Playing along with the carpetbaggers, boondoggles and time-wasters in the search for a bushfire fix

• In Event: Sense ecologies: new technologies and strategies of environmental surveillance - II

Abstract

Southern Australia is one of the world’s worst areas for intense landscape fires, and for several number decades the management of its temperate and highly flammable forests and grasslands have been the almost exclusive domain of large public land and fire agencies. Institutionally, these agencies have been preserved from some of the trends that have reshaped the wider public service, and similar public services internationally, in that: their employees are often “lifers”; they are frequently audited but have few clear quantitative markers of success; and, their budgets have grown in recent decades. Technologically, these agencies are also arguably unusual, in that the many tasks of detecting, analysing and predicting combustible environments tend to occur without shared standards, using some mix of bespoke regional infrastructures and free global ones. Following the landmark 2019-2020 “Black Summer” fires, which affected over 12 million hectares of southeast Australia, a number of enterprising companies have attempted to step in and “disrupt” this sedimented socio-technical system with “new” remote sensing and machine-learning technologies. In this paper, I will reflect on fieldwork amongst fire risk analysts within land and fire management agencies, their responses to such encounters with “carpetbaggers”, “boondoggles”, and “time-wasters” offering technical solutions, and how the reception of these alleged “fixes” reveal political contests within these agencies regarding their role in an increasingly flammable world.

Author

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University