The Regime: Fire and Human-Landscape Involvement

ABSTRACT

In the southwest of Western Australia, the state Parks and Wildlife Service carry out prescribed burns with the goal of reducing ‘fuel loads’ and creating landscape patterns that they hope will slow down the spread of bushfires. These practices can contribute to establishing ‘a fire regime’, a tenuous state, which must be continually upheld, in which the forest tends to burn in certain ways. The regime is a model for human-environment involvement that highlights attempts to be favourably involved with landscapes that are sometimes dangerous and often unpredictable. This shows one example of a complicated pattern of involvement in today’s world. Often thought of as a time of distance and forceful disconnection, the Anthropocene also contains numerous examples of complicated attempts to maintain close ties with landscapes. This article develops ‘involvements’ as a lens for understanding cases like these, where people deliberately attempt to shape landscapes but do not have complete control over or insight into the paths from intention to effect. Involvements can shed light on how people live in the uncertain space between intention, action and effect; how they stretch themselves out across time, how they open themselves to being affected and how they create for themselves certain forms of knowledge and understanding. For fire managers, practices of burning, planning, patrolling and making themselves familiar with the forest all contribute to creating an interface with the fiery and dangerous landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape
• fire
• the Anthropocene
• Australia
• environmental management

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Even though ‘landscape’ is a problematic concept in some ways, for instance for its ties to a certain historically situated way of seeing and taking ownership of land (Cosgrove 1985), my view is that the concept is nevertheless useful in many ways. Recent environmental anthropology uses the landscape concept actively (Mathews 2023; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019), taking it as a concept that invites a critical view on historically situated ways of seeing and acting at the same time as it opens for seeing complex human–non-human relations (Tsing 2015). Moreover, I find the concept especially useful for understanding the interplay between process and form (see also Mathews 2023).

2 It is meaningful to say that Parks and Wildlife is a descendant of the Western Australian Forests Department, which since the mid-eighties has gone through a number of organizational restructurings, partly in response to conflicts surrounding logging and forestry.

3 Many of the fire officers have a background in forestry or environmental science. Among the fire crews are local farmers, young people taking seasonal work, former tradesmen, and some that have come to Parks and Wildlife from recently closed coal mines or saw mills. Both fire officers and fire crews are male dominated groups, but among officers especially the trend in recent years has been towards a more even gender distribution.

4 All interlocutors have been anonymized. Approval for the project was granted by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California Santa Cruz.

5 Rodrigues et al. (2022) show that there is a desire among some Noongar elders to be more involved in fire management but also a reluctance to have their knowledge be drawn on as solutions to the problems caused by others. As Neale et al. (2019) show with a case of collaborative bushfire management in the southeast of Australia, revival of Indigenous fire practices can be open-ended and ambiguous experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Science Research Council.