Backfire
The settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4329085 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirsten Vinyeta (0000-0003-0452-2431, Utah State University, corresponding author), J Bacon (0000-0003-0987-9982, Grinnell College), J M Bacon (Grinnell College) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 226-251 |
| Publication date | 2025-02-23 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0964-4016 • E-ISSN: 1743-8934 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09644016.2024.2353544 |
| OpenAlex | W4396936070 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 40 |
Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial logic, itself replete with gendered exclusion and speciesism. In this article, we combine intersectional theoretical frameworks with settler colonial and Indigenous studies to carry out a systematic content analysis of 201 unique campaign documents. We demonstrate how the campaign’s production of the careful citizen – one rooted in mid-to-upper class, settler masculinity – hinges on interlocking narratives of Indigenous erasure, low-class criminality, and the helpless victimhood of women and more-than-human species
Colonialism · Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law
The Rise of the American Conservation Movement
Mark My Words
Understories
Kincentric Ecology
Justice forward
Glossary
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
Multispecies justice
Place in Research
Between Two Fires
Seeing Like a State
Solastalgia to Soliphilia
Under the guise of science
The rise of the American conservation movement
Keepers of the Flame
The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism
Ecofeminism as Politics
Inhuman Nature
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Settler colonialism as eco-social structure and the production of colonial ecological violence
Smokey Bear and the pyropolitics of United States forest governance
From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations
Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery
Settler Colonialism as Structure
As We Have Always Done
Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice
Forgotten Fires
Seeing Like a StateHow Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Decolonizing posthumanist geographies
Introducing
Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |