Making Live on Landscapes That Die: Prescribed fires in Canadian national parks

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

Abstract

Prescribed burning is often positioned as a much needed form of land care in Canadian national parks, where diverse fire-prone ecosystems have suffered at the hands of a century of fire suppression. Suppression policies, which replaced and helped actively erase diverse indigenous relations to fire, remain the status quo. Today, though suppression still reigns supreme, fire managers, ecologists, and municipalities are grappling with the increasingly complex task of putting fire back on Canadian landscapes. Based on an institutional analysis of Canada’s national park fire program, this paper will consider the work and diplomacy of suppression and ignition on landscapes that burn. Though attuned to the particular and unwieldy agency of combustion in different ecosystems, fire managers and ecologists work towards ‘returning’ fire to the land in the hopes of caring for fire-dependent species and producing more natural landscapes. This process is often complicated by the mosaics of governance often surrounding national park land, and the internally competing national park mandates, like that of tourist revenue and protecting ‘species at risk’ (not all of which benefit from fire). In an institution tasked with caring for the ‘ecological integrity’ of national park land, managers and ecologists are tasked with making sense of competing projects to ‘make live’ (Lorimer, 2015; Braverman 2015) in landscapes that periodically die. This paper will consider the work of carrying out a prescribed burn in complex policy landscapes punctuated by conflicting visions of what it means to flourish.

Author

• Colin Robert Sutherland, York University, Canada