Defining the Horizon: Designing Wildfire in Time
A few words on design, time, the future, and the agency to create it.
If the next month in the history of the wildfire management landscape is difficult to predict wholly and with certainty, at least in terms of weather, fuels, ignitions, and a rising wave of technologies, what of the future? In the present, and many presents to follow, to say nothing of the pasts that have already slipped away, design falls squarely into our hands. Design is concerned with what future we should have and how we should create it, granting the wildfire community enormous agency in deciding how it wants to be later, within shifting political, economic, socio-technical, and cultural constraints (Morin, 1992).
Not all futures are equally desirable or even feasible, nor are the things created to materialize them. However, we live in a multiverse where more than one future will be materialized (Maturana & Poerkson, 2011). One can hope that in wildfire they are not overly antagonistic to one another as may be the present case.
Currently, the concern over the practicality of futures, especially of broad futures, should be subordinated to the evolutionary potential of the thing being brought into being to create a new someday. If not presently feasible, does the thing have the capacity to someday produce a desirable now in the future?
For the intentional creator of futures, the designing wildfire professional, the trajectory from the present to a time later than now, perhaps much later, is not, as is typically pictured, a smooth, slightly blurred, stream moving between rocks. Time is not a constant, uninterrupted flow. Rather, it is discretized into a horizon of integration, of multiple horizons of varying duration and meaning.
First, there is the shortest horizon, about 10-100 milliseconds in duration, with its elementary components that are in rapid motion, some of which may appear to occur at the same time, while others may not. This is the horizon of ideas. The components of this horizon give way to the next as building blocks, the horizon of moving ideas to practice. Here, elementary components are coincidentally perceived due to synchronous activation. This forms an assemblage that lasts 2-3 seconds through its integration, holding, and unbinding phases, before the next ensemble appears, embodying the residue of the one that came before it. These ensembles underlie cognitive acts of the same 2-3 second duration, before another one is ignited, sustains, and relaxes.
Lastly, there is the horizon of linguistic assessments of no fixed duration. This horizon is associated with personal identity, providing a continuous sense of self. The longest of the horizons, it is concerned with evaluating the outputs of the 2-3 second duration scale, and perhaps, to a lesser degree, the horizon of elementary components. This is where a macro view of the designer’s work becomes possible, and the thing they are creating is evaluated, ideally and partially by its capacity to produce a desirable wildfire future. The horizons integrate into one another, not necessarily like an inverted pyramid or layered by duration, but relationally to form an integrated whole where the central property is a linguistic capacity associated with the continuity of identity (Varela, 2000).
A desirable and entirely feasible future is one where AI, science, and data-driven decisions about mitigation are made. This is the future promised by FiSci’s1 Mitigate, which provides a platform for any user concerned with the wildfire risk posed to any kind of asset to model the wildfire threat, determine the risk profile, and experiment with mitigation types and placements to reduce fire risk. I believe at scale, or even as an inconsistent meshwork, Mitigate can produce a wildfire future seen widely as desirable.
A second, far more precarious future is the introduction of considerably more fire on the landscape. This refers both to managed fires and prescribed fire practiced responsibly, using the wildfire modeling power of Mitigate to forecast how weather conditions will be as far as 6 months ahead of the present or how an ignition has the capacity to unfold as a managed fire rather than a suppressed one. Fuels reduction arrives through varying means.
In conclusion, we have agency over the future we create through what we design and how what we design behaves once in the hands of the intended user (Fry, 2009). Further, wildfire innovators devising a future do so in time, by time, and through time. Wildfire finds itself in a similar position: it occurs in time, it erases time, it accelerates time, it marks the duration of events that happen in time, it is remembered in time, and it is feared in time, but it does not always need to be so (Maturana, 1995).
References
Fry, T. (2009). Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice. London: Bloomsbury.
Maturana, H. R. (1995). The nature of time. Chilean School of Biology of Cognition.
Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2011). From being to doing: The origins of the biology of cognition (2nd ed.). (W. K. Koeck, & A. R. Koeck, Trans.) Kaunas, Lithuania: Carl-Auer.
Morin, E. (1992). Toward a study of humankind: The nature of nature (Vol. 1). (J.L. Roland Belanger, Trans.) New York, NY: Pete Lang.
Varela, F. J. (2000). Present-time consciousness. In F. Varela, & J. Shear (Eds.), The View from Within: First-person approaches to the study of consciousness (pp. 111-140). Thorverton: Imprint Academic.
I work for FiSci, which has given me unlimited access to their tool and the ability to build models across the country.