Design in Wildfire: The Needful Creation of the Artificial

A look at design in wildfire across three landscapes.

Introduction

Earlier writings on design in wildfire are scattered across posts, and this is an effort to consolidate that work. This post positions itself as an integration of a design perspective vital to wildfire for the unique understandings design can produce. Design, as it is understood here, is defined as the decisions made about what should exist in the world at a time later than now and how to create it. There are various disciplines of design, including, at a minimum, graphic design, web design, user interface design, industrial design, service design, interaction design, environment design, and strategy design. However, as a matter of fact, we are all designers as we all envision preferred ends and develop means to attain them. We are all designers.

Unnatural Landscapes

There has long been discourse about returning to a pre-colonial state of wildfire, perhaps occasionally regarded as a natural state. It is curious as to how that will happen, given the shifts across the landscape since then, and the outcome of human purposeful activity being natural. To expound, the earliest burning that occurred in North America was an act of design. The igniters had designed tools and were designing landscapes while they were burning, as decisions were being made or had already been made about what the landscape should look like and how to burn to get it there. This is often confused with a natural landscape. However, design cannot produce the natural; it will always produce the artificial. Even when regarded as natural landscapes that should be returned to, they were created by design, and as has just been said, design cannot produce the natural, only the artificial.

Since humankind started intervening in them, our landscapes have always been artificial as a product of design. It is important that this point not be cast as a product of ill will. As centuries pass, the creation of increasingly artificial landscapes may have been an outcome of not knowing or of not situating oneself in time enough to be aware of what intervening in ecological processes would accomplish over time. However, humankind’s relationship with fire has been marked by the best of intentions, faced with an impossible paradox that will be discussed later: fighting fires can make subsequent fires worse.

Artificial landscapes, at least while fire was an integral part of them, may have been better off because they were maintained through the recurrence of fire. Still, energy was expended through the labor of preparing, burning, and through combustion to maintain the artificialness that had been distinguished as desirable. One must ask if there is an ideal landscape, how much energy would be required to return to it, and then hold it there?

It follows, then, that there is no return to a natural state, as any conceivable natural state precludes human activity. What would be recovered is an artificial state produced through the innate designerly abilities of humans, and landscapes would be burned to meet the desired end of their needs and wants. Only artificial landscapes can be returned to or created through the management of wildfire, and all the inescapably design decisions made to do so.

Risk Landscapes

Fire regimes are often unmentioned in this conversation, though their importance cannot be understated. Apart from fire regimes, elevated wildfire risk from increasing vegetation continuity and density is, in many contexts, the output of design decisions. Though they are fire management decisions, design’s ever-presence can be located. A needful and foreseeable end is identified, such as keeping the fire West of a location, out of a particular vegetated area, and critically out of a community in the path of a fire. This end is accomplished through suppression.

Wildfire incidents and proactive risk management are entirely complex, and in that way, both have difficult to see, understand, and navigate temporal extensions. For example, while achieving immediate success through stopping a wildfire, an unwanted long-term consequence emerges: the fire burns some areas, reducing the amount and continuity of vegetation, while other areas are left unburned through suppression tactics that corral the fire and keep it small. Such tactics are associated with burned footprints surrounded by vegetation that continues to grow and increasingly becomes denser and more continuous, producing a landscape with greater wildfire risk. Fighting fire can produce landscapes that burn with greater intensity at a later time. Suppression as a mechanism to defer and increase wildfire risk was never the intent, but the situation has arrived all the same. The outcomes of decisions as designers remain artificial and represented in the landscapes they produce.

To revisit the earlier paradox of fighting fire fueling later fires, it is not unheard of for fire managers to let unplanned (not prescribed) wildfire incidents burn additional acreage for forest health and to reduce accumulated vegetation that will reduce fire risk. Known as fire use, this tactic is a product of design decisions to create a healthier forest with a lower risk profile, and using fire to reach that end. Without question, this is a useful approach that exploits an unplanned wildfire situation, but it is hard to imagine it scaling to a level where it is changing the risk map on a regional or state scale. However, in parallel with the mitigative turn, both may together produce remarkable outcomes.

Mitigated Landscapes

From my perspective, we are in the midst of a mitigative turn, as is visible in insurance restructuring and private sector innovation. This is not to discount the decades upon decades of mitigation work completed by all levels of government and contracted resources. However, now, in the mitigative turn, technology is becoming further involved, enabling targeted and proactive fuels treatments on small to massive scales throughout the deployment of innovative technologies. Now, anyone concerned with wildfire risk can directly or indirectly access the tools needed to mitigate it. Empowering risk owners with the ability to quickly assess the risk posed to their assets and determine what actions to take, where, when, and of what variety, is adding momentum to the mitigative turn.

While suppression proceeds to make some landscapes increasingly artificial by designing them with a higher risk profile, mitigation also designs artificial landscapes in the continued interest of protecting values at risk, but it creates the artificial in new ways, prior to a wildfire. Thinning, grazing, firebreaks made from mineral soil, such as hand or bulldozer line, and prescribed fires produce landscapes less prone to carrying and supporting large-scale destructive fires and protect what is valued from wildfire proactively. Whatever the benchmark, mitigation at scale, even on parcels, is traveling in new directions. If it is all artificial, and if that is what humans create through their undetachable designerly skills, then perhaps the most significant realization of the mitigative turn is that the landscape can be intentionally and strategically designed to produce certain outcomes through an evidence-based approach.

Mitigation, in the many forms it comes in, can be clearly framed as the purposeful development of landscapes to create a desirable future where fire behavior is intentionally and continuously modulated. Mitigation is, and should be, dominantly concerned with protecting commercial and community properties, but it should also look to the future it creates to include how mitigation work done today can continue to produce desirable futures between humans and wildfire.

Conclusion

In this brief essay, there was a movement from the image of a nation pre-human intervention at scale labeled “natural,” to the artificial by design. The management of fire has not always been desirable in its externalities, but it was needful, or at the very least was framed as needful. However, as the fighting of wildfires was seen as needful, the more needful it became as the landscapes grew to become more artificial, including changes in vegetation composition and building homes in the wildland- urban interface. As designers, fire managers created landscapes through the interlocked decisions of deciding what should exist in the world and how to bring it into being. We are all designers, and fire managers and firefighters are, of course, not an exception. Recognizing the wildfire profession, or any profession, as being composed of designers is to say they are continually pursuing ends of their own preference that they have already envisioned. This is a new and fundamental re-imagining of daily professional life in fire and what it creates. Enduring landscapes that are often characterized by more or less risk than they were before intervention.

Risk owners living with wildfire currently may find themselves in the mitigative turn propelled by the proliferation of technologies and equipment. It is hard to imagine a future in the United States where there is no fire suppression, but a vision can vaguely exist where, over time, mitigation lessens the need to fight fire at the scale that is taking place now. As the situation exists presently, data-backed and validated mitigation is essential to making the mitigative turn.