What Is the Proper Place of Fire Science?
In a new essay proudly posted with permission at W.I.S.E, Dr. Stephen J. Pyne of ASU, World’s Foremost Authority on Fire, asks this question: What is the proper place of fire science, and other sciences, in dealing with real world problems with cultural origins and implications?
The essay is The Wildland/Science Interface by Stephen J. Pyne (full text [here] or selected excerpts at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here]).
The real world problems under scrutiny in Dr. Pyne’s essay are the hazards imposed by Sky Island forests (chiefly wildfire) on the astronomical observatories located there, or conversely, the hazards (multiple biological impairments including fires) imposed by the observatories on the forests.
Four Sky Island peaks host observatory complexes as well as isolated forests with endangered species. The political battles over scopes vs. squirrels have been surfeit with favor as special interests have engaged in decades of funding frenzy. In the end, however, the big dog hogged most of the gravy:
One science, astronomy, and a nominally science-supporting institution, the UofA, turned to politics to overturn the claims of another science and its non-governmental auxiliary. The winner was the more powerful: Astronomy meant Big Science. Conservation biology only acquired a name in 1978. Deep sky met deep biology, and sky won. …
But nothing has been done about the wildfire hazard, and wildfires have threatened all the observatory complexes, and continue to do so year after year.
Pyne’s observation is that neither Branch of Science, astronomy or fire science (pyrology?), despite the $billions spent on those sciences, has been able to ameliorate the problem, and in fact have arguably made the wildfire problem worse.
The critics of fire suppression often point to graphs of increasing expenditures and swelling acres burned to make a case that more money fighting fire doesn’t reduce either costs or burned area (Figure 1). … [T]he rising expenditures are just as likely to be the cause of increased burning. The more we spend, the less control we get. A fire suppression-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground.
This same logic can be applied to fire science. … An objective measure of applied fire science – analyzing science as science would natural phenomena – would probably show mixed results much like that from fire suppression. The more we spend, the fewer practical outcomes we get. A fire research-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground. …
For all practical purposes, both astronomy and fire science (and Science in general) have failed.
One reason is that Western science is compartmentalized and specialized. Astronomers know about as much about wildfire as fire scientists know about… anthropology, fire history, and ethno-ecology for instance, which is to say, next to nothing.
Science has chopped itself up and packed itself into boxes, cubicles so small and insular that the occupants are almost totally ignorant about what goes on in other cubicles, even when the neighbor cubicle is on fire!
Science is perhaps incapable of living up to its promise. The goal of Science is to provide an increasingly more reliable description of the Universe, Nature, the Real World, with the expectation, or at least the hope, that the more reliable description will improve the Human Condition.
Scientists are more comfortable with the goal than the expectation and pursue tractable problems of highly-focused experiment and observation. The promised outcome of improving the Human Condition is often intractable, unmeasurable, and very much out of the scientists’ control.
Interestingly, in refutation of that theory, scientists do seem to know how to feather their own nests. Perhaps a myopic view of the Human Condition — one’s own personal bank account, office, benefits, prestige, etc. — dominates.
In any case, Science is not living up to the expectations Society has placed on it. Instead, Culture seems to play a major role:
The reality, too, is that major reformations in fire management have come not from new scientific discoveries but from changes in cultural values. Upheavals in social understanding determined the paradigm shifts in fire science, not vice versa. Critical thinkers came to value fire because they saw it as part of wilderness, not because they chronicled its evidence in scarred trees and soil charcoal. Those cultural revolutions further allowed society to sift through the competing claims of the various sciences. The ideas and beliefs that surfaced chose which kind of research to support and which to put on the shelf. …
After nearly a century of evidence, it should be clear that fire science is not adequate to the task before it, and that it will never be adequate. Science, as science, simply can’t answer the questions most needed to live on the land. It can improve technology and advise about possible outcomes of decisions, it can overgrow with data, but it cannot decide, and its record is such that acting solely on its existing data will almost certainly lead to errors if not disasters.
Interestingly, Culture has played a significant role in western forests, too. During the entire Holocene human beings have been applying fire to landscapes, inducing what are commonly called “cultural landscapes” via cultural (anthropogenic) fire regimes. Fire science, and indeed forest ecology, have not yet grasped this fact-based notion in all its preponderance of implication — leading to the ironic condition of scientists twice removed from the real world, first by the soundproof wall of their defective descriptions, and second by their inability to mitigate the disasters that ensue from reliance on their (hopelessly outmoded) descriptions.
As powerful as Science is, Culture is stronger, and it is the Culture that has developed within Science that has blinded its own devotees to impending firestorms in their own backyards.
But Pyne, being a basically cheerful guy, offers some hope:
Yet, unexpectedly, the imperial model of science, in which science informs and management applies, is finding itself constrained. Nationally, a countermove is underway in the guise of adaptive management that blurs the hard border between science and quotidian experience. Science is an experiment in management, practice is a scientific experiment; both need to be constantly calibrated, compared, and adjusted. Granted some space, the concept may return fire management to its ancient status as grounded in experiential knowledge.
Hmmm. Well, maybe. A lot of walls need to be torn down first.
The Wildland/Science Interface by Stephen J. Pyne is a VIE, a Very Important Essay. Please read it and offer comments to this post. Thank you.
