Blazes on the New Frontier

What has emerged is a program of sheltering in place. The choice to fight or flee belongs with the homeowner. If you leave, you leave early. If you stay, you take measures to protect yourself and your home. The protocol is taught like standard first aid. The lessons are coded into a saying: Houses protect people, people protect houses. Residents can stay inside and emerge after the front to swat out threatening embers.

In comparison, the American resort to ever-vaster mandatory mass evacuations looks both pathetic and paranoid. Apparently we can defend our houses with an M16 and a bazooka if we choose, but not with a garden hose and a rake. There can never be enough firefighters to shield all structures during a conflagration. They shouldn't have to. Let homeowners take responsibility, not only for preparing their property but for protecting it. Knowing that you might be called on to defend against the next outbreak of a Santa Ana fire avalanche ought to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

The likely outcome is that today's intermix fire, which first appeared like an alien specter, will continue to be naturalized, and then gradually domesticated. Urban fire services will claim the task. Authorities will enact fire codes for buildings and landscape development. Fighting these new fires has to become institutionalized, as it eventually was in America's frontier cities, which burned with even greater frequency and ferocity than the I-zone today. The crisis will linger while fires consume the slacker communities and early developments that resist retrofitting.

When this passes, however, wildland fire may revert to something akin to its origins. This will probably mean finding better ways to reinstate those vital wildland fires, whether set by nature or by people, that decades of fire protection have tried to suppress.

This won't abolish firefighting in the woods, or eliminate the occasional big fire, or revive the craft of smoke-chasing. But it might reinvent firefighters in a greener form, perhaps as fire foragers, seeking out sites to kindle the way their predecessors tracked down smoke. That would at least put future practitioners into the woods. And if they -- if we -- are fortunate, the smell of smoke may trigger something more benign than the incense, at once cloying and frightening, that characterizes the wildfires of an industrial order and its megacities.

stephen.pyne@asu.edu

Steve Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of "Tending Fire: Coping With America's Wildland Fires."