Following on from Chris Dixon`s article here is a bit more discussion about wildfires but also about nature based solutions. Permaculture design is profoundly based on understanding and learning from natural systems and we Permaculture engineers place a high value on the services brought to us by these systems. We design in wild areas, in the jargon these are zone 5 areas that are either fully natural, which is rare, or are left to redevelop themselves as they wish. In both cases the areas are left to evolve without interference. This study shows the importance of allowing wild areas to evolve as they will without interference from us. I quote : "We recognize widespread concern that disturbances in dry forest are outside historical variability, so they are damaging. However, we found they are not; instead, they are effectively restoring and adapting dry forests to climate change."
Now for a lot of people this may seem astonishing because we continually underestimate the resilience and interconnectedness of natural systems. Frans de Waal wrote a book called “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” Another question and one that is profoundly important today is ‘are we smart enough to understand the ‘intelligence’ of natural systems?’ Little of our schooling teaches us about complexity and for the most part the word is used as a synonym for complicatedness, they are not the same thing. A big difference between the two is that complicated systems can become increasingly complicated and eventually collapse. At least a part of the cause of the collapse of the Roman empire was that life became increasingly complicated for people, too many laws, too many administrative things to do etc. A complex system can become more complex, more units and more interconnections, and said system becomes increasingly dynamically stable and resilient. It can rebound from shocks and disturbances.
All too often when we start to have a fiddle with natural systems, usually either to exploit them or to ward off some preceived threat (such as wildfires) we do more harm than good. The study cited above brings this to the fore. Our command and control approach for mitigating wildfires are hugely expensive and pretty ineffectual. We also tend to forget evolution and Darwin’s natural selection and how the ‘survival of the most adapted’ is the selecting force in the process of evolution. Natural ecosystems have been adapting and evolving since the origin of life, the process is pretty robust and can rebound from ice ages, super-volcanoes and meteor strikes.
Wildfires are a force that pushes a system to adapt and evolve, they are problematic for us because we now take up so much place and don’t sufficiently protect our houses, villages and towns. This is a general strategy for wildfire mitigation: let wild areas adapt and evolve but create buffer zones around the areas we wish to protect. This has been the approach used by Permaculture engineers for decades, we design buffer zones, protect areas affected by hot dry winds, install integrated water systems which can be used to flood areas to protect dwelling etc. Buildings are designed for fire resistance, access roads act as fire breaks and can be flooded. Of course each farm, house, village or town is different and so the techniques/strategies and links between subsystems vary according to the local context.
Climate models tend to predict that arid and semi-arid areas of the world should become more humid with global warming, after all warmer air can hold more water vapour. This isn’t turning out to be the case and atmospheric moisture hasn’t increased and this means that we must urgently rethink how we deal with wildfires. It also means that we must try and better understand the ‘intelligence’ of natural systems and let them change and adapt to the changing world. Another mystery and linked to the above is that the atmospheric moisture load over humid areas is increasing yet not as much as projected during the dry seasons.
To finish here is another quote from the study mentioned above “if prescribed burning and managed fire for resource benefit were enhanced to be more natural, full restoration and adaptation could feasibly be met in ~30 years, by mid-century, a significant achievement.”