Decolonizing wildfire: Theorizing more-than-human modes of relationship
Topics: Geographic Theory
, Environmental Justice
, Hazards and Vulnerability
Keywords: wildfire, more-than-human, decolonizing, WUI, critical geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58
Authors:
Ben Nevis Barron, University of Colorado, Boulder
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
Scholarship on the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – defined as the area of intersection between human structures and “undeveloped” vegetation – often frames wildfire as a threat to be managed and mitigated. This framing has several problematic consequences. Constraining the human relationship with wildfire to a highly specific and technically defined geographic area obscures macro dynamics, such as the combustion of fossil fuels driving anthropogenic climate change, which creates the conditions for more intense fire activity, or the health impacts of widespread air pollution caused by wildfire smoke. This threat mentality also enables a technocratic approach to fire management and a militaristic approach to firefighting, both of which emphasize private property as that which is threatened and must therefore be protected. This tracks with an understanding of fire management as a process of settler colonial dispossession and control, a perspective that has been thoroughly established in critical geographic literature. Fire suppression, designed to protect private property and timber resources, perpetuates a settler colonial economic orientation that incentivizes accumulation by dispossession and extractivism – an orientation used to justify the criminalization of indigenous modes of relation with fire. This paper employs a critical more-than-human framing to call attention to human influence in the emergence of wildfire, with the aim of theorizing a different relationship with fire than the threat relationship underpinning the WUI. Importantly, the “human” of more-than-human is understood as a heterogeneous category inflected with uneven power dynamics that skew the distribution of risks and benefits involved in interactions with wildfire.
Decolonizing wildfire: Theorizing more-than-human modes of relationship
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides