Fire as Companion Species: Speculative Futures in Fire Ecologies and More-Than-Human Relationalities in a Changing Climate

• In Event: Flammable Futures: Encountering Combustion in a Changing Climate 1

Abstract

Fire has a crucial role in human and environmental history. Invoking Donna Haraway, one can appreciate fire as “companion species”, yet its unpredictability has obligated humans to discipline their bodies and affairs in a way to reap its maximum benefits while eluding its danger. In recent years, massive wildfires have spread across vast swathes of land in North America, Europe and Africa, wreaking havoc in residential, agricultural and forest lands. Many researchers predict that such large-scale wildfires, termed megafires, will become more frequent as global climate patterns continue to change (Wang et al. 2015). Wildfires are potent ephemeral, translocal and generative phenomena that are sites for organic and material life and death of both the human and the nonhuman – a dynamic being in its own right. This paper seeks to disentangle tensions at the intersection of more-than-human relationalities, death and belonging in the era of rapid environmental and social change, through the lens of fire ecologies. I investigate the ways by which humans and their transient more-than-human relationalities might find belonging and security in the so-called Anthropocenic fires where through annihilation and regeneration, everyone is returned home, literally and figuratively, into the ecological networks that once sustained them. I argue that fire is the “companion species” that facilitates such transformations. I speculate how such megafires may impact these dynamic relationalities and their futures, while looking to sociocultural and artistic responses to such events as a means to world-making and developing new ways of being in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Aadita Chaudhury, York University