We think of fire in black spruce as an unwanted intruder spreading noxious smoke and destruction, but we'd be better off treating fire as a natural part of the landscape in most of Alaska.
This is of little consolation to those who have lost their homes or had their lives disrupted, but fires every 50 to 150 years are no accident, regardless of how they are ignited. Fires are like mosquitoes on the tundra or ice-jam floods on the Yukon. They can't be stopped.
On some level, we all know that there are better ways to prepare, but until we start focusing on the problem in months that aren't June and July, we can forget about any real progress. We can start with paying more attention to community and regional standards on buildings, zoning and landscaping, particularly along the road system from Fairbanks to the Kenai Peninsula.
Writing newspaper stories about Alaska fires over the years, almost all of which dealt with statistics about acres burned and houses threatened, I came across the work of Stephen Pyne while doing research.
He is a former wildland firefighter who became a professor at the University of Arizona and one of the world's leading authorities on wildfires. On a day in which a host of fires had turned the afternoon Fairbanks sun to a late-evening orange glow, he spoke on the phone from Arizona about how we might become more fire-resilient.
Pyne, the author of "Fire in America" and more than a dozen other books with "fire" in the title, says Americans in fire country have long chosen "the path of least resistance, which is also the path of least resilience."
"You're not going to keep fire out. You would have to completely convert all the combustible landscape of Alaska to something else. You're going to have fires either by lightning or accident. Some way or other it's going to get in and you're just going to have to accept that," he said.
Still, just as bug spray and netting provide some protection from mosquitoes and moving to high ground is the best flood insurance, those of us living in areas prone to wildfire can adapt.
"There's a lot of evidence that says where to put your money is on the structure itself and its immediate surroundings," he said. "And I mean immediate -- 20 feet. Clear 3 or 4 feet around the house so that you don't have a continuous cover of stuff to carry to a wooden porch or wooden steps."
He said houses need to be built to withstand showers of embers that can blow in. That doesn't mean everything has to be cleared within 300 feet of the house, he said, but the threat posed on each building site should be understood long before the embers fly.
"You have to think, how is fire going to behave here? How is that fire going to threaten the house?" he said. "I don't mean everyone has to live in a concrete bunker. But it does mean taking basic steps."
He said the steps taken to prevent fires in cities -- with zoning codes and building codes at the top of the list -- can help prevent fire losses for people who build in the woods. He said those who reject zoning and building codes because they want to be free to build anything they want in any place are neglecting the obvious threat that surrounds them and the societal costs of protecting structures that aren't fire-resilient.
Allowing some people to save a few bucks so the state can spend a lot of bucks setting up to save a building that is too close to black spruce is hardly a fair exchange. When a house burns, it exacerbates the threat to others.
Preparing to deal with fire would not prevent some houses from being destroyed, but it would limit the threat and raise the safety level, especially in subdivisions. Pyne said he has a home in Arizona where he took steps to change the surrounding landscape, and when a wildfire roared through in 2011, it passed the house without damaging it.
I told him that the state and local emergency responders here have long preached the value of the "Firewise Alaska" program and "defensible space," but local and state governments have been reluctant to make anything mandatory because of public opposition.
With fire suppression costs continuing to rise, however, and with more people going farther into the woods, sensible building and landscaping practices need to be more than suggestions in Alaska. Fire-safe practices can be tailored to make sense in settings that are on the edges of Anchorage, Fairbanks and along the road system.
"The power of fire resides in the power to propagate, and the way you take control of fire is preventing its ability to destroy what you don't want it to," he said. "That's a landscaping issue and a zoning issue."
With the smoke still hanging in the air over much of Alaska this week, we need to recognize that building and land-use standards have made cities more resilient to fire and there are ways to do the same for the growing suburbs, especially along the road system in Alaska. I know a lot of people will bristle at the idea, but it's time to take fire preparations seriously.