Why We Need to Stop Fighting Wildfires
And Start Building Resiliency Around Them
Fire is now perceived as an enemy. According to Stephen Pyne, fire historian, and Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, ‘we are now seeing too many bad fires and too little good ones. There is too much combustion built-up and nature is not able to handle too much combustion for a long time. What we see now are not wildfires anymore; they are ferals’.
Each year, the fire season brings more records than the last. ‘The fires become too big when we don’t let them happen naturally’, explains Javan Kerby Berkanevitch, International Land Designer, consultant, speaker, facilitator and educator with All Points Design.
According to Verisk’s 2017 Wildfire Risk Analysis, 4.5 million U.S. homes were identified at high or extreme risk of wildfire, with more than 2 million in California alone.
In his documentary Facing Fire: Building Resiliency to Wildfire, Javan explains how ‘We’ve convinced ourselves in North America for over 100 years that we’ve know best how to deal with wildfire. The policy of “the only good wildfire is one that isn’t burning” has built up exponential fuel loads in our forests. We’ve built our communities into a fire habitat and now have to face the situation we’ve created.’
According to the Insurance Information Institute, the 2019 wildfire season has not been as active as 2018. ‘However, in late October significant fires broke out throughout California, leading to the evacuation of over 200,000 people and the declaration of a state of emergency’.
‘The 2018 wildfire season made records for the number of fires, the intensity of fires, and damage and expense to extinguish wildfires. An extended wildfire season, increased temperatures and more lightning have resulted in a hotbed of activity. Over 100 years of fuel build-up has created a situation where it’s not a matter of if a wildfire will burn, but only a matter of when’. — All Points Desgin
Annual Number of Acres Burned in Wildland Fires, 1980–2018
Source: National Interagency Fire Center
A Natural Codependency
On Earth, something is always burning. Wildfires are started by lightning or accidentally by people, and people use controlled fires to manage farmland and pasture and clear natural vegetation for farmland. Fires can generate large amounts of smoke pollution, release greenhouse gases, and unintentionally degrade ecosystems. But fires can also clear away dead and dying underbrush, which can help restore an ecosystem to good health. In many ecosystems, including boreal forests and grasslands, plants have co-evolved with fire and require periodic burning to reproduce’. — NASA Earth Observatory
In Facing Fire, Javan explains how fire and our relationship to it set us apart from all living things on our planet. ‘Fire sustained us, nourished us and empowered us. Our early relation with fire was one of need, appreciation, and wonder.’
‘Fire has a pattern. Plants evolve with fire. There is codependency’, explains Javan Kerby Berkanevitch, International Land Designer, consultant, speaker, facilitator and educator with All Points Design.
In our world, the common culture is about fitting in. ‘Nature will move things around when we force a pattern on the landscape. For over 120 years, we have excluded fire and seen it as something bad. When we exclude fire, nature tends to build more biomass and the living elements feel more stressed’, explains Javan Berkanovitch.
According to ancient wisdom, fire gives us feedback and is an essential part of the ecology. Indigenous tribes have been using fire to manage landscapes for centuries.
In 1910, there was even a formal debate in the United States on the fire policy, where a group suggested to copy the controlled fire strategy of Native Americans.
‘It’s easy to demonize it when it burns houses at a massive level. Rather than fight the element of fire, we should try to observe the lessons nature offers us’, according to Javan Kerby Berkanevitch, International Land Designer, consultant, speaker, facilitator and educator with All Points Design. Javan helps his clients create inner and outer landscapes, in their businesses and in their lives, that get better year after year.
‘Learning to use the wisdom of fire is about learning to create sustainable change and being aware of the consequences of ignoring the lessons of nature. When looking at nature-based models, we learn to create an agile and sustainable change that matters’.
Javan suggests that we should use nature as a mirror and metaphor for inner and outer change.
‘We are nature. We are a system of systems. Ecology is all living beings since the beginning of time. We are ecology. Understanding and integrating ecological principles and feedback loops into our lives and our work is imperative; we tend to ignore nature lessons at our own peril. Nature always provides feedback loops to support sustainability’, explain Javan.
Learning How to Use Controlled Fires
Elizabeth Azzuz is from the Yourok tribe and the Cultural Management Fire Council. She explains - in the documentary Facing Fire-, how fire cleans our ecosystems, helps care for our animals, helps to grow medicinal plants and even traditional food. ‘As humans, I was taught that it is our responsibility is to care for the Earth’, add Elizabeth Azzuz.
When observing nature, Javan explains that we should first try to understand what is going on. ‘Nature is interested in the Why to produce and create itself. It doesn’t care about the How. The How is malleable to the Why’.
‘When it comes to fire, we don't think holistically, as nature does. To establish a diagnosis and understand what is going on, we must first learn to observe what is the reality as it is, not what I want it to be’, explains Javan.
For Javan, it’s time for humans to learn the art of building resiliency to wildfires. ‘We have to stop the war against fire.’
From Ancient Wisdom to Resiliency
‘It’s time to ask ourselves where can we go from here, what we can do. It’s important to understand the natural cycle, the event, and the feedback loop. The ecological web is a product of a process and the beginning of another process’.
Humans have lost thousands of years of empirical experience of dealing with fire and landscape. ‘And it is hard to recover it’, explains Stephen Pyne, fire historian.
‘We were told that every forest fire is bad, explains Daniel Halsey, Ecological Designer at Softwood's Ecosystems, that every fire in the wild needs to be put out, that it is destroying life. Millions of people were told that and this conditioned our attitude to fire’.
‘If we think: this is interesting with a past, present and future lense, there is an opportunity for learning from floods, pollution, hurricanes. It’s about developing the capacity to ask: why did that happen’, explains Javan Berkanovitch.
For Javan, climate change’s effect is more or less like a fever, a symptom of a bigger ecological process happening.
‘Right now, the current debate is centered around how we can fight climate change instead of what changes we have participated in. Fire is a natural element and part of a cycle. When we try to remove fire from the equation, there is a buildup of vegetation and a fuel build-up. What we are seeing now in terms of wildfires is more or less the consequence of 120 years of fuel build-up’, adds Javan.
‘The current temperature increase is an important element to observe as part of the feedback loops nature provides to us. The lesson is always interesting, in this case, it is about learning how we stopped a natural cycle’, explains Javan.
Gloria Flora, a Former US Forest Service Supervisor, explains how when it comes to fires, we have been using the strategy of ‘Pay me now or pay me later’ for too long. ‘We are now seeing the consequence of the pay me later strategy and the price is going to be high’.
With the wisdom from tribal lands, Javan Berkanovitch participated himself in a controlled fire. He learned to burn land using ancestral tools.
‘Nobody talks about fire as a tool and it’s important to start the conversation. With a fixed mindset, we can’t open a toolbox. We need mentors who are here in nature. We need to see how ecology can educate us. If we are interested to learn, we only have to sit and be quiet and observe the nature of reality as it is’, explains Javan.
In countries where people shifted to urban areas, the vast majority of people are disconnected from nature. ‘People now live from oil derivatives rather than from the land itself. There is huge biomass build us which became fuel; the land is no longer grazed by animals. The reduction in the use of the landscape produces more biomass, trees start to grow on grasslands’, explains Javan.
‘Fire can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. From an ecological standpoint, fires are essential, adds Stephen Pyne.
Elizabeth Azzuz: ‘However, everything we own today melts and creates toxic gas when burning. These toxic elements end up in wells and have major consequences for animals and for humans as well’.
‘We have to let people talk; there is so much lost knowledge. We need to embrace fires and get rid of this fear of fires’, explains Javan. ‘Native people don’t fight the fire; they like fire. The solutions to using controlled fires need to be localized’.
‘We live in an esthetically-driven world, where living in the mountains and surrounding yourself in nature is valued. We need to learn to develop and manage landscapes which build resilience to fire’, concludes Javan Berkanovitch, International Land Designer.
‘Nature bats first and last. Ecological patterns, fire regimes, and natural cycles continue with or without our blessing. It’s time to change our mindset and acknowledge North America is a fire ecology. Prescription burns, improved ecological understanding and decision making to allow fires that pose a low risk to human settlements are a good start to building our fire resiliency. Developing FireSmart homes and communities can help us to acknowledge and work with nature, but that’s only the beginning. We have to re-integrate natural patterns of a diverse and wet landscape that are resistant to and recover quickly from fire if we not only want to survive but thrive in a land of fire’ — All Points Design
To learn more about embracing the culture of fire and the movie ‘Facing Fire’, see facingfirefilm.com.
