Throughout much of human history, fire has been a source of comfort, warmth — even inspiration. Only when the flames eclipse our control and threaten the things we prize do we hasten to extinguish them. But in doing so, and doing so constantly, acting desperately and without thinking, we have created a fearsome specter with which to reckon: today’s megafires, which are unlike the wildfires that have burned for millennia.
What will we be left with once it burns? Artist, author and naturalist Obi Kaufmann takes a look at the fraught, fearful question on the minds of so many Californians each summer and responds with hope: What new life will grow after the fire comes?
“This is pyrogenic agriculture,” Kaufmann told me. “This is a system of localized, traditional ecological knowledge that understands that in well managed, naturalized regimes, the return of fire means the return of a chemical nutrient vector that shocks the soil with such fecundity that it makes possible for all of this panoply of peoples across California to consciously eschew till-and-seed agriculture for thousands and thousands of years.”
The State of Fire: Why
California Burns
By Obi Kaufmann
240 pages, hardcover: $28
Heyday, 2024.
California burns differently than any other place on Earth. It’s also one of the most biodiverse. That California will burn is a foundational ecosystemic truth. Exactly how and why it burns, and the essential relationship between fire and the state’s diverse ecosystems’ longevity and vitality, is the topic of Kaufmann’s latest book, The State of Fire: Why California Burns.
“Fire is the mind of the land,” Kaufmann writes near the end of the book. He begins with the understanding that no landscape in California has been without human intervention, and that California’s many ecosystems amount to a “holobiont,” or a network of complexly connected species. As forest and ecological management practices, urban development and global warming collide with increasing intensity, he’s intent on reconfiguring our relationship with fire in order to reduce human pain and trauma and respect California’s fires as a transformative process fundamental to the land.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Kaufmann learned to understand fire by watching the many ways that Mount Diablo changed; spectacular wildflower seasons, for example, always followed wildfires. Kaufmann was raised by scientists, and his astrophysicist father expected him to be a mathematician. But as he studied, he began to challenge his father, questioning epistemological truths while seeking to expand his own worldview. “But how do we know what’s true in the universe?” the teenage Kaufmann asked. “And, let us not forget beauty, let us not forget this imminence and this transcendence that combine to react into this unity of knowledge that will present one thing or another.”
Kaufmann yearned for a deeper knowledge of the connections within the world around him, both human and nonhuman. That feeling, combined with his training in the systemic approaches inherent to mathematics, inspired the meticulous methodology with which he pieces together California’s ecosystems from the ground up. Using the landscapes he’s most familiar with as a lens through which to inquire about the land’s intricate relationships, Kaufmann traces them both backwards and forwards by thousands of years, well beyond what he terms “this so successfully imposed urban veneer that has been erected across the state in the past 170 years.”
The State of Fire is Kaufmann’s sixth book. His earlier works — The California Field Atlas, The State of Water, The Deserts of California, The Coasts of California and The Forests of California — each tackled a specific aspect of California’s ecosystems, blending his writing and observations with his watercolor illustrations. With The State of Fire, Kaufmann recasts what is commonly regarded as a destructive force as an essential part of the landscape, an understanding of which is critical to the continued health and well-being of California.
“Fire is the mind of the land.”
“Resiliency is traditionally defined as the ability to recover from some manner of ecological disturbance in some time frame. But that’s not what ecosystems do,” Kaufmann says. “Say a forest fire moves through, that ecosystem doesn’t come back, it comes back transformed. And so much more apt is the measure of adaptability.”
California’s myriad ecosystems respond differently, and their adaptability varies greatly. In a tone that blends curiosity with erudite observations, Kaufmann describes the long history of fire within the context of the state’s diverse ecosystems and their management by a multitude of Indigenous tribes, whose work helped create the verdant, biodiverse landscapes California boasts today.
To illustrate the reciprocal relationship between ecosystem stress and resilience, Kaufmann diagrams the state’s watersheds, animals, plants and bioregions, revealing each one’s complex relationship with fire and outlining how different species respond to, thrive or suffer from it. Eschewing the use of the collective “we” (Kaufmann considers it too tainted by policy agenda and prescriptive ideals), he takes a holistic approach, casting fire as its own being, as worthy of understanding and support as any other plant or animal.
“Fire is not a thing. Fire is not an object. Fire is not inanimate. Once it ignites, fire exists in scales of time and space through patterns of behavior and regime,” Kaufmann writes. “Just as pyrodiversity has informed biodiversity, fire informs human ecology and will increasingly inform economic development.”
At the moment, human interactions and economic priorities have transformed California ecosystems so rapidly as to threaten them altogether. Fire poses a greater threat to ecosystems weakened and strained by flux, Kaufmann reasons, largely because they have been removed from their previous fire-resilient state by climate change, fire- and forest-management practices, and today’s increasingly intense fires. A fundamental reconfiguration of understanding is needed, he believes. Just as ecosystems adapt after a fire, California too must adapt, accepting fire not as an economic and structural threat, but rather an essential process with which humanity needs to build a new rapport.
“The future of humanity’s relationship with fire is dependent on humanity’s relationship with itself,” Kaufmann writes. “For every right that is celebrated, there is a corresponding responsibility to be met, and the measure of the collective will that rises to meet those responsibilities will gauge the future quality of humanity’s continued residency in this most beautiful of all places, this perilous California.”
Expansive and thoughtful, The State of Fire is a meditation that offers a road map from which to reconsider California’s relationship to fire through an intimate exploration of the state’s many intricacies. Working within the confines of existing lands and ownership, Kaufmann’s writing and illustrations comprise a deeply researched philosophical exploration focused not just on the current moment but on refashioning understanding and California’s ecosystems to support thriving generations to come.
“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,” Kaufmann concludes. “A cooperative relationship with fire has the potential to reform the California economy and to fuel a hundred new forms of industry that will all revolve around a centralized land ethic of reciprocation and intentionality.”
While those new configurations remain unclear, Kaufmann believes in the viability of a paradigm shift, noting that in his lifetime, he’s already watched California transform its relationship with many species that were once thought all but lost. Condors, peregrine falcons, white-tailed kites, tule elk, whales, otters and black bears — all rarely seen when he was a young man backpacking in Big Sur — rebounded. Likewise, California can and will adapt its relationship with fire, refashioning it into a catalyst for support and strength.
“If there is time, there is hope,” Kaufmann says. “For every point of despair, we’ve got a point of hope, and I will go toe-to-toe all day long with anybody who says other.”
