Combustible Buildup: The Long History of the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire

• In Event: Environmentalism Without Justice: Popular Discontent with State Environmental Regulation in Argentina and the US

Abstract

This talk is based on a project that assessed the cultural impacts of the historically unprecedented wildfires in northern New Mexico in 2022, completed on behalf of the New Mexico Humanities Council and National Endowment for the Humanities. It will explore how the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, the largest and most destructive in the state’s history, was a product of not just climate change, but also a longer story of material and cultural loss among New Mexican land grant communities. It will trace how these communities formed beginning in the late eighteenth century and developed communal practices known as mutualismo that created a distinct fire regime. The U.S. government disrupted these practices when it seized the common lands of the land grants at the turn of the twentieth century and transformed them into National Forests. The U.S. Forest Service thereafter limited access to these lands, discounted local knowledge, and imposed management policies such as fire suppression that altered the fire regime and related cultural practices, such as grazing, timber harvesting, and herb gathering. The scale and intensity of the fires in the twenty-first century are thus an outgrowth of the disruption of traditional cultural practices among land grant communities and a continuing threat to them.

Author

• Robynne Mellor, Sunmount Consulting