Built to Burn - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 220

take its place beside urban, wildland, and rural fire, overlapping with them all but with
its own distinctive character. It will become a nuisance rather than a nemesis. And we
will inhabit a landscape that better reconciles how we live with nature with how we say
we would like to live, in a place not simply infested with threats, bristling with protective
countermeasures, and occasionally aflame with feral fire, but one aglow with promise.
11.5 Conclusion
That promise might look like this. Instead of hardened physical countermeasures, we
would search out biological controls that will help dampen the hazard in ecologically
friendly ways. Instead of DMZs between the wild and the urban, we might occupy a
shared habitat, a site suitable for fire as for elk and wolves, hummingbirds and chipmunks.
In place of either walking away from fire or attempting to beat it into submission, we
reclaim our heritage as keeper of the flame and see that the right kind of fire gets to the
right places at the right times. Not a likely outcome, but an honorable and sensible one,
and the only kind of truce imaginable in what will otherwise become an endless war on
nature—and worse, one of our own contriving.
References
1. Schroeder, M.J. and C. Buck, Fire Weather (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
Agriculture Handbook 360, 1970).
2. Krammes, J.S., Tech. Coord., Effects of fire management of southwestern natural resources
(U.S. Forest Service, General Technical Report, RM-191, 1990).
3. Pyne, S.J., Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Seattle, WA: University
of Washington Press, 1997).
4. Leopold, A., Grass, brush, timber and fire in southern Arizona, Journal of Forestry , 22: 1-10, 1924.
5. Cohen, J.D., The wildland-urban interface fire problem: A consequence of the fire exclusion
paradigm, Forest History Today , Fall: 20-26, 2008.
6. Rodgers III, D., Bernard Eduard Fernow: A Story of North American Forestry (New York: Hafner,
1968), p. 167.
7. Cohen, J.D., Relating flame radiation to home ignition using modeling and experimental crown
fires, Canadian Journal of Forest Research , 34: 1616-1626, 2004.
8. Cohen, J.D., An examination of the Summerhaven, Arizona home destruction related to the
local wildland fire behavior during the June 2003 Aspen fire (Intermountain Fire Sciences
Laboratory, unpublished report, 2003).
9. Pyne, S.J., P. Andrews, and R. Laven, Introduction to Wildland Fire , 2nd edn. (New York: Wiley, 1996).
10. Pyne, S.J., Tending Fire. Coping with America's Wildland Fires (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004).