Encountering the burn: Prescribed burns as contact zones

Abstract

Encounters with fire and landscapes that burn have the potential to be both disastrous and life-giving events. In Canadian national parks, where a century of fire suppression has ruled human encounters with fire adapted landscapes, fire managers and ecologists are eagerly returning fire to diverse ecosystems in the hopes of building healthier ecosystems and reducing the risk of larger wildfire events. Ongoing changes to park policy have made new relationships with fire possible on these federal lands. Prescribed burns, whereby fire is applied to the landscape by park managers, is one such emerging encounter made possible by these policy changes. By reconceptualizing the burn as a process constituted by encounters, in what Mary Louise Pratt would call a contact zone, we gain insight into how thinking and working with fire requires an attention to how humans and more-than-humans encounter one another and the institutional settings which narrate and often constrain these encounters. In the case of Parks Canada’s fire program, this tool of active management, and an alternative to full-suppression, illustrates how thinking and working with fire consists of a set of encounters which take place at both an institutional and embodied scale.

Centering Indigenous Voices: The Role of Fire in the Boreal Forest of North America

“…As alluded to early on, the existing literature suggests that historically, Indigenous peoples understood that humans were not the only agents of change in the boreal forest [70]. For Cree people for example, fire is seen as a being that has a spirit.…”

“…Although beyond the scope of this paper, the role fire plays in ceremony and spirituality more broadly, in the case of smudging, for example, should not be overlooked[70].…”

Moved by fire: Green criminology in flux

“…What matters in this encounter is how they interact and deal with the other, changed by the processes of the other. Prescribed burning, in this view, is the effort of determining how the encounter will ensue (Sutherland, 2019). Utilising knowledge about the way fire travels has long allowed Aboriginal peoples to predict and intercept its movements.…”

“…Based on their knowledge of the lands' and fire's characteristics, they could avoid dangerous fires in the process of land management. Sutherland (2019) conceptualises fire as a social encounter between humans and landscapes. What matters in this encounter is how they interact and deal with the other, changed by the processes of the other.…”

“…This meant that the landscape moulded by Aboriginal practices was now left without their management (Gott, 2005(Gott, : 1204. As Europeans settled the land, they also colonialised fire management practices (Sutherland, 2019). The sudden removal of fire from a landscape can deeply shake it: withdrawal of a previous fire regime can have large effects on the ecosystem (Pyne, 2001: 58).…”