Webcams and Wildfires: Remote Sensing Technologies and Making the Saskatchewan Boreal Forest

• In Event: Seeing through New Eyes: Science, Truth and Technologies of Visualization - I

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how wildfire practitioners, operating seemingly disembodied remote-sensing technologies, come to know and ideally detect wildfires in the Northern Saskatchewan Boreal Forest. The detection of wildfires is a sophisticated enterprise involving planes for aerial surveillance, call centres for on-the-ground informants, and, increasingly, the use of cameras as a form of sensing technology. Implemented in 2013, the Wildfire Management Branch (WMB)’s camera surveillance program was the first and largest of its kind in North America, involving 43 cameras surveilling nearly 10 million hectares of forest. While those in the industry consider the system at the vanguard of fire detection technology, its implementation was not without controversy: the cameras replaced the province’s 100-year-long fire watch-tower program, which involved loss-of-employment to 38 seasonal workers, many of whom were Indigenous (Dene and Woodland Cree), have lived on the Land and worked on fire towers for generations. The replacement of local in-person expertise and detection with remote-sensing cameras, operated out of the basement of the WMB, raises important questions about how settler governments prioritize ways of knowing when managing environment disasters. In this paper, I draw on 3 months of ethnographic fieldwork at Saskatchewan’s WMB, including training on remote sensing equipment, interviews with Detection Centre practitioners, and analysis of operation manuals. Rather than examining its efficacy, I show that remote sensing involves specific geographies and temporalities, unexpected non-human encounters, and ongoing tinkering practices that influence how, when, and which wildfires are intervened with—differences that influence human-forest-fire relations in the region.

Author

• Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University