Landscape Architects Help Communities Learn to Be "Firewise"

The National Wildland/Urban Interface Fire Working Team/Firewise Communities held its second National Wildland/Urban Interface Fire Education Conference, “Backyards and Beyond,” in Denver November 2–4. ASLA was represented at the conference by Cindi L. Rowan, ASLA, and David J. Rowan, PhD, of Rowan Design and Consulting, a Colorado landscape architecture and environmental consulting firm. The conference was attended by nearly 450 fire and emergency professionals along with many interface residents and community leaders. Attendees traveled from as far away as Australia and South Africa.

The conference was divided into a series of educational tracks: Using Technology, Research, Firewise Communities/USA, Planning and Mitigation, Fire and Emergency Operations, and Communicating the Firewise Message. While the majority of the conference focused on community education and promotion of the Firewise message, some sessions dealt with the development and enforcement of statewide codes and standards for communities across the United States and internationally. The technology track explored GIS, spatial modeling, 3-D simulations, and remote imaging applications, with much attention given to firefighter safety practices.

Of most interest to landscape architects, the planning and mitigation track explored the various ways that communities and states are responding to the need for increased protection from wildfires for current and future residents of the Wildland/Urban Interface. The success of the Firewise program has in part come about through its focus on individual communities through the promotion and tailoring of the Firewise program, and the focus of most of the sessions was on overcoming community resistance to mitigation measures and bringing residents together to adopt collaborative approaches to mitigation on individual home sites. One session by Roger Kennedy explored the historical and political reasons for increasing migration of populations to rural areas and proposed strategies to curb this trend. Kennedy is a former director of the National Park Service, director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s American Museum of Natural History, and currently an associate at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. William Butler, ASLA, is a landscape architect for the city of Palm Springs, Florida. Butler discussed his work to develop planning codes to make communities in his region safer from wildfires.

Both Cindi and David Rowan discussed new research indicating that in some cases, popular mitigation strategies such as clearing and thinning forests can actually increase fire frequency and severity through a combination of factors. These measures can lead to increased dehydration of plant tissues in very sunny and windy areas by increasing exposure beneath the thinned forest canopy and stimulating the rapid growth of underbrush, which can at times be extremely flammable. These measures also increase an ecological condition known as “edge effect,” which leads to higher density and concentration of flammable undergrowth as well as destructive impacts to wildlife already affected by the habitat fragmentation, erosion, and other impacts of wildfire mitigation in populated areas.

Cindi Rowan showed the extreme visual impact of development in mountain regions using satellite imagery and census data maps, which also showed the increased visual impact of home sites that had been cleared for fire mitigation. She then proposed a variety of community design principles that begin to address some of the problems currently associated with Firewise practices based upon the design of the communities themselves rather than focusing on individual lots. These design strategies reduce fragmentation and edge effect while improving views and access to open space. She showed that by simply changing the arrangement of lots in a subdivision, communities become more defensible and more sustainable and promote higher quality of life.

Overall, this conference showed that landscape architects can collaborate effectively with the Firewise program to develop solutions to effectively address this challenging issue with far-reaching effects on sustainability and stewardship. Presenters in the Firewise Communities’ previous conference in 2004 included Jeff Caster, ASLA, Angela Dye, ASLA, Steven Halsey, ASLA, and Jennifer Burns, landscape architect for the U.S. Forest Service.

Firewise Communities held its second conference this fall. Cindi Rowan, ASLA, presented at the conference and prepared this report for LAND Online.  ASLA’s Manager of Professional Practice is Jennifer Strassfeld, jstrassfeld@asla.org.