Our museum exhibition includes a set of journals being collectively written by those who visit and participate in the co-creation of this work. These journals ask questions about how you feel about fire, what most concerns you, and what we can or should do to sculpt the pyro futures we might inhabit.
Below is our online version of these journals. Responses gathered from these will be combined with those from the physical exhibition and published here and possibly in other media. All responses will remain (or be made) anonymous.
What do you think California will look like in 50 years if we continue to have large and intense wildfires?
Over the past few decades, California has experienced more and more high intensity fires and fires that are occurring too frequently. These burns do not just thin out the forest, consume underbrush, and rejuvenate the meadows. Rather, they burn so hot and with such ferocity that they incinerate nearly everything they encounter, leaving behind few, if any trees. They burn subterranean tree roots and cook the soil, leaving behind lifeless, crusty, erodible dirt. The transformation caused by such fire events is akin to a throwback to primary succession; so much so that what these immolated ecosystems formerly were – such as a ponderosa pine forest – might not ever return; instead converting to grassland or shrubland indefinitely.
These fires are feral, having escaped efforts to eradicate and tame them. They are transforming landscapes at multiple scales — impacting plant communities, animals, air, water, and soils. They make their own weather systems and literally create new kinds of ground in their wake. They are typically larger, hotter, and more destructive, due to how we, as settlers, helped to engender them.
What do you think are the most influential factors driving changes in wildfire? Why?
A vast number of landscapes across California have excess fuel to ignite due to decades of fire suppression techniques. Fire suppression changes the cadence of fire regimes, making them longer and less frequent in occurrence. A significant change in fire regime can change a landscape, and if the cadence is too fast or too slow, it can lead to migratory, qualitative changes in what a landscape is, its ecological relations, and how it functions.
There is also accelerated climate change to contend with. As earth’s climate continues to get hotter and destabilize at accelerating rates, it exacerbates risk for areas that are already fire-prone. With climate change, these regions are experiencing longer and hotter periods of drought, lower levels of humidity and soil moisture, and longer fire seasons that are changing regional plant phenology.
A third factor concerns land use and land use changes, including growth in fire-vulnerable landscapes. The presence of humans in these landscapes is elevating the risk of human-ignited burns. In fact, many of the largest fires in recent years can be attributed to human behavior, be it from vehicle-related sparks, campfires, or downed power lines.
How have you been personally impacted by wildfires? What concerns you most about wildfires?
The Central Valley of California is often enveloped in smoky air from wildfires for weeks at a time. Be it spring, summer or fall, we may see white, papery flakes drifting down from the sky, dusting the ground with ash and making the sun appear as an ominous red ball in a thick haze. This smoke often contains toxic micro particles from housing developments and other artifacts that have been incinerated in the fires, and air like this can impact much of the state, and the states to the east of it.
We often speak of ‘bad’ fire or ‘good’ fire, based on the sets of contextual factors that determine its behavior. There is also prescribed, cultural and suppressed fire. And what does it really mean to ‘fight’ fire - symbolically, culturally, materially, and physically? To many ecologists, fire is considered a keystone process in forests and other biomes. It has also been likened to an abiotic herbivore that consumes and physically digests landscape vegetation in binge-like fashion. Yet it also acts very much like a decomposer. But in the western scientific world view, fire (and landscapes) are not typically considered to be alive, sacred or mythical. Rather fire is dealt with instrumentally.
More people are living in fire-prone areas. What should be done about this?
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is made up of diverse, liminal spaces between wildland and the built environment where feral flames often abound. This peripheral zone has been labeled many things in the fields of landscape architecture and planning – from ‘exurban’ to ‘rural-urban fringe’ to ‘borderlands’– with the understanding that wildland and the built environment are not binary but are, in fact, hybridic, diverse and intertwined. They consist of dispersed housing developments and other built structures and land uses mixed together with remnants of forests, chaparral, and grasslands.
In some parts of the world, people are leaving these edge zones to live in urban centers, rendering them feral and derelict, while in others development is aggressively encroaching outward from cities into formerly undeveloped land. In the U.S., for example, the liminal area between wildland and the built environment has grown tremendously over the last few decades, making it the fastest-growing land use type in the lower 48 states. Many of the largest fires in recent years can be attributed to human behavior, be it from vehicle-related sparks, campfires, or downed power lines The sheer diversity and extent of landscapes emerging and burning in these hybrid zones is hard to overstate.
What do you think are the biggest barriers to adapting to wildfires?
There are co-creative techniques to fire and fire stewardship that intentionally embrace and utilize landscape forces, while also trying to intentionally and creatively guide them. This approach is one of give and take and feedback between people and landscapes, as exemplified by pre-colonial land stewardship in North America. It is one that acknowledges both the agency and generative capacity of fire, and seeks to work with it. It’s an approach that understands that landscapes cannot be controlled, but can be adaptively stewarded and collaborated with. Co-creation implies a lack of singular and distinct authorship in these techniques, as agency is broadly shared and distributed across landscape assemblies, people and climates. It works in the realm of active care, design, effort, learning and change.
Through our work, it became clear that new and revived approaches for working intentionally, creatively, and proactively with fire are expanding, and we feel that co-creative approaches are where our human-fire coevolution has historically been, and where we are likely to return.
If you had the power to change one aspect of how we design with fire, what would it be and why?
If you haven’t yet had a chance, please visit the case of artifacts on the north wall of the classroom to explore three future scenarios for the state of California.
We don’t know which scenarios will be the ones we actually come to experience and embody, and almost certainly, none of them will be exactly like Pyric Commons, Wrath of Fire, or Right to Burn. But by envisioning exploratory scenarios of what could possibly happen,, combined with more normative scenarios of what we might want to make happen, may provide us with broader options and horizons to consider. These scenarios are just a beginning gesture to prompt us to think and feel more expansively and inclusively about the kinds of relationships we want to have with fire, and from which we can set about the work of designing and enacting those relations.
Any relationships we now make with fire – even if it attempts to be completely hands off – will still bear a heavy imprint of our agency, which is why design by, and with fire is so important. We have, and always have had, so much choice in what nascent, fiery landscapes can be.