Built to Burn - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 211

11
Built to Bu rn
Stephen J. Pyne
CONTENTS
11.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 213
11.2 Humans and Fire in North America ............................................................................... 214
11.3 Wildfires .............................................................................................................................. 216
11.4 Wildfire Management ....................................................................................................... 218
11.5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 222
References ..................................................................................................................................... 222
11.1 Introduction
Earth, air, water, fire—these are truly the basics of the Southwest's elemental landscapes.
But among them fire is the oddity because it is not a substance but a reaction, and while the
others shape the character of life, fire is a creation of life. In peculiar but powerful ways, it
is biologically constructed.
The Southwest is built to burn. The fundamental rhythms of fire are set by a cadence of
wetting and burning. It has to be wet enough to grow combustibles and dry enough to
ready them to actually combust (see Chapter 4). The Southwest's deserts thus burn after
wet winters that fluff up the landscape with grasses and forbs; its mountains burn amid
droughts that leach away moisture from forests (see Chapters 7 and 8). Add to this the
need for a spark to initiate the reaction. The Southwest has plenty in the form of light-
ning. 1 In this regard, it isn't the number of flashes that matter but their relative dryness.
Early monsoon storms often have their rain evaporate before it strikes the ground while
lightning suffers no such loss. Look at a map of lightning flashes, and you will find the
Southwest well on the margins. Look at a map of lightning-kindled fires, and you will find
it at the epicenter (Figure 11.1). 2
To these factors knead in its rugged terrain. There is, it seems, always some place dry
and some place where lightning is temporarily segregated from rain. It all makes for a
complex geography of fire, full of niches, of quirky topography and odd cadences, amid
broad regional rhythms that adds up to an abundance of fires, mostly small, but occasion-
ally large, that can reside amid tiny terrains or ramify across the region. Year in and year
out, something is always available to burn, and something nearly always does.
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