Obi Kaufmann has spent a lot of time thinking about California’s fires.
“There’s no way I can pull this punch: To live in California, you are going to live with fire,” says Kaufmann during an hour-long phone conversation. “Now, being forewarned is being forearmed.”
Kaufmann is best known for his California Field Atlas books, a series of gorgeously illustrated, information-rich explorations of the state’s deserts, forests and coastline.
His latest, “The State of Fire: Why California Burns,” is something different — a compact, data-rich sibling to 2019’s “The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource.” This new book arrived as the Airport, Bridge and Line fires rage across the state.
SEE ALSO: Bestsellers, authors, books and more can be found in the Books section
While “The State of Fire” shares the textual and artistic elements that have made his previous books so distinctive, Kaufmann says this “data-driven artistic vehicle” has a “direct and specific agenda.”
Making the case to rethink California’s approach to fire — highlighting its importance for biodiversity, habitat and soil chemistry — the book explores ancient and modern concepts of fire stewardship, best practices for the wildland urban interface (or WUI, the space where human development meets undeveloped wildland), and an alternate look at the legacy of Smokey Bear.
In the book, Kaufmann writes, “The resurgence of traditional ecological knowledge, coupled with scientific innovation, will yield the strongest combination of tools to productively interact with the landscape that humanity could ask for. A cooperative relationship with fire has the potential to reform the California economy and to fuel a hundred new forms of industry.”
In conversation, he explains his reasons for writing the book.
“Every year, fire season begins in June and goes through December,” says Kaufmann. “Every year, it seems to come as a surprise to the media that we’re on fire again.”
“Why,” he asks, “are we not right now figuring out how to transform?”
The following conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. Kaufmann will be on tour across California talking about “The State of Fire” with stops scheduled for November in 29 Palms, Santa Monica, Los Angeles and Laguna Beach.
Q: How do we, as you describe it, get right with fire?
There’s a lot of cleanup to do. We are not out of this mess by any stretch of the imagination.
Why are we building houses like we build them in Ohio in the California Floristic Province, knowing that these houses are just going to burn, knowing that we’re just putting fuel into the wildland urban interface — and putting human lives inside of what is ostensibly these structures that are made of fuel, right? And now everyone is losing their home insurance. It sounds like a recipe for more disaster as if there’s some collective blinders on to where we are.
Human development pushing into the fire-prone landscape of California’s backcountry is a dangerous proposition, especially when you’re building your home out of materials that want to burn. We have the terrible human tragedy that is, for example, the suburbs of Redding, California in the 2018 Carr fire where the flammable materials that the suburbs were made of, that the houses were made out of, generated a fire tornado that swept through there that was a half-mile wide, three-miles tall, and burning at 2,000 degrees.
To get right with fire in California, and I believe that we will, is one of the great challenges of being from California in the 21st century. If we were to get right with fire in California, we need to analyze how we live in the wildland urban interface. Now, that being said, there are other great thinkers who have studied fire in California, including John Vaillant in his book “Fire Weather,” when he says, ‘The WUI now is everywhere,’ and I am wont to agree with him.
Q: Can you talk about Smokey Bear? You have an interesting take on the character.
Smokey Bear, perhaps the most successful advertising campaign in American history: Only you can prevent wildfires. Now, Smokey Bear is a symbol of what might ultimately be an injustice – a perpetuation of an injustice that remains uncorrected. This injustice is related to the nature of fire stewardship in California over the past several millennia, the nature of wilderness itself, as if humans don’t belong in nature, as if nature is a place where humans don’t go and if they do, they will potentially destroy it.
This is what I call a tragedy of misconception in my book, and it gets back to certain paradigms that were established in the late 19th century by thinkers including John Muir, who ostensibly had no idea what he was looking at. He was looking at a fire-stewarded landscape, and it was not a wilderness. It was home to ancient traditions of people actively involved in reciprocal relationship to the land that supports them.
This gets back to what Smokey Bear is — culturally, this modernist idea of domination over nature. As a designer and an artist, I can’t help but think that that’s why he was wearing pants and a hat: We are quite literally humanizing the more-than-human world, which is also a Disney-fying aspect. How California is that to Disney-fy Smokey Bear?
Q: So, to be clear, you are not saying that people don’t belong on the land.
It’s just a tragedy to hear. One of my biggest criticisms of the environmental movement is that it almost becomes like an anti-human movement. California is as biodiverse as it is because of decisions that people have made — because of the presence of humanity. To say that it would be better if people weren’t here is another one of these almost racist remarks.
One of the main hypotheses that I have in the book — it’s a grand theme of all six books now — is that there is a very clear trajectory towards leaving the more-than-human world of California in better shape at the end of the 21st century than we left it at the end of the 20th century – despite the advent of global warming.
Q: How does cost play into your ideas for making things better?
However much California spends, whether publicly or privately, on the quote-unquote ‘environment,’ it’s nothing next to the amount of money that can be made should we invest.
We are the fifth-largest economy in the world. So when I say $9 billion to handle the entire department of natural resources in California, that is a diminishingly small fraction of 1%, so we’re not talking about some enormous percentage.
Q: You also write about the potential for economic growth if we took a different approach to dealing with fire.
Investment in getting right with fire has the potential to be the greatest economic boom that California has seen since the Gold Rush. And the thing is, there’s precedent for such an enormous transformation. Think of what California did with the waterscape over the past 90 years — how California stores, conveys and uses water, transports water up and down the California Floristic Province — rivals anything that humans have done anywhere, anywhen throughout human history. I’ll put it up against the Great Pyramids. I’ll put it up against the Great Wall of China.
The same can be said about the firescape, the fire-prone landscape of California. Getting out in front of that proactively instead of reactively will be the primary determinant in the quality of our continued human residency here in the state. And that’s a very exciting prospect.
SEE ALSO: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
Q: You said that we have more trees than ever before. Why isn’t this a good thing?
We don’t need more trees. What we need is healthy forests. And those are two very different things. Healthy forests, in respect to historical ecology, are mosaiced habitats that are incredibly diverse, open and operate within regimes of water delivery and fire on the land in such a way that are in accordance with how they’ve evolutionarily matured over the past several thousand years.
When you think about an old-growth ponderosa pine forest in the southern Sierra Nevada, say, you have something in the neighborhood of 40 trees per acre. Now, you can easily find in excess of 2000 to 3000 trees per acre [in some places]. So when I say we have more trees, that’s what I’m talking about. And basically what that arboreal community then becomes is infirmed. It becomes drought-stressed. Think of all of those trees needing water inside of an atmospheric regime that is tending towards greater increase in temperature, greater aridity, all of that.
Q: What do you think we need to do?
What other choice do we have but to figure this out? And figuring it out means there’s a seat for everybody at the table, not just these human storytellers, but the more-than-human storytellers. So the idea of conservation of biodiversity, of propagation of biodiversity across the state to maximize the utility of healthy ecosystems – connected ecosystems, restored ecosystems – is the path to greater resiliency within human ecosystems.
It’s an incredibly nuanced, connected story, and, hey, I don’t know if everybody agrees with me or not, but I do understand that I tour these books up and down the state. When I’m talking to the Farmers Association of Fresno, or I’m talking to ranchers in Lassen County, or I’m talking to tree scientists in Arcata, or I’m talking to the people in Los Angeles Basin, I haven’t met anyone who wants to see a degraded California. Nobody wants to see this beautiful place get wasted.
And yet, and yet. Deciding the best path forward in a democratic sense, which I fully believe we can do, is imperative. I think the path forward is not about building some kind of better argument, it’s about telling a better story. And telling that story? That would be my job. That’s the job of the poet, that’s the job of the artist. It’s not necessarily the job of the scientist.
Q: Finally, you write that fire is unique to this planet. I’m not sure many of us think about that, and I wonder if you had more to say about that?
Yeah, isn’t that interesting to think about? They’re relatively modern in the history of planet Earth. The earliest fires only happened about 500 million years ago.
As far as we know, Earth is the only planet where landfire exists. Maybe the most meaningful aspect of that bit of cosmic trivia is that fire and life are one and the same, that you can’t have fire without living processes. Life is the thing that burns. And as we realize that fire is such a nutritive force inside of the ecosystem, across the biosphere, we would not exist as we do today without it.
Related links
California wildfire coverage
Fires in West are becoming ever bigger, consuming. Why and what can be done?
How California’s wildfires and a personal crisis sparked ‘The Last Fire Season’
How the Paradise fire, Northridge earthquake and Hurricane Katrina inform this author’s work
How the California landscape ignites Daniel Gumbiner’s ‘Fire in the Canyon’
Related Articles
Things to do in the San Fernando Valley, LA area, Sept. 26-Oct. 3
7 Brian De Palma films are explored in a new book. But ‘Scarface’ isn’t one.
This week’s bestsellers at Southern California’s independent bookstores
There’s something foul in an LA fashion house in Lilliam Rivera’s ‘Tiny Threads’
Free downtown LA community book fair celebrates Spanish language and culture