Wildland Fire: A Tale of Wolves
Thoughts on Wildfire Management. A Story of the Changing Relationship Among a Family, a Herd of Migratory Animals, and Wolves. A Narrative Closely Aligning with the Domestic Wildfire Experience.
Introduction
A wildfire burning across a landscape is always in the process of becoming (Holland, 1992). Wildfire is a process and no longer a natural one. Wildland fire has been an artificial process since fire was first intentionally used to produce a specific type of landscape. It remains artificial due to the landscapes that have been created, human-caused ignitions, intrusion of the built environment into vegetated areas, prescribed fires and other manipulations of the landscape, and a changing climate.
A natural state of wildfire might consist of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that ignited massive blazes that burned unchecked across the country until they met each other, ran out of fuel, or burned into a barrier. As a process belonging to the natural order, no human interference sought to influence wildfire. Vegetation grew and was managed naturally by periodic fires with varying severity. This was the natural order.
What could be considered a natural state of wildfire was deviated from likely first by Indigenous burning. Early burning was a design decision, meaning there was a vision of what landscape conditions should exist in an area, which was brought into being through intentional burning. This is a simple understanding of design. Early burning may have been replicating the conditions produced through the natural order. However, this does not make the outcome of their activities natural, as they burned on their own designed schedule using fabricated ignition devices.
In the wildfire community, there is a strong discourse about restoring landscapes across the United States to their pre-colonial state. Restoring such a landscape would be moving from one artificial state to a previous artificial state through design decisions. Design cannot produce the natural; it will always produce the artificial. Every prescribed fire and every suppressed wildfire are all outcomes of design decisions producing particular artificial landscapes based on imagination, preference, and pressure. Some landscapes are more favorable than others. Ideas of burning and cutting back into time to recover landscapes and establish a new natural order are misnomers. Human intervention through innate design abilities in ecological systems will only produce what is artificial.
Recreating the pre-human, pre-designed natural order of wildfire is impossible as the conditions conducive to doing so no longer exist. Ubiquitous values at risk, liabilities, missing policy, and vegetation loading could not possibly allow for a naturally ignited wildfire to roam a landscape in many areas nationwide. Another leading narrative in a wildfire is the artificial state of overgrown, dense, and unbroken vegetation produced by design through visions of suppressing fires aggressively. These preferential landscapes with smaller burn scars and unchecked vegetation growth outside the burned area present challenges to subsequent wildfires, prescribed fires, or mechanical treatments. A primary concern is that the available vegetation may lead to a prescribed or managed fire that burns too quickly and severely. The frequent necessity of aggressive wildfire suppression is not being argued against. An argument is being made that full suppression is not always necessary and that the effects of past decisions have created landscapes where the need for aggressive suppression reinforces itself. Regretfully, these decisions by fire managers colonize the future with conditions more conducive to extreme fire behavior. This is the outcome of design, the creation of the artificial, and the violation of a distant natural order or a preferential closer-in-time artificial order. The field should be aware it is only capable of producing artificial states. The agency that appears in the wildfire community following the recognition they all design is enormous. Fire managers make design decisions about the qualities of wildfire risk across a landscape, the vegetation pattern, the sustainability of wildfire risk management, when and where a prescribed fire will occur, and burn with what severity.
As mentioned, images of pre-colonial landscapes are sought after. It is important to note that although these images may have associations with the patterns of the natural order, they are the product of design decisions deciding when, where, and what should be created. Mimicking ideas of the natural world does not make it natural; it makes it artificial. Fire managers are designers who create and sustain an artificial order, for better or worse. The field must be sensitive to the role of design in management outcomes and the ideas and actions that are conserved in fuels and suppression.
About Wolves
The following is based on a short story in Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008), which describes interactions with and departures from the natural order. The story begins with the rise of pastoral living and a family that followed a herd of migrating animals. A pack of wolves lived close to the herd and hunted and fed on the same animals the family used for food. As time passed, it was recognized that the wolves’ behavior would not stop, diminishing the herd and the family’s food supply. To mitigate this, the family made it difficult for the wolves to access the food they had long been hunting before the arrival of the family. Barriers and family members guarding the herd night and day reduced attacks.
The adults in the family recognized they were violating the natural order and its regularities, events, stabilities, and patterns by preventing the wolves from being able to hunt and eat as they always had. The wolf and herd relationship was part of the natural order. The family had interrupted a relationship belonging to the natural order and created an artificial one that was more convenient for the family and would help them sustain their food source. The adults recognized their convenience violated what was natural. Some adults performed a ritualistic activity to maintain awareness of violating the natural order. During the ritual, they may have even apologized to the wolves for preventing them from hunting the herd, as was proper to the world.
This ritual was passed on to the children who would participate, and they learned that even though protecting the herd provided food for the family, it violated the natural order by preventing the wolves from behaving as they always had. In the world, the children were told that everything has a legitimate existence, place, entanglement, interdependency, and interrelationships with other living things, constituting a natural order that must be respected. When the order must be violated, it must be recognized, and a ritual must be performed to acknowledge this disturbance and apologize for what has been done.
At some point, the conservation of the understanding of the ongoing violation of the natural order was lost between generations, and the family's sacred, honored, and apologetic relationship towards the wolves and its ritual was forgotten. Some children grew up respecting how the family had violated the natural order but maintained awareness of this incoherence with the natural world. Others matured with the understanding that the act of appropriation of excluding the wolves from the herd was the natural order. They took it as a given without investigation and believed the family was entitled to the herd alone. Over time, the separation of the wolves from the herd was further bolstered by controlling the herd’s movement. The family sought areas that could sustain the herd and be easily defensible from wolves.
Eventually, those responsible for protecting the herd broke into two groups: Those who guarded the animals and those who went into the woods to hunt the wolves to protect the herd before an attack occurred. These tactics were supported by an understanding of what was thought to be the natural order based on the exclusion of the wolves from the herd they had grown up with. The family was unaware their knowledge of the world was unnatural and becoming increasingly artificial and would have externalities. The way of living that emerged from this understanding of wolves as a problem to be solved was fueled by aggression towards the wolves as they depleted the family’s food source and, therefore, must be stopped to whatever end. At this point, the family understood the situation as protecting the herd “from the aggression of the wolves” (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008, p.90).
The family’s management of the herd, pasture selections, and passive and active protection led to a larger herd and a smaller wolf population. Increasing the size of the herd and reducing the risk of wolf attacks became goals the family and other families that joined them pursued. The different families all formed a cohesive group. As they pursued these goals with greater and greater sophistication and organization, they became blind to their aggression toward the wolves and the shifting order of their developing artificial world. As a result of this blindness caused by the commitment to pursuing goals, the group never recognized their own overwhelming aggression and its effect on the world around them. Fewer wolves led to increases in other animal populations that would feed on the same grounds as the herd over time. To protect the food available to the herd, any intruding species was either promptly killed as secondary sustenance or to protect the herd’s grounds. Without the balancing force of the wolves, herd numbers swelled and had to be moved more often for grazing. Thus, the group faced more hazards, some of which were solved through the aggression of the families and their willingness to protect the herd.
The “natural order” lost with the first violation led to an increasingly artificial order as the group’s environment shifted, partially out of their actions, and their shared understandings of it changed. Their corresponding shifts in patterns of behavior changed as well. Both understanding and ways of acting may change together. Any change only becomes of consequence when it is conserved by a family or group of families and passed down from generation to generation. The conservation of a manner of living centered on aggression, domination, and the denial of the legitimacy of other living things’ existence to secure the group’s welfare by any means will spread throughout the burgeoning society in different forms and contexts.
The understanding that the herd must be protected from the aggression of the wolves was the starting point in the deviation from the natural order and the fabrication of a new one. As this understanding became conserved, it became a foundation upon which further and more radical departures from the natural order could occur and would continue to be conserved in the process of building a civilization. The less probable pathway begins with the family recognizing the attacks from wolves were a natural process that was part of the course of life, and the wolves had as much right to the herd as the family. Had this understanding been successfully conserved, living would have been harmonious with natural events. This would have alleviated the problematic mode of living that arose later and continuously required more significant and greater action to stay in control. As the family decided to interfere with the wolves’ access to the herd, the most apologetic, awareness-raising ritual does not repair the disruption the family caused, which will extend far beyond the family, the herd, and the wolves.
Conclusion
“Nothing is true or false, valid or not valid, good or not good in itself … all depends on the criterion of validation used to accept one or the other in any case” (Maturana, Muñoz, & Ximena, 2016, p. 665). There was no intrinsic status or value of the wolf attacks on the herd until certain criteria of validation were applied that rendered these events “bad.” Then, further criteria were used to distinguish the behavior of the wolves as “aggressive” and the herd in need of protection from them. Whether something is good or bad, true or false, valid or not, is an outcome of the person observing and the criteria they use. The way of living and understanding the world’s order that slowly appeared from the original sin of making it difficult for wolves to access the herd may also be evaluated using specific criteria. For example, the way of living’s departure or alignment with balance in the environment.
The story of the family and the wolves parallels the United States’ experience with wildfire. In the discourse, a pre-colonial landscape state is desired, seemingly nationwide. Without question, this project entails enormous amounts of energy before a chainsaw is started or fire is put on the ground, which is when the physical labor starts and carries on. The physical labor includes maintaining previously treated areas when brush and regeneration begin to populate burned or thinned areas and cleared spaces among the trees. In the case of prescribed fires, there can be enormous risks to the built environment and larger landscape in the event of an escape. The author emphasizes the many prescribed fires and firing operations that are never watched or read about because they are carried out successfully.
To reiterate, the ideal of the pre-colonial landscape is artificial, even if it was the product of the Indigenous people following what had been the natural order. The fire management field is definitively post-natural. No natural order or landscape can be created, as all human intervention involves design, and design creates the artificial. Additional considerations involve the departure from the highly preferred pre-colonial artificial state and its surrounding context. Informed artificial landscapes must be designed that sustainably minimize risk while balancing ecological benefits. It is known that this is a large project with sensitive decision-making, and it will never be in pursuit of the natural but a more desirable and sustainable artificial order.
The trajectory into the future changed the moment the wolves were recognized as aggressors, and the herd must be protected from their untoward behavior. As the direction of travel into the future changed, the understandings and actions that would and would not be conserved across time changed markedly. Wildfire went through a similar process, where fire was seen as an aggressor, an enemy, an aberration to be fought with the same aggression it showed firefighters. It was to be defeated and eliminated from the landscape. Fire’s unwelcome presence on the landscape was codified in early policy and permeated (permeates?) the culture of fire management. Conserving ideas and related actions is far easier than changing them. Like with the group and the wolves, fire management conserved aggression but it was similarly unchecked.
The early ideas of fire being a force to fight aggressively were conserved, making the present enormous world of fire suppression and current offshoots, such as wildfire tech, possible. It all rests on the artificial. As these ideas and practices were actualized in areas that had not already deviated from fire-adapted landscapes by other means, wildland firefighting continued to cause landscapes to depart from park-like, mosaic, pre-colonial ideals. While fire managers were not violating a natural order like in the case of the family, they were violating the remnants of a desirable, intelligently designed, artificial order that could be maintained through the presence of fire and not its exclusion. Perceptions of and actions toward wildfire leading up to and involving policy formation might have taken a different, yet unlikely, direction sustained into the present day. Conserving the fire practices of the Indigenous people or detecting the early effects of fire exclusion in California and conserving them in practice would have created more sustainability, harmony with nature, and less damaging and deadly management.
Through their (unintentional) designerly behavior blinded by objectives and evaluation of fire, fire managers produced new artificial landscapes. Indeed, it will take well into the next century and require political capital, unification, different management decisions with a strong legal basis, an engaged and outraged society, and legions of forces who can do the work to bring about a different, practical, and artificial order that will eventually require far less energy to manage fire on.
And here we sit—but not comfortably. Good work is already taking place; it just needs to scale. It is time to let wolves be wolves.
References
Holland, J. H. (1992). Complex adaptive systems. Daedalus, 121(1), 17-30.
Maturana, H. R. (2011). Origins and implications of autopoiesis: Preface to the second edition of de máquinas y seres vivos. 6(3), 293-306. (A. Paucar-Caceres, & R. Harnden, Trans.)
Maturana, H. R., Muñoz, S. R., & Ximena , D. Y. (2016). Cultural-Biology: Systemic consequences of our evolutionary natural drift as molecular autopoietic systems. Foundations of Science, 21, 631-678.