The Rabbit–Duck Illusion in Climate Messaging: An Example from Wildfire Policy

If you’re only seeing the rabbit, let me show you the duck. When fires are viewed through the lens of fundamental ecological laws, a very different picture emerges.

The rabbit–duck illusion (known since at least 1892) is an image that can be seen as either animal, depending on how one looks at it.

But to experience the illusion, one must know both animals. If someone knows only the rabbit, for instance, they will never see the duck. To them, the picture will appear entirely unambiguous and consistent.

Equally unambiguous and consistent sounds the recent public summary of the 112-page report “State of Wildfires 2024–2025.” Below, I list the most relevant excerpts from that summary, with my emphasis:

CLIMATE CHANGE DRIVING MORE INTENSE WILDFIRES, REPORT WARNS

Severe heatwaves and droughts linked to human-driven climate change are making extreme wildfires increasingly frequent and destructive worldwide, according to the State of Wildfires 2024–25 report, co-led by ECMWF, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia.

Published in Earth System Science Data, the annual assessment provides mounting evidence that global warming is amplifying wildfire risk, with advanced satellite observations and modeling revealing that fires are now larger, longer lasting and more polluting than ever. …

In Southern California, January’s Los Angeles wildfires were estimated to be twice as likely and 25 times larger in today’s warmer climate than in a pre-industrial world. …

Report co-lead Dr Francesca Di Giuseppe of ECMWF explained, “Climate change is not only creating more dangerous fire-prone weather conditions, but it is also influencing the rates at which vegetation grows and provides fuel for the fires to spread.

“Our analyses detected the critical role of both extreme weather and fuel in the Los Angeles fires, with unusually wet weather in the preceding 30 months contributing to strong vegetation growth and laying the perfect foundations for wildfires to occur when unusually hot and dry conditions arrived in January.” …

The report warns that without rapid global emissions cuts and improved land and fire management, extreme wildfire seasons like 2024–25 could become routine by century’s end. Land and fire management policies and practices can also help to mitigate damage.

Report co-lead Dr Matt Jones of the University of East Anglia said, “We urge world leaders at COP30 to make bold commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions rapidly this decade. This is the single most powerful contribution that most developed nations can make to avoiding the worst impacts of extreme wildfires on living and future generations.”

It is a familiar narrative: excessive atmospheric carbon leads to more fires, with the usual, inconsequential nod to land-use policy.

Is a radically distinct perspective justifiable?

Before turning to the alternative, it is worth emphasizing once again that land-use issues are indeed marginalized in climate reporting (I recommend Rob Lewis’s series on how land use came to be marginalized). Yet in this case, marginalization is not the whole story.

From the account above, one can gather that, according to the scientific report, additional plant growth provides more fuel that later facilitates fires — with Southern California given as an example. In the current U.S. context, this reinforces the notion that such “extra fuel” must be eliminated through land-management practices such as preventive burning, which has been widely promoted in California.

“This beautiful, dense carpet of old-growth chaparral on the slopes of Santa Rosa Mountain in the San Bernardino National Chaparral (Forest) Preserve was scheduled for clearance and burning by the US Forest Service. We stopped them.” — California Chaparral Institute

However, in line with the ideas that I shared in “Why it is important to read scientific papers beyond their abstracts, especially when it is about the role of CO₂ in climate”, the report itself implies something very different. First of all, already the abstract states that

In Southern California, the future trajectory of extreme fire likelihood remains highly uncertain due to poorly constrained climate–vegetation–fire interactions influencing fuel moisture, though our models suggest that risk may decline in future.

That is to say, although global warming has allegedly doubled fire frequency in Southern California, further warming will not lead to more fires. How could that be?

The report clarifies that

simulations suggest that increased tree cover driven by CO₂ fertilisation under higher emissions scenarios (SSP585 and SSP370) may raise fuel loads while simultaneously increasing fuel moisture, with the overall effect being to reduce the likelihood of extreme fire events in our models.

Again, compare this to what we read in the summary:

…unusually wet weather in the preceding 30 months contributing to strong vegetation growth and laying the perfect foundations for wildfires to occur when unusually hot and dry conditions arrived…

At this point, the reader has every right to be confused. After all, is more vegetation in California good or bad for fire prevention?

Understanding Ecological Succession

To truly see the full picture, we must consider the laws of wild nature — something almost entirely foreign to our urban civilization.

When an ecosystem is disturbed — but not yet murdered — it does not descend into chaos. It enters a deliberate sequence known as ecological succession — the ecosystem’s own process of healing and rebuilding itself, along with its environment and climate. Ignorance of this order is not merely academic; it distorts how we perceive our predicament and the very strategies by which we attempt to live within it.

An example of ecological succession. Image source

The image above shows ecological succession in a forest ecosystem. This recovery process is unique to each ecosystem, yet follows some general patterns. For our discussion today, what matters most is that

different stages of succession have different flammability.

Immediately after a severe disturbance, such as a fire, little biomass remains and flammability is naturally low. This initial stage is dominated, on the plant side, by lichens, mosses, and herbs. Then, as the ecosystem strives to regain its biological power, shrubs and early-successional trees begin to appear. As succession advances, the so-called climax species re-establish, forming a gap mosaic of young and old trees that can persist on time scales far exceeding the lifespan of any individual tree. This is effective immortality.

Flammability depends on the ecosystem’s capacity to store moisture and regulate the water cycle — including through the biotic pump mechanism. At the early stages of succession, the priority is to rebuild biomass, while the ecosystem’s environmental control temporarily weakens. A fitting analogy is that of a sick person on leave: not yet contributing to society, but devoting energy to recovery. Once health is restored, the ability to perform useful work — or, in nature’s case, to regulate climate — is regained at full strength.

Now an important point: just as a sick person is temporarily supported by the rest of society, a healing ecosystem depends on the environmental stability maintained by the biota of the surrounding intact areas. As long as the disturbed zone remains relatively small — as it naturally tends to be — the larger region retains its overall regulatory power, allowing the damaged area to recover safely within the protective framework of the whole.

The inference is clear: when we humans disturb ecosystems on a large scale, their recovery inevitably passes through a stage of heightened flammability. But unlike in natural settings, there is no surrounding biotic support to stabilize the environment in a moist state — the devastation is too vast. If, in our ecological ignorance, we continue to interfere at this vulnerable stage — reducing “fuel” through logging, burning, pesticides, and the rest of our ingenuity —

we trap the system in a state of maximum flammability.

For as long as it remains alive, the ecosystem will strive to move beyond this phase of ecological succession toward the water-competent, climate-stabilizing climax state — yet our actions keep it perpetually sick.

If, on the other hand, we open our minds to the fundamental laws of ecology and protect the recovering ecosystem — as the surrounding intact biota would naturally do — from additional fires during its delicate, vulnerable stage, we will be rewarded. The result will be a resilient, water-competent native ecosystem with maximum moisture-storage capacity, an efficient biotic pump mechanism, and flammability reduced to its naturally low level.

The State of Wildfires 2024–25 report never mentions ecological succession.

Having outlined this conceptual sketch, in the next sections I will turn to supporting evidence and explore its implications for the global climate narrative — to see the duck.

Landscape trap

The image below summarizes the multi-year research of Professor Lindenmayer and colleagues in Australian forests. It illustrates both the rabbit and the duck — the interplay of changing climate and human pressure.

• A key point in the figure is that early-successional, young forests exhibit higher flammability than native old-growth stands, despite the latter’s greater biomass. This aligns with results from North American forests, where protected areas — with no fuel removal or prescribed burning — were found to burn less severely than “managed” stands subjected to preventive burning (Bradley et al. 2016).

Figure 1 from Lindenmayer et al. 2022 describes how increased human pressure can lead to ecosystem collapse — a “landscape trap”

• Another key point is the mention of the extensive old-growth forest (left panel) being replaced by an equally extensive, highly flammable young stand (right panel). While old-growth forest ensures environmental stability and supports the safe and rapid recovery of small burned patches, this regulation breaks down when the entire landscape is disturbed.

• The left panel shows that without human disturbance, even under novel climatic conditions associated with global warming, the forest — though experiencing high-severity fires — retains its ecological integrity and spends only a brief period in the highly flammable stage, thanks to rapid natural regeneration. In contrast, the right panel illustrates that with human disturbance, the forest remains trapped in a highly flammable state, unable to complete succession, until it eventually degrades beyond recovery.

Not only flammability, but also drought resilience declines with increasing anthropogenic disturbance. The figure below, from the global analysis by Xiao et al. 2023, shows an inverse relationship between human pressure and ecosystem resistance to drought stress (higher values indicate a more resilient system).

Primary forests are more resilient to drought than secondary forests, older forests are more resilient than young stands, and heavily harvested forests tend to be less resilient than unharvested ones. Local studies confirm that primary, undisturbed forests are more resilient to drought than secondary forests (e.g., Wolf et al. 2023).

Since about 90% of major forest fires in the U.S. are human-caused, there is enormous potential to reduce wildfire damage simply by working with people. Achieving zero ignitions may, in fact, be easier than cutting fossil fuel use by 100% to reach zero emissions.

Left image: Nagy et al. 2018. Right image: The big tree was killed by a fire from an anthropogenic ignition, but the surrounding forest in the Clearwater Country in north-central Idaho is alive — thanks largely to the efforts of Professor Chuck Pezeshki and his colleagues back then in the 1990s

Finally, let’s not forget the global trend: primary ecosystems are increasingly being replaced by secondary ones — effectively pushing the world’s biota backward along the successional axis, toward greater vulnerability and reduced resilience, figure from Makarieva et al. 2023):

During the industrial era, CO₂ concentration has grown, and primary ecosystems have declined, by approximately one half. We have been focused on carbon.

The Duck

How might a report and its summary look if our environmental thinking had taken a different course — one that moved beyond carbon-centrism to focus on life from the very beginning?

If the evidence we have just discussed (and many other similar studies) were not scattered randomly across the vast universe of scientific publishing, but instead woven into a coherent, life-centered framework for studying the living world of which we are a part, then perhaps the headlines we read today would sound more like this:

HUMAN PRESSURE ON ECOSYSTEMS DRIVES MORE INTENSE WILDFIRES, REPORT WARNS

New assessment links thinning and burning of recovering forests to rising flammability, stalled succession, and global ecological decline.

Expanding land use, logging, and repeated disturbance are keeping ecosystems in a state of chronic recovery, and making them burn more easily, according to the State of Ecosystem Resilience 2024–25 report, co-led by the Institute for Biotic Regulation, the Centre for Wildland Recovery Research, and the Aurora Institute for Living Systems.

Published in Journal of Applied Ecological Literacy, the study finds that human pressure, rather than temperature alone, explains the growing intensity of modern wildfires. Drawing on the concept of a “landscape trap,” the authors show that repeated clearing, fragmentation, and forest thinning interrupt ecological succession, preventing ecosystems from reaching mature, moisture-competent, climate-regulating stages.

Lead author Dr Patricia Forrester explained, “When we thin or ‘manage’ recovering forests through preventive burning, we interrupt their own healing process. Young trees lose shade and moisture, the soil dries, and the ecosystem becomes trapped in a water-poor stage — the ecological equivalent of a patient kept perpetually in rehab but never allowed to heal.”

Co-author Prof Lin Shuiyuan added, “We believe we’re reducing fuel, but in reality we’re dismantling the forest’s water engine, weakening the ecosystem’s drought resistance.” Co-author Dr Sylvia Spruce agreed: “It’s not the planet that’s combustible, it’s our management philosophy.”

The authors warn that increasing human pressure is globally pushing the biota toward earlier successional stages, where natural flammability is higher and water regulation weaker. Over time, this feedback can lead to regional drying and eventual ecological collapse, even under moderate climate stress.

“Global warming adds heat,” said report co-lead Prof Ignatius Burne, “but the deeper issue is that we no longer let nature reach maturity. We’ve built a world of ecosystems forever recovering — and nothing can recover forever without breaking down.”

The report concludes with a call for a paradigm shift in forest and land management.

“We urge policymakers and land stewards to adopt zero-ignition, zero-deforestation, and proforestation strategies, minimizing anthropogenic disturbance during recovery phases,” said Dr Forrester. “Allowing natural succession and continuous forest growth to reach their moisture-retentive, climax stages is the most effective pathway to lowering flammability, restoring hydrological regulation, and stabilizing regional climates.”

The principle is simple:
In difficult times, try to reduce — rather than increase — what you take from the forests.
Their endurance is our own.