In the Pyrocene, rethinking resilience means designing architecture that works with fire rather than against it.

Fire, like all the other elements, is profoundly paradoxical, for like water, air, earth, and even aether, it is integral to the life and death of all things. Too little or too much of each extinguishes the conditions in which life sustains. In the case of fire, since its arrival, a myriad species of plants, bacteria, fungi, and animals, have evolved traits that enable them to not merely survive, but to thrive in its presence. These plants in particular,  are called pyrophytes. Extraordinary as it may seem, there are some that would go extinct were wildfires not burning with some frequency, and these are called pyrophiles – plants that have evolved to live with wildfire have reproductive cycles synced with fires native to the places where they are found: thus no fire, no future. 

The animal kingdom also has its fair share of pyrophilic species, such as members of the beetle genus Melanophila, or ‘fire beetles’ as they are more commonly known. Sensing their presence through organs that are stimulated by the airborne chemical mixtures found in smoke and burnt plant volatiles, fire beetles head towards, not away from wildfires – procreating upon their passing, whereupon the females lay their eggs in a nutrient-rich, but predator-free incubator in the form of scorched bark.

Though fire ecology is a field that has been rapidly expanding the past few decades, humans have been observing the interactions of living organisms and fire since we very first arrived. Our closest extant relatives, chimpanzees, are among many mammal species that, like fire beetles, have been observed moving towards, not away from wildfires. Why? We’re not the only ones that like a roast dinner. Several further species, such as Grizzly and Black bears have also been observed scavenging on the carcasses of other animals that were burnt in wildfires. Whereas others still, including pumas, are known to frequent post-fire areas where fresh growth has attracted their prey, including deer, in abundance. Fire beetles are among the fastest on the post-fire scene, arriving within just a few hours of a wildfire’s ignition. These pyrophilic insects have evolved to avoid their own combustible demise thanks to their thermal infrared receptors – a sort of sixth sense enabling them to tread a careful path through active fire fields. Thus, just as the annual rains on Africa plains catalyse The Great Migration of beasts that choreograph their lives around it, the wildfires of the United States, Australia, and beyond play a pivotal role in the life cycles of creatures large and small. And, just as changes to the frequency of the African rains can cause ecological havoc, so too does disruption to the frequency of wildfires.

The advent of a new fire age

Those unfamiliar with the science of wildfire often imagine it’s an easy fix, and thus propagate suggestions that revolve around the idea we can simply fight it into extinction. In reality, wildfire is central to Earth systems, and there are many human factors that influence their frequency, intensity, and behaviour. These range from humans causing ignition at the interface between wild and urban lands, and spreading non-native species that spread fire more quickly than indigenous ones, to often inadvertent actions that add literal fuel to the fire, such as suppressing fires in ecosystems to which they are integral. Fire-prone places, like fire itself, are not to be played with, and not least because wildfire isn’t just complex and potentially lethal, but it’s also one of the most politically contentious topics of the past century. 

Given the severity of the risks wildfires pose to life, property, and livelihoods, debates over how fire-prone landscapes should be managed are fiercely polarised across the U.S., Australia, and beyond. Yet this focus on division often obscures more consequential realities: wildfire is shaped as much by human choices as by climate and ecology, and three persistent failures continue to deepen its impacts. The first is a widespread misunderstanding of fire itself: in many ecosystems, fire is not an anomaly to be eliminated but a vital process, and decades of suppression have allowed dangerous fuel loads to accumulate. The second is political polarisation. Fire management has become a deeply contested issue, where ideology often overrides ecological evidence, despite the very real risks to lives, homes, and livelihoods. The third—and most overlooked—challenge is that fire regimes themselves are changing. Fires are burning more frequently, more intensely, and in places and seasons where they historically did not, reshaping landscapes faster than current policies, planning systems, and built environments are prepared for.

The fire regimes of the world are changing. So much so that fire historian Stephen Pyne coined the term ‘The Pyrocene’ to describe how wildfire could be to the coming epoch what ice was to the Pleistocene glaciation.

The ash from the wildfires that have raged in Canadian forests hasn’t just ended up in people’s respiratory systems – it’s also landed on ice sheets where it’s changed the extent to which heat from the Sun is reflected back into space, and in the process, created the conditions for rapid ecological regime shifts of the kind that see species populations change and change quickly. We can’t be sure exactly what’s in store, because there are too many possible variables in the Earth’s systems. However, on the balance of probability, those that have studied the options in greatest detail, such as Professor Bill McGuire and myself, among several others, conclude those systems are recalibrating and the implications for humanity are nothing short of profound.

Even pyrophytes and pyrophiles have parameters when it comes to their capacity to coexist with wildfires. Whereupon wildfire intensities and/or frequencies shift too quickly, populations of pyrophytes and the wider ecological assemblies they support are at risk of localised extinction. Looking to the possible trajectories for some regions, California included, it’s likely there will be ecological regime shifts – some species disappearing, while others appear – and that though their expression will be heterogeneous, the impacts will be widespread. The landscapes about us are not merely shaped by tectonic and other geological – and with them meteorological forces, but by the species that inhabit them. In the instance of pyrophytes, such as species of pines and oaks that are native to places with a Mediterranean or temperate-type climate, their roots greatly enhance soil stability. Hence, whereupon their numbers dwindle the likes of debris flows and flash floods become more common. In some regions it’s not wildfires themselves that take the biggest toll on local communities, but the debris flows and floods that follow. And those are just two of a veritable matrix of impacts that wildfire have on landscapes and the communities that live there.

Not surprisingly, many fire ecologists advocate for wildfire prone places to be free from human development, and few more passionately than University of Arizona’s Professor Donald Falk – one of the world’s leading experts on pyrophytes. Asked to frame the seriousness of the ecological implications of the expansion of the wildland-urban-interface (WUI), he replied, “It’s important to understand that the WUI represents in some respects an existential threat to the integrity of the ecosystems that surround it. The very presence of a WUI ties the hands of land managers who might otherwise let fire roam free or conduct large scale prescribed burns, because of concerns about smoke or escapes. Consequently, a single WUI development affects the surrounding forest not just for 100 meters, but for tens of square miles, where wildland fire must be constrained.” And yet, the places where homes meet wild landscapes are expanding faster than any other kind of development in the U.S.—growing by nearly a third since 1990. With climate migration expected to accelerate, especially as rising seas push people inland, there’s little reason to think this trend will slow anytime soon.

Shifting values: working with wildfires

Few realise that humans are – in effect – the children of fire, and as dependent on its existence as any pyrophyte. Both physiologically and intellectually, every step of our evolution has been influenced by it: from the landscapes inhabited by our early primate ancestors, to the control of fire being a foundational technology that underpinned later industrialisation, not to mention the sacred significance of fire across many ancestral traditions. Therefore, what if fire isn’t the foe, but rather the systemic human-centred design of the interface between wild and urban lands?

Pyrophytic Architecture is an act of reconciliation of highly complex human and non-human systems at a time when the parameters of those systems are fast changing. Like regenerative design, it’s concerned with designing in a way that’s compatible with ecological and social systems, but, unlike it, it doesn’t assume that design can serve as a panacea that is all things to all people and all places. 

Pyrophytic Architecture is an act of reconciliation of highly complex human and non-human systems at a time when the parameters of those systems are fast changing

Design briefs of present are typically highly reductive, and have been for many decades. In architecture and urban design, it’s usual that, and for all the systems rhetoric, ‘working with nature’ is seen through the lens of model, medium or metaphor, as opposed to all three. A legacy of the industrial age – a time when conquering briefs involved divisions of labour, and thus expertise – it’s an approach that still dominates working culture, and is expressed in ways as diverse as the pitifully poor funding and investment for research of an ecomimetic nature, the highly limited number of courses and other learning opportunities in the space, and that explains why nature-inspired design remains largely absent from commercial market places. Innovation is happening, and has been for decades, but it’s happening at the edges, not centre. Wildfire may spread like… wildfire, but working out how to synthetise and synchronise settlements with it, and the species it supports has been a slow process due to the immensity of the scholarship involved, and not only technically, but creatively and philosophically, because paradigm shifts in design necessitate a shift in not mere perspective, but in values.

Pyrophitic Architecture has evolved through several stages. The first was scoping the problem in hand; the second developing the paradigm; the third authoring the framework and codes that enable its application to architecture, urban design, planning, and policy; the fourth the development of applied concepts; the fifth its publication in multiple presentations and publications; and now the sixth, which is the launch of a dedicated design school. This hybrid, pop-up platform teaches students of pyrophytic principles as well as guides them in applying these strategies to design briefs, informed by the latest wildfire science and other critical insights. Additionally, as wildfire understanding and technology advance, new  materials, information, engineering innovations are emerging apace, in the process, rapidly expanding the ways we can both model wildfire and its various regimes, and mimic the strategies that fire adapted species endure, evade, and resist combustion.

While the potential applications are vast, this paradigm is not without significant challenges, and not least in a world in which investment isn’t always proportionate to potential and vested interests frequently trump most others. However, substantial as they are, the technical complexities of the pyrophytic design paradigm are over-shadowed by a yet greater challenge still: the widespread preference for one-size-fits-all solutions among policymakers, investors and communities of civic and corporate practice that frame future possibilities.

Pyrophytic Architecture is not predicated on the premise that it can nor should prevent wildfires from occurring in and adjacent to ‘wild’ places. It does not propose to protect all property from all such conflagrations as may ignite. Instead, it’s a proposal for architecture and infrastructure as processes of renewal and that protect the integrity of that which supports life itself. 

Reverting to fire mythologies, the phoenix remains as popular in contemporary culture today as it did upon its emergence in prehistory. Like all good mythical beasts, there are several compelling hypotheses around its origin. One is that it was inspired by Black, Whistling, and/or Brown hawks, otherwise known as ‘firehawks’. Avian arsonists, these raptors have been found to actively spread wildfires by picking up flaming foliage to then drop it to ignite spot fires. Quite when their ancestors observed that this action was coupled with the emergence of their prey from their burrows and other places of protection, we may never know. But, perhaps ours may be the capacity to evolve our actions such that we too can turn catastrophe into opportunity and reconcile with the element to which we owe our very existence. If that sounds too good to be true, think again, for if we look to the places to which wildfire is native we find ancestral architectures that did just that, and places as far flung as California to China. While some of these architectures would not meet the needs, let alone expectations, of many people today, they nonetheless prove that it’s possible to design and construct radically different buildings to those that dominate today. As for what we might design and build tomorrow, that’s a question central to the Design for Wildfire school, of which the motto is ‘Lude cum ideis’ (play with ideas, not fire).

Dr. Gustavo Rincon, cofounder in this new education initiative, underlines the importance of this, “Over the course of more than two decades living in California, I have survived two wildfires and been evacuated staying at a shelter at UC Santa Barbara while living through a wildfire in Los Angeles County. Watching the hills burn, living in ash and smoked filled air for weeks at a time is a memory that is never forgotten. Being affected and witnessing wildfires, I have come to know more uncertainty now than ever before. Surviving harm for oneself and those that you love is more important than any property or form of possessions in this world, when faced with wildfire.”

This is an opinion piece by Melissa Sterry.

Melissa Sterry is a globally recognised scientist, designer, strategist, and futurist specialising in sustainable innovation, biodesign, and resilience. She has a PhD in building architectural & urban resilience to wildfires through the mimicry of biochemistries, behaviours, relationships, systems, and wider traits of fire-adapted species and ecosystems.