Fire on the Hills: An Environmental History of Fires and Fire Policy in Mediterranean-Type Ecosystems
Human impacts on natural landscapes through urbanization and agricultural expansion have left a deep and enduring imprint on almost every dimension of the natural world. Throughout history, fire has almost always been associated with this human expansion,
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Fire on the Hills: An Environmental History of Fires and Fire Policy in MediterraneanType Ecosystems Mário Gonzalez Pereira, Jack P. Hayes, Char Miller, and Daniel E. Orenstein
Abstract Human impacts on natural landscapes through urbanization and agricultural expansion have left a deep and enduring imprint on almost every dimension of the natural world. Throughout history, fire has almost always been associated with this human expansion, from field clearance and the burning of fossil fuel biomass to human-induced conflagrations. “The arrival of a fire-wielding species,” observes Stephen J. Pyne, “was a monumental moment in the natural history of Earth” (Pyne 2010, xvii). These fires, whether anthropogenically sparked or lightning-ignited, have not only shaped where and how humans have settled, but how ecosystems themselves function in fundamental ways. This chapter examines the role of fire in the socio-ecological history of Mediterranean-type ecosystems, with an emphasis on the dynamic interaction between fire and climate, and the efforts of humans to live with and control fire regimes.
M.G. Pereira (*) Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), Quinta de Prados, 5000-801 Vila Real, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] J.P. Hayes Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Miller Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] D.E. Orenstein Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 E. Vaz et al. (eds.), Environmental History in the Making, Environmental History 6, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41085-2_9
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Introduction
Case studies from the northern Mediterranean basin, China’s Shangdong Province, Southern California, and Israel, will be used in this chapter to explore some of the varied historical attempts to master, marginalize, and manipulate fires in Mediterranean and Mediterranean-like ecotones. The chapter begins by exploring the historical-environmental context of fires in the northern Mediterranean basin, including an overview of the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of recent fire history and of the region’s fire regimes and fire-weather patterns. Then the focus shifts to the first of three case studies, with an analysis of the fire history in the Chinese Province of Shangdong. In particular, it probes the relationship between climate, historical agricultural and silvicultural management schemes, and recent urban development patterns to characterize the frequency, causes, costs and administrative perceptions related to destructive fires in China’s recent environmental history. These issues also form the basis of this chapter’s examination of the complicated evolution of recent firefighting policy in Southern California’s Mediterranean ecotone; as the 2009 Station Fire demonstrates, the politics of fire in Los Angeles are as controversial and contested as anywhere in the western United States. They are explosi
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