Living with Fire

"The time to prepare is not when your house is burning " 

 

A 1981 classic B-movie (available on Prime and YouTube) was Quest for Fire. Plot: A Cro-Magnon clan led by Ron Perlman depends on a carefully tended source of fire, stored in a lamp, which accidentally extinguishes, throwing the clan into existential panic. Lacking the knowledge to kindle a new fire, they send three tribesmen to search for another source and bring it home. The hunters encounter a Homo sapiens woman, Rae Dawn Chong, who teaches them not only how to make fire but also the Kama Sutra, winning her a Genie for best actress. 20th Century Fox pitched it as a sort of “2001: A Space Odyssey” minus the apes and spaceships. Even without Kubrick, Quest won a dozen awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA for best makeup, but perhaps most remarkable was the absence of dialogue. The whole film was just grunts.

Fast forward a half dozen ice ages and we no longer have a problem finding fire. Lately, it’s been finding us.

Fire is one of the features of 21st Century that will only accelerate as the world warms. No amount of A.I or MAGA will change that. What can be changed is our response when it arrives, as it will.

After a string of disastrous fire seasons, Ontario and British Columbia updated their fire prevention, suppression, and risk reduction laws. FireSmart Canada set out mitigation practices for homes and neighborhoods (e.g., clearing combustible materials near structures, vegetation management, etc.). Oregon went further, mapping properties that required compliance with strict new codes, with fines for scofflaws, but public uproar forced lawmakers to repeal the new rules a year later. California legislators took note and slowed down their planned upgrades. That prompted fire-smitten cities like Berkeley, San Diego and Los Angeles to enact their own.

Berkeley’s law declares a “Zone Zero,” a permaculture term, around every residence, starting this month. It prohibits flammable material within the closest five feet of any structure. For many homeowners, that means removing wooden fences and rose bushes.

In Los Angeles, the new rules meant cutting many trees, including some very historic and valued ones, and there was pushback. At what point are the benefits of urban forest—cooling, hydrating, giving habitat to wildlife and pollinators—outweighed by the danger of urban wildfire? Cowed, many fire districts retreated to policies of education over enforcement.

There is a more significant interface than urban forest and wildfire that is coming into play. As Onandagan firekeeper Oren Lyons put it, “Nature does not have mercy. None. Nature has only laws.” Angelinos and Oregonians are trying to have it both ways—to cut a deal. They still believe the American Way—consumerism über alles—is non-negotiable, but are grudgingly willing to negotiate. Maybe we’ll cut down some trees and sacrifice our rose bushes, okay? The other side does not negotiate.

The rules are not complicated. Sunlight falling on the planet is kept as heat only in balance with reflection of light back to space by icecaps, and other shiny things, and by photosynthesis—absorption of heat and production of water vapor by forest cover, the downstream exhalations of animals such as ourselves, and the occasional volcano. Skew that balance at your peril.

Introducing a 300-million-year stockpile of fossil sunlight (coal, oil and gas) into the atmosphere within a scant few human generations tipped the balance.

Wally Broeker, whom I interviewed for Climate in Crisis in 1988, used to say that climate was “an angry beast” that humans were poking with a stick. Jim Hansen, in his newsletter this week, recalled that Wally occasionally got in trouble because he liked to speculate, which is the antithesis of scientific rigor, or “reticence” as Hansen calls it. Broeker was among the first to predict the slowing of the AMOC, which transports heat from the equator to the Canadian Maritimes and Northern Europe. We are now seeing that slowing. It bodes ill for the Northern countries, especially Iceland and Greenland.

There were early climate heroes—Mike Flanigan, Stefan Doerr, and John Abatzoglou—who correctly predicted that higher temperatures and drier fuels would increase ignition probability, spread, and intensity of wildfire, speculating that by the 2000s–2010s, climate‑driven fire risk would extend almost everywhere. That news was included in the climate emergency briefing Lyndon Johnson received in 1965.

The underlying problem, for Johnson as much as anyone, was our collective addiction. As Hansen put it in his draft opening chapter of Sophie’s Choice, “fossil fuels are the source of rising living standards.” He goes on to say that only after they are proven to contribute to climate change and the “most powerful nations are led by governments willing to follow the science” will we begin to reduce our dependence. Sorry, Jim. I disagree.

First, I am sure Hansen would agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are already proven to be the primary cause of the climate crisis (land-use change from agriculture and urbanization, jet travel, and whaling are among other, lesser causes). Second, if all the world’s governments were social democracies like Denmark, perhaps they would be willing to follow the science, but they are not and even Denmark doesn’t do that.

I suspect Hansen subscribes to the “rational actor” theory of governance and economics. The framers of the US Constitution seem to have had a blind spot there as well. Personally, I think the addiction model better describes our dilemma. Donald Trump, for instance, is addicted to rewards. Apparently, he was starved for praise as a child. Now no amount of wealth or fame is enough for him. He is addicted to the acquisition process.

The homeowners declining to cut back their roses are similarly addicted. They have a normalcy bias. If they just ignore the wildfire threat, they can keep their roses and simply refuse to acknowledge that pretty flowers may threaten their home, all their belongings, and even their lives.

This is one reason I like biochar so much. It cuts through the dopamine cravings like a superspeedy running back finding a crease.

CalFire has been pioneering the use of mobile biochar kilns to mitigate fire risk for several years. In 2024, I visited a site in the Berkeley Hills where a forest service contract with Biochar on Site [https://donorbox.org/biochar-on-site] was demonstrating how to thin highly flammable eucalyptus in a State Forest by turning it into biochar. Broadcast back onto the forest floor, the biochar worked like a sponge when it rained, arresting surface erosion, percolating water towards tree roots, and storing excess for a later season when the trees would need to endure the drying heat of the Santa Ana winds.

It would be nice to imagine thousands of small backyard biochar kilns—like the cutesy Charbeque—used to thin and water the urban forests of California cities. County burning rules prohibit those in many places. Even the air curtain incinerators and flame cap kilns that CalFire uses are outlawed—that’s considered open burning.

Recently biochar engineer emeritus Tom Miles calculated how much biomass might be generated by the new Zone Zero rules in Berkeley:

• An average building footprint of 2400 ft2 on a 6550 ft2 lot

• An average building perimeter of 192 ft.  

• A 5-foot strip of 960 ft2 per home or 22 acres for 1,000 homes.

• Reduce the area 30% for walkways, patios, steps, driveways, and other noncombustible surfaces—15.4 acres

• Each home would be clearing 60-240 lb dry biomass.

The fuel load would range from a low of about 2 dry tons/acre (light mulch, sparse ground cover) to a high of 8 dry tons per acre (dense shrubs, hedges, or heavily mulched area) with a moderate load of 5 dry tons per acre (continuous ornamental shrubs or thicker mulch).

The total biomass removed for 1000 homes would range from 52 to 205 green tons or 31 to 123 dry tons.

Tom went on to speculate about what might be if the county decided to support biochar production the same way it provides garbage pickup or trash recycling.

The average mobile chipper fills a truck with 6 tons of chips in an hour or two, depending on the drive time between houses and the drag distance. Zone Zero clearing would provide from 7 to 26 truckloads. At 30% yield (some kilns are more efficient) that produces 9 to 37 tons of biochar.

Tom says a Tigercat mobile carbonizer, which is probably the least efficient of the mobile kilns although CalFire already owns a few of them, could process this material in one or two days if it were hauled in bulk to a central site. The finished biochar, which already has a climate benefit built in by virtue of keeping greenhouse gases locked away for millennia, could be distributed back to homeowners or used on public lands and city green spaces to nurture nature and build drought—and fire—resistance.

Win Win.

 

Thinning the Tilden Regional Park with CalFire, Kelpie Wilson, and the portable smokeless Ring of Fire biochar kiln. 
Photo by author, 2024.

This week, I have an announcement for subscribers and other readers regarding this theme of climate preparedness and carbon budget rebalancing. The group responsible for CalFire’s interest in biochar—inventors and distributors of their own mobile kilns, and convenor of workshops for homeowners and authorities—is Biochar-On-Site. Global Village Institute is pleased to announce that we have agreed to sponsor B.O.S.’s tax-deductible fundraising campaign going forward. If you would like to pledge $8 per month (about the cost of one Peppermint Mocha or Frappuccino at Starbucks), you can help municipalities like Portland and Berkeley produce biochar from their urban waste and from protected forested areas. That Frappuccino for your friends is now tax-deductible.

The rules Mother Nature imposes are not complicated or onerous. We still get to live happy lives. We just can’t keep breaking them and imagine we are getting away with it.

Fire is a powerful reminder.

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Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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