The Social Contract of Managing Fire with Stephen Pyne

Welcome to our second episode with THE Stephen Pyne! Stephen is a renowned author and fire historian who, in addition to his academic life, also spent over a decade working on a fire crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon early in his career. Given this background, he seemed like quite possibly the perfect person to chat with about the recent Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park. 

For a quick primer, the Dragon Bravo Fire started three miles north of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon during a lightning storm on July 5th. On Sunday, it destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and dozens of other buildings in the adjacent complex. It was being managed for resource benefit, or was in other words a "managed fire". I’m not going to go into all the details on the fire itself, but here’s a thorough, measured analysis from my friend Zeke at the Lookout regarding what took place over the week or so that the fire was being “managed for resource benefit” (I’ll get into what this means in a minute). Zeke also provides some of the behind the scenes context on wildfire decision making and some other educated thoughts that are very deserving of your time.

Stephen, as you'd expect, had some great perspective to share about this event. While we avoided armchair quarterbacking the decision making on the fire, Stephen was able to speak a bit about the decades of precedent for this kind of wildfire tragedy in the Southwest, about the background of managed fire use in the National Parks, and how important managed fire can be to reducing wildfire risk—but only if we acknowledge the limitations of managed fire policy and take more strides to improve our processes and learn from our mistakes. 

One of the improvements Stephen advocates for is being more forthcoming about managed fire with the public, which would include agencies being very clear about what managed fire is and isn't, what the objectives of managed fire typically are, what preparations have been made to make managing a fire the right decision and also—importantly—that mistakes can happen and how we can better prepare in the event that they do. 

The biggest takeaway from this episode is that we've done a poor job of building trust with the public, and especially so around the practice of managed fire. Perhaps now is a good time to have that conversation, and to figure out how we can reframe this conversation so that people get more of a glimpse at managed fire when it goes right?

For more background on Stephen, check out his TED Talk on how fire shapes everything, or this great essay he published in Scientific American last spring.