PERSPECTIVES ON THE FIRES : Keeper of the Flame : Our management of this element ranges from poor to criminal; we suppress natural burning and take arson to brutal extremes.

If there is one thing we as a species do, or ought to be able to do, it is to work with fire. This is part of our biological heritage, a legacy from the days of Homo erectus, the one act we perform ecologically that no other species can. For all of our existence, we have been the keepers of the flame on behalf of the Earth. That is what makes the misuse of fire so maddening, and so terrifying. And that is what makes arson such a heinous act: It does not merely defy society; it also denies our humanity.

Fire is power. Fire mythology is quite clear on this score, fire being something that must be stolen or fought for. If fire were captured for the first time today, it would never survive the regulatory agencies. It is too dangerous, too prolific in unwanted side effects. But without it, human life would be impossible. And without the tending of fire by humans, much of the world’s biota would unravel.

That, at least, is the historical role, writ large. The transition to an industrial society--the substitution of fossil fuel-burning for real fire and the creation of societies that this energy source has made possible--has thrown the combustion calculus of the planet into confusion.

The American scene is almost parodic. There is too much combustion and not enough fire. The fire that does exist is maldistributed--too much of the wrong kind in the wrong places and at the wrong times, not enough of the right kind in the right places and at the right times. The grinding of society against nature is throwing sparks that have little relation to historic fire patterns. The extinction of free-burning fire in wildlands is stoking a buildup in fuels, the combustion equivalent of toxic dumps. The measure of American fire power--its marvelous organization for fire suppression--has become the index of its weakness: the inability to balance fire use with fire control. The intermixing of houses with wildlands has created an unstable compound, the landscape equivalent of nitroglycerin. (Build a city out of forest materials and it will burn like a forest fire.) Fires that should be set aren’t; the fires that are set cause damage to society and nature. So colossal is the mismanagement that it amounts to an environmental analogue of the savings-and-loan scandal, with nature burning down the failed institutions. It’s not a pretty sight.

It is easy, though, to see symbols in the flames. A homeless immigrant who doesn’t know how to act in his new environment becomes a metaphor for post-World War II society in Southern California, which doesn’t know how to act either, which has through inattention fashioned a fire environment worse than anything anyone could deliberately plan. Accidental fires abound, no longer buffered through a fire-managed landscape. Like the levees that prevented small flooding but leveraged moderate runoff into monster floods in the Midwest, the engineering away of small patch fires has often created the conditions for conflagrations. And then there is wildland arson, an ecological equivalent of drive-by shootings.

The power of arson derives from the power of fire to propagate. Arson is thus more like a riot than an assault, and it is ineffective without the opportunity to spread. In principle, one can contain arson by containing fire. In practice, this means controlling ignition or controlling the fuels on which fire feeds. Total prevention is quixotic. Rapid attack of newly started fires is not feasible under extreme conditions. Fuel management requires negotiation between nature and society (and within society) over what kind of landscape is possible and what kind of structures should be built. Historically, the preferred means of controlling fire is to use controlled fire. What a society burned under acceptable conditions was unavailable to lightning, arcing power lines or arsonists. But it is exactly the practice of controlled burning that has vanished.

Joan Didion once wrote that “the city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself.” There will always be fires in Southern California. But here, as everywhere, the character of those fires reflects the character of the society that engages them. There have always been arson fires, too, set for profit, jobs, pastoralism or political protest. The current outbreak has a different tenor, however. If set through accident or ignorance, these fires betray a criminal disregard for society. If deliberate, they betray a viciousness and opportunism that places them in the category of serial killers and mass murderers. If copycat arson, fire has found in television a new medium of propagation.

In the past, arson was self-limiting because the landscape could burn only so much at any one time, even under extreme conditions. Today there is little to stop the flames except high-technology fire-fighting and the Pacific Ocean, and they are, respectively, too little and too late. The city will burn. The issue is whether it burns in small chunks over centuries or in great catastrophes, whether from accident or error or malice, whether under controlled circumstances or in crisis.

But it does not have to burn from arson, and arson does not have to take this form; it does not have to savage society so brutally. If Southern California can’t stop such fires, it can nonetheless discourage them, and it can ensure that acts of individual fire abuse do not end in social immolation. The means are at hand. Besides, if we can no longer manage fire, then it is time to board up the windows and tender our resignation from the Great Chain of Being.