Wildfire Adaptation and Questions About Time

A thought experiment on the questions asked and the length of time involved in them related to wildfire risk adaptation in the wildland-urban interface.

Introduction

There is important ongoing work creating fire-adapted communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). I am fortunate to be able to interact with one of the involved networks, Fire Adapted Colorado, talk with others, and learn about the fire-adapted initiatives taking place around the state. The fire-adapted culture is significantly different from what I experienced in suppression, as it needs to be, but I recognize fire-adapted communities as a way forward, and that adaptation can be materialized in many different ways.

Time and Ways

Recently, I have been busy with a study of time in preparation for giving a talk on the subject at the Complexity Lounge this November. The process of studying and interpreting a specific time narrative has been fulfilling and has inspired many questions. Although it has been asked before, I have spent time contemplating the implications of different organizational levels on experiences of time, which led to a question about fire adaptation in the WUI.

I have become curious as to whether homeowners asking different questions about time might produce different responses from the perspective of fire adaptation.

The literature I have been studying specifies three questions about time.

The past:

• How does the past explain the arrival of the present?

The future:

• What if the present were conserved into the future?

• What if the present is transformed into the future?

These are not only the questions that can be asked about time, but they are some of them, and they are important. Questions about time are always asked in time, as time cannot be detached from, though different forms of time can be entered into other than pure chronological time. Even when time is questioned, we are still within it, in duration, sequence, and simultaneity, at a minimum.

How does this relate to the WUI and fire adaptation? It depends. Each of the three questions includes a particular temporal horizon of a certain length, width, detail, whether coarse or granular, and either a recollection or an expectation, all contingent upon who is asking and why. If some form of these questions (and more) is asked regarding time (in time), the nature of the question asked changes depending on its motivation and content, and then gives a different answer. As the answer changes, so does how the present is lived in, to include what decisions are made, and what actions are taken regarding wildfire risk.

If the nature of the question about how the past delivered the present entails a short time horizon, then the answer will only bring into the present a small segment of the past that can then be considered as an explanation as to how the present arrived. Shorter time horizons may only consider a period of time during which the community did not experience fires and thus explain (away) fire risk as “this community does not experience fires and we are safe here.” This is in contrast to asking a longer, rather than a shorter, question about time and folding into the present a much longer temporal horizon that recollects a destructive wildfire many decades ago that burned part of the community. The same longer horizon question about time may reveal fires that were quickly contained, situations where the community was in the path of a fire but it was stopped before it made contact, or prolonged periods where the community was under a red flag warning. Different questions about time offer varying explanations about how the present came to be: Either as historic disruption-free normalcy or through past adjacent or actualized calamity.

In addition to questions about the past, questions can be asked about the future that depend not only on how far into the future of fire risk they consider, but what specifically is asked. If it is asked about how things will stay the same, the question is preference-based on a desirable present in need of consideration. However, over a long enough time span, the conservation of a preferred present and its wildfire risk becomes less and less probable unless the involved dynamics can be artificially held static or at a distance through human intervention (which is resource-intensive). Nonetheless, if it is held by the person asking the question that the present will repeat itself into the future, then there is no need to take any action except for those already taken, as there will be no considerable deviations from what has already happened requiring adaptation.

The question about transformation may also be asked. How will the future transform itself away from the present conditions? Answers to this question are again contingent upon the amount of time taken into consideration. A time horizon of one to five years may not yield enough potential transformation to adequately inform what adaptive measures should be taken and may produce only short-term investments. However, a five to ten-year data- and speculation-driven view on transformation into the future may support longer-term investments into adaptive measures taken by homeowners that follow how conditions and dynamics are expected to transform over time. Following the transformation uneven trajectory may help communities overcome current and anticipated perturbations brought by wildfires.

Conclusion

This brief post has considered whether asking different questions about time would change responses related to fire adaptation. The result of this thought experiment is that asking larger questions about time relates positively to fire adaptive actions. Questions about the past that extend into history in search of answers are able to inform the now more fully, with the community’s history with wildfire brought to the fore, which informs the present. A component of informing the present that is produced through asking extended questions about the past is creating a disposition toward asking larger questions about the future and how it may transform over an extended time period. It is safe to conclude here that asking questions about time that extend far enough into the past to produce an informative horizon that incorporates key wildfire events may be disposed toward asking questions about how the future of wildfire risk will transform and what future to become adapted to.