Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in places where the existing forest is a shambles, they might well improve biotic health
and biodiversity (see Chapters 10 and 12). They would offer an opportunity for construc-
tive landscaping, almost certainly an ecological improvement over tangles of pine-jungles
and a soil paved in conifer needles. Such a program will be neither cheap nor simple.
Probably, though, we could come to some consensus, community by community, about
how to do it.
All sides, however, will quickly look beyond that penumbral border. The deeper
problem will not end at the hamlet's shadow. Sooner or later we will have to pursue it
into the backcountry; not everywhere, but in enough critical sites to matter. Advocates
of a changing-the-combustibility strategy will see in the fire greenbelts a demonstration
of how that projection might be done, and why. Critics will worry that, once launched,
those fidgeting hands and conniving minds will not exercise the same level of care and
planning and will blast recklessly into the land beyond. They may become corridors for
human traffic of all kinds, like highways into the Amazon. Trailer parks, trophy homes,
and casinos may not be far behind. The concept of a fire greenbelt, that is, may prove a
tough nut, not because the projects are intrinsically problematic but because of what, to
various imaginations, they represent for the future.
It is unlikely that the intermix scene is simply a contemporary fad. Americans are
creating a new kind of landscape, a postmodern pastoral, something neither urban nor
wild nor rural (see Chapter 18). Like strip malls, these landscapes are destined to become
permanent features that won't give way to “real” architecture. They are what they are and
can be done well or poorly. Such communities need reasonable standards for fire codes,
not simply the jeers and Schadenfreude of the chattering classes, eager to gloat over the
spectacle of NASDAQ millionaires trying to protect log-plated trophy homes with garden
sprinklers. And unless we want our intermix milieu to look like the parking lots of big
box retailers and woody trailer slums, we need to think about landscaping; settings that
are fire-safe but bio-friendly. We need an esthetic for ourselves in the scene. All of which
argues that, once the transitional phase has passed, a new kind of fire will exist, more or
less permanently, and that the fire community should think about what kind of institutions
and practices are suitable to cope with it.
The trick is to remember that not all biomass is fuel, and that all fuels are parts of a
biota. Fire is more than a tool, like a candle, or a “process,” like a flood: It is an ecological
catalyst, a kind of biotic defibrillator. A flood or earthquake can occur without a molecule
of life present. A fire can't. We are not hammering and sawing fuelbeds; we're massaging
ecosystems. We are creating habitats; for fire, for ourselves, for the other creatures with
whom we share the site. If we get fire right, we will probably get much of the rest of our
stewardship right as well.
To its credit the fire community early identified the intermix issue and is succeeding in
taming it. This seems counterintuitive: The burning houses and evacuated towns crowd
TV screens every summer and fall. But the public has heard the message, new communi-
ties are incorporating fire safety into their design, and the crisis, stoked by a long drought
and a bull market, is cresting. The most stubborn problems involve those communities
created early in the movement and under the worst circumstances; it is this backlog that
is most vulnerable. (While California in the early 1990s legislated against shake-shingle
roofs in new construction, the Cedar fire of 2003 took those Scripps Ranch houses not yet
retrofitted to the new code, and the Sayre fire of 2008 blasted through trailer parks.)
If we do what we already know needs doing, and are lucky, the intermix fire wave could
pass within the next 5 years, and it is plausible that, within another decade, the intermix
fire scene will be sufficiently domesticated to no longer pose a startling challenge. It will
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