat, oxygen, and fuel. Then, humans began carrying fire around with them, burning it into the tissue of Mother Nature. Suddenly, fire ecology looked quite different.

“Then it gets even worse,” Pyne said. The third phase of fire ecology begins with industrialization and the burning of fossil biomass in machines. This development allowed humans to remove open burning from the landscape.

But the removal was far from complete, setting the stage for a competition of combustion, of fire fighting fire. Which is worse? The effluent burning from automobiles, or the fallout that blows in from the occasional wildfire? For three days last summer, pilots had to fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport relying solely on instruments because of the smoke produced by the 61,000-acre Lone Fire in the Tonto National Forest.

“If you took an ecosystem that was used to 30 inches of rain and suddenly you give it three, the system is going to be stressed. That’s what we’re seeing, in a sense, with a lot of fire landscapes,” Pyne explained. “The system is so distorted now that fire is very hard to put back in.”

Public land managers wish to reintroduce fire into the ecosystems under their jurisdictions, but the attempt raises some difficult policy issues. Millions of acres of land must burn each year to eliminate accumulated biomass that fuels the growth of ever-larger wildfires. And yet Phoenix-area homeowners face restrictions on when they can light their fireplaces.

With prescribed burns, Pyne said, “You’re going to clog up a lot of airsheds with smoke seasonally. How many of us are willing to quit driving our cars to make room for smoke up on the Mogollon Rim? I’m all in favor of banning smoking, but if secondhand smoke is bad for you in restaurants, why is it OK to go out and burn off millions of acres and smoke things in periodically? We’re locked into a set of decisions that is going to be difficult to change.”

To Pyne, the issues boil down to questions about values and how society sees itself in relation to nature.

“If fire has a place in the system, what are we willing to give up to make room for it? Are we willing to compromise some endangered species? Are we willing to log some small-diameter trees? Are we willing to risk escape fires? There will be escapes. Fire is inevitable in wildlands. If you’re not willing to have controlled fire, you will have wildfire.”—Steve Koppes