Flammable Futures: Encountering Combustion in a Changing Climate 1

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

There are growing signs that the incidence and severity of wildfires are increasing due to climate change. This issue is compounded in many fire-prone countries – including Australia, Chile, Canada, Portugal and the US – by increasing enclosure within forest interfaces. Such trends not only raise questions about the sustainability of life in the spaces where ‘fuels’ and human populations intermingle but also, more broadly, how we should coexist with combustion on an increasingly flammable planet. Humans have ‘appropriated and advanced a technics that was the planet’s own,’ as Nigel Clark notes, forcing global changes through a capacity for combustion. In line with STS’s commitment to understanding science and scientific knowledge as situated, this panel seeks contributions that consider how our knowledge of combustions’ present and future are being assembled. Possible topics include: combustion and markets; quantifying combustion; cultures of combustion; distributing combustion risks; and, the biomedical consequences of combustion. This raises a broader set of questions about how our lives are entangled with these and other combustive practices that condition the planet’s flammability. For proof of these entanglements we might look not only to the ongoing extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, but also the broad-scale fires intentionally lit by agriculturalists to aid food and commodity production. We might look, more microscopically, to the carcinogens that various combustive arrangements sediment into our lungs and bloodstreams. Linking all of these concerns is the question of how combustion is rendered discursively and materially containable.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Flammable futures: encountering combustion in a changing climate

Chairs

• Lauren Rickards, RMIT University

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University

Individual Presentations

• Fire as Companion Species: Speculative Futures in Fire Ecologies and More-Than-Human Relationalities in a Changing Climate - Aadita Chaudhury, York University

• Right Fire, Wrong Fire. Burning together with Country, evolving our culture with fire. - Den Barber, Koori Country Firesticks Aboriginal Corporation; Lauren Tynan, University of New South Wales; Michelle Bishop, University of New South Wales; Jeremy Walker, University of Technology Sydney

• Letting it Burn: Contesting ‘Value’ and Expertise in the Canadian Boreal Forest - Alex Zahara

• Making Live on Landscapes That Die: Prescribed fires in Canadian national parks - Colin Robert Sutherland, York University, Canada

Session Organizer

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University