An Eternal Flame: The Elemental Governance of Wildfire’s Pasts, Presents and Futures

Abstract

Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’.

Breathing Fire into Landscapes that Burn: Wildfire Management in a Time of Alterlife

“…The policy Framework explains this shift in thinking, "The traditional way of viewing fire and forest insects and diseases is that they are bad and should be eliminated…Ecologists now recognize that trying to manage individual elements of the landscape is not effective and that fire and insects and disease are part of the dynamics of ecosystems" (Saskatchewan Environment 2003, 4). Re-conceptualized as a complex and resilient ecological system, state forest managers could utilize any number of management strategies to include or even mimic natural disturbances (Neale et al 2019).…”

Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

“…There is much to be said about the kinds of ethics that might emerge from different elemental orientations, not least in relation to environmental pedagogies (Rooney, 2018). And there is also much more that could be said about how different elemental agencies (of which fire is one of the more obvious) are becoming the problematic objects of different forms of governance (Neale, Zahara, et al, 2019; Veland, 2017). Nor are these orientations settled: as we noted above, part of the value of thinking with the elements is an ongoing agitation by a range of anthropogenic and other processes.…”

Assembling fire: beyond engineering solutions

“…Liberation of fire studies requires taking a necessarily broad perspective of “fire”: although fire is a hazard comprising technical attributes understood through scientific experimentation, it is also a phenomenon that implies risk when it interacts with the human environment. We are reminded that fire is necessarily political by Neale et al. (2019, 117), who claim “the rich field of meanings surrounding … elemental exchanges and their inequities provide insights as to how another politics of fire is possible.” Bringing the technical, social, political and environmental perspectives on fire together through multi- and inter-disciplinary inquiries challenges siloed modes of thinking but help us attend to and navigate the complexities associated with risk and safety.…”