Encountering the burn

Prescribed burns as contact zones

Bibliographic Data

ID4464784
AuthorsColin R Sutherland (0000-0001-9277-1336, York University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume2
Issue4
Pages781-798
Publication date2019-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2514848619871047
OpenAlexW2972597576
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited21

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

Archaeology · Cartography · Civil engineering · Ecosystem · Embodied cognition · Environmental ethics · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Fire protection · Fire regime · Geography · National park · Prescribed burn · Scale (ratio · Wildfire suppression · Engineering · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Ecology · Forestry

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