Pyro Futures includes three potential future scenarios from our book, Design By Fire.
Each scenario explores a different possible future, based on different sets of decisions, actions, trends and chance happenings. In the book we identify seven key factors impacting what future fire conditions might be like. These include: global warming and accelerated landscape change; property and land use; management and stewardship, ecocultural restoration and indigenous sovereignty; insurance and liability; investments, policy, and governance; sensing, access, and education.
The following scenarios play out these drivers in diverse ways and are only a handful of many possibilities that could happen.
Pyric Commons
In the late 2020s, the climate movement became an exceedingly powerful political force. Based on numerous and patchy international crises – floods, droughts, deadly heat waves, ecological and agricultural breakdowns, and famine – a motley global public often led by disillusioned and activated youth, is, through shutdowns, walkouts, sit-ins, economic embargoes, and isolated acts of eco-terrorism, able to pressure and demand that governments immediately curb carbon emissions, or else… Even the U.S., which just happens to have a progressive president at that particular four-year moment, agrees to this, which tips the scales. The Green New Deal becomes real.
This change leads to massive public and private investment in more sustainable technologies, policies, and lifestyles in the U.S. California is already a leader in this domain, and gets to work. Particular to fire management (and its proactive efforts on climate change) the state’s government and policy makers make sweeping changes. Realizing the public cost of development in the WUI and that public agencies can no longer afford or feasibly manage these areas, the urban edge becomes creatively regulated and reimagined. For communities living in very high- and high-risk zones, the state pioneers the offering of collective buyouts, wherein those communities are given opportunities to move to safer locales together, rather than on their own. This is paired with a federally supported retreat strategy for vulnerable populations who cannot afford to move out of the WUI. These managed retreats are a test to see if over time, more money and lives are actually saved by relocating, rather than rebuilding in harm’s way.
For rural communities with lower risk levels who wish to remain in place, they must create their own “community fire and landscape stewardship plan,” aimed at fostering greater autonomy and self-determination. This takes “fire adapted communities” to an entirely different place that is far less vague and decentralizes fire management across them. As part of these plans, residents and private landowners are provided training in prescribed burning (performed within the safer, off-season winter months) and these communities must actively manage and burn their lands and large extents of surrounding lands at agreed upon recurring time intervals. Legislation from the early 2020s is successful in building partnerships between tribes and State and Federal agencies, which refines the techniques, timing, and site-specific application of these burns. Community members must either directly contribute their labor to these stewardship efforts or pay their contribution. These efforts are combined with fire surrogate strategies, such as mechanical thinning (integrated with local wood product and biofuel economies), and productive land use/land cover conversion in peripheral landscapes adjacent to development. These WUI communities start to be colloquially called CSFS – community-supported fire stewardships. Over time, this creates an entirely new sector of public-private land managers that greatly diversifies this work force, restores ecological health and function to WUI and beyond WUI lands, and greatly reduces reliance on public agencies to manage and protect these communities.
Given the state’s proclivities to burn, some rural communities are still occasionally subject to fire, or partially fall to fire, but the number and severity is greatly reduced due to proactive management, beefed up safety and evacuation protocols, and the restrictions on WUI expansion. Moderated climate warming makes wildfire management challenging, but not impossible. And beyond the WUI, the Green New Deal enables the funding and training of workers dedicated to land-fire stewardship and expansion of diverse fire design strategies across the state.
Wrath of Fire
Over the next two decades, little is done to curb carbon emissions at the global level. Governments variously try to do so, but efforts are largely unsuccessful in the context of declining economic gains and squabbles over which nations should do what. In tandem, climate change effects begin to hit hard, and unfortunately, the scientific projections of those impacts prove to be woefully underestimated, as they often have been. In California, already a remarkably variable and erratic climate prior to global warming, weather events become commonly extreme. Elevated temperatures and longer summer droughts further place many ecosystems on the brink, with alpine forests taking the worst hit. Trees in both the coastal and Sierra Nevada ranges expire in multitudes. Further expansion and development of the WUI continues to occur across a variety of forest and chaparral landscapes, mostly unchecked by laissez-faire pro-development land use policies. Proactive fire management by public agencies increases across the state, and some token moves are performed to expand indigenous cultural burning, but only modestly in comparison to the need.
In the summer of 2040, a forceful weather event with multiple thunderstorms sets fires burning across large swaths of the state, encompassing all mountain ranges and their lower flanks. The scale of the inferno is far beyond what CAL FIRE and other fire-fighting agencies can even imagine controlling. Massive numbers of rural communities, both those of the wealthy and the vulnerable, are destroyed. The intensity of the fires kills just about everything they burn through. Toxic smoke – filled with the tiny particulates of former houses, wires, infrastructures, and automobiles – blankets much of the state’s skies for nearly two and half months. And just as it seems the fires are fading, a second storm with more extreme winds ushers in the second wave of the inferno. These fires don’t fade until early December, when light rains make active containment possible.
Such a vast extent of the state’s WUI is burned in the fires – including thousands upon thousands of structures – that it’s impossible to rebuild it. Private insurance companies fold under the weight of the claims and ask to be bailed out by the federal government, which refuses, given so many other environmental crises it’s dealing with. The state also discontinues its property insurance stopgaps, by necessity. And after the trauma that so many residents have experienced, many don’t want to rebuild or go back anyway. Former tourist destinations, like Lake Tahoe, now have little to offer. The public health toll from the air pollution from these fires (and others before them) is experienced over time through higher rates of asthma, respiratory illnesses, and cancers.
People come to speak mythically about the summer of 2040 – calling it “the great retreat,” or “the wrath of fire” (rather than The Grapes of Wrath) – when the state radically changed course, went bankrupt and its population plummeted and emigrated elsewhere. Huge expanses of deeply burned land are left to develop in novel, post-apocalyptic ways.
Right to Burn
The University of California is a massive, multi-campus, R1/top tier public research institution. It bills itself as an international leader in research innovation, teaching, diversity and sustainability. But its lofty claims came into considerable question beginning around 2020. As a land grant institution, UC was originally gifted 150,000 acres of land appropriated from Native Americans. Many now refer to these institutions as “land grab” universities that, in total, were granted about 11 million acres. A two-day conference held at UC Berkeley around this time took this topic head on, exploring how that land grab is “intricately tied to California’s unique history of Native dispossession and genocide” and examined “how UC continues to benefit from this wealth accumulation today.” Discussions were held and recommendations were made for what the university could do to try to address its responsibility to indigenous tribes.
At 756,000 acres, the UC reserves are one of the largest in the U.S. and encompass all major ecosystems in the state. They are spread across California’s Floristic Province’s biodiversity hotspots. Right to Burn is the initiative started in the mid-2020s that re-envisions the University of California Reserve System as a broad network of experimental and educational public landscapes for the reparative and creative reintroduction of fire and indigenous land stewardship and rights as a whole. It transforms the role of these lands from passive scientific observation to one of proactive adaptation, eco-cultural reparation, and public education.
As reparation, this initiative invites local native tribes near UC reserve lands to re-assert their rights to cultural burns and other traditional ecological practices within them. They are also invited to assume jobs (and to rewrite job descriptions) as full-time reserve staff and to co-lead and advise on research and educational initiatives. These hybrid forms of landscape stewardship (Western science and traditional ecological knowledge) are brought together with diverse UC faculty, student research programs and work internships to generate pluralistic and useful forms of knowledge that spread beyond the UC reserves to adjacent public lands, based on their results and findings. As a shared, experimental place for learning (socially, politically, and ecologically), U.S. and international students gain first-hand experience of indigenous ways of tending the land. Tribes and cultural burners are able to observe how their practices inform western science and expand the domains of its research and vice versa.
The reserves become state-of-the-art landscape labs for land-fire stewardship. And rather than a closed-door policy, public outreach and engagement across the reserves informs larger publics and catalyzes change far beyond their borders. People come from around the world to study and learn from this initiative, from chancellors to community activists.
Right to Burn memes its way into the U.S. Forest Service, who build relationships with tribes and cultural burning practitioners to burn and steward lands on ancestral homelands within their agency’s domain. This starts through small-scale pilot projects that demonstrate their value to both parties, and then spreads and expands. This relationship grows to be a symbiotic and power-shared relationship. Tribal members are provided with well-paying jobs for their services and benefits and offer cultural burn training to the agencies’ staff. For the first time in decades, the Forest Service becomes successful at more sustainably managing the lands charged to them, and in ways that create a wider range of benefits to people and other organisms. In turn, shared land right agreements are made and the forest service becomes a radically different public agency. This, in turn, leads to further change in federal and state agencies.
As of 2047 the Right to Burn initiative employs over 60 indigenous Americans, fosters the establishment of entirely new majors and academic programs, and creates a range of national and international research collaborations with other universities, public agencies, and other institutions. Like all changes and evolutions in cultural, social, and technical norms, mistakes, misunderstandings and differences in participant expectations are common in the early stages of these efforts and are part of learning and experimenting with new ways of living and coexisting. The initiative’s foresight and planning for those difficulties and its ability to proactively and openly address them, is a major component in the success of the experiment.