I
t can seem like Earth itself is on fire. In places such
as Australia and California for which fire is a natu-
ral feature, landscapes are burning at historic if
not epic scales. In the Arctic and Greenland, where
fire is rare, tundra is smoldering and melting per-
mafrost. In Amazonia, Indonesia, and Mediterra-
nean Europe, fires are interacting with the land
clearing of rainforest, the draining of peatlands, and
the abandonment of rural lands to create damaging,
even lethal, conditions.
There is no single driver except humanity behind this
outbreak. But increasingly, anthropogenic climate change
is recognized as an enabler, performance enhancer, and
globalizer. Fire seasons are lengthening, fire severity is
escalating, and collateral damages are compounding.
Is this a “wicked” problem so entangled with scien-
tific and social complexities that solu-
tions are impossible? We think not.
We need to unbundle “fire” in all its
shape-shifting avatars into manageable
pieces. Some issues will have technical
solutions—fires sparked by powerlines
can be prevented. Some involve knotty
ecological processes: Lands that have
had fires removed can suffer an eco-
logical fire deficit for which reinstating
flame can be as complicated as restor-
ing a vanished species. Most of the
problems involve clashes of cultural
values over how we get energy, organize our economy,
and choose to live on the land. These will demand a
political resolution.
Scales matter. Some reforms can be applied imme-
diately and locally, as with protecting towns. Others
will require decades of work across countries and
regions. Restoring a suitable regimen of fire to tens
of millions of hectares will be an arduous exercise in
adaptive management. Confronting the effects of cli-
mate change will likely prove a century-long quest, but
unless we reverse trends, they will overwhelm what-
ever type of management is implemented. We need to
pursue all levels simultaneously.
Begin with ignition. Research shows that nationally,
97% of the fires that have threatened houses are started
by people. There will always be accidental ignitions,
and in the West and Florida, lightning kindles many
fires. But prevention programs can reduce the risk to
manageable levels.
Still, fires will escape. The power of fire, however,
resides in its capacity to spread and inflict damages.Within limits, we can dampen fire intensities by modi-
fying the landscapes that fire feeds upon, and we can
harden communities to keep embers blown from the
countryside from metastasizing into urban confla-
grations. The strategies are the same as those used to
contain urban fire. Concepts like the home ignition
zone—the house and its immediate surroundings—
identify points of vulnerability. Long-extant programs
like Firewise, which also add concepts like defensible
space, promote suites of tried-and-tested techniques to
communities in nearly all kinds of environments.
In montane forests like the ponderosa pine of the
Southwest, research shows that thinning and burning are
effective methods to reduce fuel loads and allow surface
fires to return. But many techniques are available, includ-
ing prescribed grazing, the use of managed wildfire, and
varieties of mechanical treatments like
chipping and masticating. Most places
will need a cocktail of treatments, ap-
propriate to their local conditions.
Smart treatments, done well, will en-
hance ecological integrity at the same
time that they reduce hazardous fu-
els. Thinning, for example, resembles
woody weeding and unlike logging
removes the small stuff that powers
fire. Moreover, fire is a biochemical
process, not just a flaming woodchip-
per. Fire as fire matters biologically.
Good fire can provide herd immunity against bad fire.
Yet all these interventions will be overpowered un-
less climate change is brought to heel. Paradoxically, as
we ratchet down our binge-burning of fossil fuels, we’ll
have to ratchet up our burning of living landscapes to
grant them the robustness they will need to survive the
stresses to come.
Science can’t do all the intellectual lifting. Fire is sys-
temic: We need a systemic cultural response. We need
art, new narratives and a poetry of flame, a revamp-
ing of liability laws to make controlled burning a de-
fault choice, a restoration of traditional knowledge to
broaden techniques and purposes, a politics that can
see the flames behind the smoke and engage with those
who must live with its choices. In the end, science can
advise; it can’t decide.
But we need a solid empirical basis for the tough de-
cisions heading our way. We need what science can do
best, and the best of what science can do.–William Wallace Covington and Stephen PyneFire in our future
William Wallace
Covington
is Emeritus Founding
Executive Director
of The Ecological
Restoration Institute
and Emeritus
Professor of Forestry
at Northern Arizona
University, Flagstaff
AZ, USA. w.wallace.
[email protected]Stephen Pyne
is an emeritus
professor at Arizona
State University,
Tempe, AZ, USA,
and a fire historian.
stephen.pyne@
asu.edu10.1126/science.abeSCIENCE sciencemag.org 2 OCTOBER 2020 • VOL 370 ISSUE 6512 13EDITORIAL
“There is
no single
driver except
humanity...”