These have become the most common and most deadly of wildfires within the developed world. The uneasy mingling of city and wild, exurban shards and overgrown woods, has put spark and tinder almost everywhere. The most spectacular expressions are the near-annual fire eruptions in California, including the Oakland fire that killed 25 people in 1991 and the Malibu fires of 1993. In the last 25 years, more houses have burned in California wildfires than in the rest of the century. But intermix fires are not a California curiosity.
Intermix fires are as universal as the edge cities that scramble the landscape.
They drove last summer's Florida fires, a weird, deadly cocktail of American nature and American civilization. The same environmental recipe is served in the South African fynbos, the Sydney bush and across the maquis of the northern Mediterranean. These are landscapes that have become home to exurban sprawl and urban pockets overgrown with woods and brush. But while once rural, they no longer support a rural economy. Residents cease to plow, prune, plant, graze, gather and, yes, burn.