Future Fire: Knowing and Making Pyrogeographic Risk

• In Event: Can the Subaltern Research? I

Abstract

Humans are ‘fire creatures,’ as Stephen Pyne suggests, that have used off-site fire (also known as wildfire or bushfire) for millennia to shape local environments to diverse purposes. Our capacity for combustion has also forced global climatic changes and rendered the planet increasingly flammable, creating the conditions for progressively larger, more intense and higher impact wildland fires now and into the future. Meanwhile, governments in fire-prone countries such as Australia have continued to allow human settlements to be established (and re-established) in those zones, known as wildland-urban interfaces, where lively organic ‘fuels’ and human homes intermingle. Like other ‘natural hazards,’ fire is thereby an intractably social and cultural phenomenon, bound up with human values, practices and decisions. We are ‘fire creatures’ not simply because we are uniquely capable in utilising it, or view it as a polysemantic phenomenon, but also because we dwell in and with its conjunctures, often in perilous proximity.

Couched in terms of technical acuity, and paralleled by the ‘emergency’ discourse of a burgeoning fire-industrial complex, the ‘management’ of this hazard in Australia has been progressively framed bushfire as preventable by the state. State agencies, as Australia’s Prime Minister recently avowed, ‘keep us safe in the face of the inferno’. This contrasts with the opinions offered by most scientific researchers, who have revealed the limited efficacy of existing preventative and response measures, while also documenting the ecological and financial costs of these strategies. Now, aspects of these anticipatory regimes are within a moment of ‘calculative rearticulation’ in which new forms of modelling have put the question how we know, predict and manipulate the parametres of future fires. In this paper, I will present a critical analysis of the dominant forms and content of fire’s governance in Australia over the past several decades, before examining some of the alternate ontologies made visible in the present moment. Drawing on ethnographic work with fire practitioners in two Australian field sites, I suggest that present modes of anticipating and intervening in fire’s future are making pyrogeographies inimical to their ostensible ends – that is, the sustainability of human life.

Author

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University