The 16th Annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD WINNER, STEPHEN J. PYNE : Fires That Build and Burn : Excerpt From “World Fire”

Many of us fear fire: that brooding, ineffable, sometimes fatal presence that can burst forth with terrifying effect. But not Stephen J. Pyne. Pyne has fought fire firsthand (his work as a fire crew chief in the Grand Canyon is described in his 1989 book “Fire on the Rim”). But Pyne has also come to see it as an essential, “conscious geological power” without which Earth’s biodiversity and ecological harmony would collapse. Ironically, he writes, our failure to fathom the utility of natural wildfires has led us to manage the land in such a way as to encourage the kind of catastrophic wildfires that struck Borneo in 1983 or Southern California in 1993.

A professor of history at Arizona State University, Pyne is best known for his “Cycle of Fire” series of books: “Fire in America” (1982); “The Ice” (1986), an “intellectual history” of Antarctica, the fireless continent; “Burning Bush” (1991), an epic prose poem about fire and Australian exceptionalism; and “World Fire” (1995). “Vestal Fire,” Pyne’s fire history of Europe, will appear next year.

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In the early years of fire control, firelines were often called trails; and they resembled them, paths cut down to mineral soil around which firefighters patrolled. No fire was technically controlled until a fireline surrounded it.

But fires were often fast and firefighting with hand tools slow, so a technique evolved by which burned-out sections of the fire could be incorporated into the constructed line without the labor of cutting, digging, scraping and trenching. The dead, or cold, sections of the fire were treated as de facto fireline, and crews leapfrogged over them from hotline to hotline. Those burned-out sections were known as coldtrails.

In a sense that is the path fire protection itself followed. Before the advent of industrial fire control, fires cycled through the landscape. What burned today would rekindle tomorrow. The land was a kaleidoscope of burned, burning, regrown and greening pieces. As seasons and droughts turned the kaleidoscope, the parts reorganized, but according to a kind of conservation principle. While its locale might migrate, fire remained constant.

Fire control broke that cycle. Burned areas were extinguished, and burned-out sites were prevented from reignition. Fire control cut a fireline through history. Burned-out patches were coldtrailed into the new order, absorbed by a larger process of suppression into what was advertised as a path of progress. America needed to reconstruct fire regimes to suit an industrializing society, and the easiest first step was to overthrow the old regimes. There was no thought that what didn’t burn today might need to burn tomorrow. There was only a drive to contain that flaming frontier. Systematic fire protection snuffed out fire after fire.

By the 1990s, it was no longer necessary to pursue wildland fire into the back country. It had come to cities and suburbs, or they had come to it. Cities moved out, fuels moved in, and fires glowed in the cracks between. The process was pandemic, but of course it was heightened to the point of parody in Southern California.

The landscape surrounding the Greater Los Angeles basin is notorious for its volatile fuels, rugged topography, recurrent droughts, episodic eruptions of Santa Ana winds and overall fire-prone intransigence. A Mediterranean climate mixes wet winters with long droughty summers, an ideal formula to create fuels and ready them for burning over most of the year. In this environment, in brief, fires are inevitable.

Humans, however, have ensured that ignition remained more or less constant. California nourished an intricate melange of native tribes, none of which, interestingly enough, practiced agriculture. Instead, with fire for plow, rake and ax, they harvested the native flora and hunted the resident fauna. Colonizing Spaniards arrived in the 18th century, and found the native fire regime not to their liking; they sought to convert the land as well as the natives, the one being essential to the other.

The big change came after the Forest Reserve Act (1891) allowed the president to create forest reserves out of the public domain. At the insistence of irrigation agriculturalists and urbanites--both desperate for secure watersheds in the mountains, Southern California acquired some of the earliest reserves. Programs to control fire and grazing promptly appeared. With each decade the effectiveness of fire programs, largely under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service, improved, with steady decreases in the total number of acres burned.

Firefighting on this scale distorted the province’s already destabilized fire regimes. A smaller number of large wildfires tended to replace a large number of smaller fires. Historically, even large fires at the onset of the 20th century obeyed a rhythm of smoldering and flare-ups that left a landscape mottled with burned and unburned brush. Those fires shared the complexity of the living systems on which they depended for fuels.

Active suppression changed all this, much as levees and channelizing could eliminate nuisance floods but lead to more frequent large floods. Fire control could, by deferment, contain the wildfire menace for several decades. But so long as fuels grew like a cancer across the sunbaked mountains, so long as Santa Anas blew the aridity of the Mojave Desert over mountain passes, so long as a Mediterranean-type climate prolonged a fire season across seven or eight months of the year, fires could not be abolished. The greatest check on unrestricted fire exclusion was simply the lack of tools, men and money. That began to change during the New Deal. And the sense of limits--limits of any kind--appeared to vanish completely with World War II.

With the war, Southern California crossed a divide. The Los Angeles region emerged, chrysalis-like, as an industrial dynamo. Its population doubled almost by the decade. Old valley fuels disappeared--first into fields and orchards, and then into houses, factories and asphalt. The exploding population thrust into and around the mountains, pushing with mounting force against forest, park and reservoir reserves. The center fell apart, if it had in fact ever really existed; a jumble of built landscapes, stocked with immigrant flora, created a postmodern ecosystem ready for deconstruction by earth, air, water and fire, nature’s least forgiving critics. To aging chaparral fuels the new era added houses, often outfitted with highly flammable wooden roofs, and to the old cycle of ignitions it added further sources from power lines, machinery, children and arsonists. Conflagrations that had formerly raged in the back country or along a tattered rural fringe now, by virtue of this instant geography, burned into suburbs. Residents lived on a fault line of fire as powerful as the San Andreas.

“The city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion has observed. During the Watts riots “what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.” It is no accident that the Smokey the Bear campaign had begun in Southern California during World War II amid alarms of a fiery invasion by Japan. But fire as urban catastrophe didn’t require riots and wars. It demanded only that the city develop as it had, and that the fuels from suppressed fires built up until they could be released in a fury of natural rage.