On the afternoon of September 15th, in the small northern California town of Weed, a fire began burning in the dry grass near the Boles Creek Apartments. By day's end, it had consumed about a quarter of the town, moving so quickly that many residents fled empty-handed from their homes, some of them half dressed. Though Weed is famous for its wind—the town’s much lampooned name is the legacy of Abner Weed, a sawmill operator who was looking for a place to dry his lumber—never before had that wind combined with heat and drought to such destructive ends.
As much of the American West gets warmer and drier, wildfire season is getting longer, busier, and more frightening. But fire, unlike other natural hazards, is still widely considered an enemy to be defeated, rather than a fact of life that must be accepted. As Max Moritz, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of a review paper published today in Nature, puts it, “To reduce flood damage, we make floodplain maps. To reduce earthquake damage, we form earthquake commissions. When it comes to fire, we hand everything over to the firefighters.”
There have been attempts, especially in the past two decades, to change this tendency. Smokey Bear’s nearly seventy-year-old admonition—“Only you can prevent forest fires”—has been supplemented by warnings from scientists about the denser, more flammable forests created by overzealous fire suppression. So-called fuels reduction is now the go-to strategy for mitigating wildfire danger: last year alone, the United States Forest Service spent more than three hundred million dollars on thinning out stands of trees close to residential neighborhoods and other at-risk areas. But the Weed wildfire, like many of the wildfires in the West in recent years, began as a grass fire. The low-elevation forests where fuels reduction might be useful make up only a quarter of the forests in the western United States.
“We don’t just have a forest-fire problem,” Moritz told me. “We have a shrubland-fire problem, a grassland-fire problem, and a woodland-fire problem. And the more we rely on fuels reduction to protect us, the more energy we’re taking away from measures that could really make a difference.” In fact, he pointed out, fuels-reduction efforts may increase risks to life and property by encouraging development in fire-prone areas.
In their paper, Moritz and his co-authors call for a wider recognition of “pyrodiversity”—the variety of landscapes and fire histories within a given region—and a correspondingly nuanced approach to risk reduction. The number of people living at the border between urban land and wildland, where the threat of wildfire damage is often the highest, has grown by more than sixty per cent in the western U.S. in the past forty years. Land-use regulations like those that govern floodplains, the authors say, could restrict development in the most dangerous areas, and building codes requiring fire-resistant materials could reduce damage to existing structures. (The basis for such regulations already exists: after the 1991 Oakland firestorm, which killed twenty-five people and destroyed thousands of homes, the California legislature required that the forestry department identify high-hazard zones throughout the state. While these classifications don’t prevent development, they do influence building codes and must be disclosed in real-estate transactions.)
Moritz and his fellow-authors suggest that wildfire responses be customized, too. In remote areas prone to fast-moving fires, mandatory-evacuation notices sometimes come too late to save lives. They can even put people in danger, by drawing them out of their homes as fires near. This was the premise behind Australia’s adoption, in 1983, of a new wildfire-management strategy—“Prepare, stay, and defend, or leave early”—which instructs residents either to evacuate as soon as weather conditions are right for a wildfire or to remain at home and fight the flames themselves. As Christine Kenneally described in the magazine in 2009, the policy can lead to terrifying dilemmas. But, in some parts of the western U.S., training homeowners to fight fires may prove a prudent strategy.
Such measures might not have kept the Boles fire from starting—it was allegedly set by a man named Ronald Beau Marshall, who was arrested last month and pleaded not guilty to arson—nor would they necessarily have kept the town of Weed from going up in flames. But a greater prevalence of fireproof building materials might have helped preserve the library, two churches, and hundred and fifty-seven homes that burned to the ground, and an early-warning system based on weather conditions might have allowed residents to flee sooner and with more of their belongings. “Unless people view and plan for fire as an inevitable and natural process, it will continue to have serious consequences for both social and ecological systems,” Moritz and his co-authors write. Perhaps it’s time that Smokey, in addition to teaching us to prevent forest fires, taught us to coexist with them.
