A reply to 'reading the Fire' in Education for Sustainable Development, Vol. 2, Pacific Stories of sustainable living (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing World
Fire is a daunting human ecological challenge and a major subject in science and policy debates about global trends in land conversion, climate change, and human health. Persistent environmental orthodoxies reduce complex burning traditions to overly simplistic representations of environmental destruction, degradation, and loss while reinforcing existing social inequities involving smallholders. Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing World advocates for a more inclusive and pluralistic fire ecology, a shift from the paradigmatic globalized version of fire science and management towards approaches that embrace anthropogenic fire regimes and broader understandings of the ways humans interact with fire. The authors present new evaluations of human interactions with fires in contexts of changing environmental conditions. Through deep description and analysis of knowledge and practices enacted by local communities who ignite, manage, and extinguish fires, this collection of case studies supports proactive local and regional efforts to adapt amidst continually changing social and ecological circumstances.
Fire as Unruly Kin: Curriculum Silences and Human Responses
Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment
Humans have ambiguous relationships with fire. The ability to control fire has been part of shaping human development and human society as well as the characteristics of Australian ecosystems, but bushfire is also a threat to all forms of life. The chemical process of combustion is also complicit in the Anthropocene and climate change, which threatens life as we know it. The current Australian curriculum generally ignores fire, and this needs reconfiguring. In this chapter we disrupt the traditional curriculum and argue for becoming-with fire as a pyro-pedagogy for teaching and learning with this unruly kin.
Enflamed Imaginations: Of Fire and Futurity
Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios, 2019
If you were trying to get to a liveable future, would you start from here? On a planet that will roll along as ours does, there is a certain logic to setting out from the places or niches we now inhabit and asking where we would like to end up, or proceeding from where we want to be and working out how best to arrive there. But is that enough? The lesson of contemporary Earth science is that this is a planet with multiple operating states-with indicators pointing to the likelihood that we are in the process of passing over a threshold into a planetary regime the likes of which we Homo sapiens have never seen before. When geoscientists seek some sort of proxy for what the Earth might be becoming, they routinely look back millions or even billions of years. If we 'social thinkers' are to consider how our species might learn to inhabit what will be to us a new and strange planet, I would suggest we too need a long run up. The preeminent question for our time seems to be how best we might power our social formations if we cannot continue to combust fossil fuels. Or, rather, if we're 'back-casting'-if we want to arrive at carbon neutrality, at what speed and through what substitutions should we end our dependence on fossil hydrocarbons? But it's worth remembering that this is a fire planet-the only planet in the solar system that is constantly aflame-and that we are the only species on Earth that regularly handles fire. Evidence also points to an intensification of wildfire in times of rapid climate change. So perhaps there is another question we might layer into our scenarios: if we are not to construct our social futures around the combustion of exhumed hydrocarbons-then what else might we do with fire?
Proceedings of the 1995 National Silviculture Workshop, 1995
From ancient philosophies to present day science, the ubiquity of change and the process of transformation are core concepts. The primary focus of a recent white paper on disturbance ecology is summed up by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who stated, "Nothing is permanent but change." Disturbance processes, such as fire, provide a window into the emerging world of nonequilibrium theory. In contrast to a steady state view of the world, nonequilibrium theory asserts that biological communities are always recovering from the last disturbance. Disturbance is somewhat of a misnomer, connoting disruption of an equilibrium. Disturbance is about death and rebirth, the continuous process of renewal. Incorporating the process of renewal and transformation is the key to creating healthy forests and effective organizations. The process of continuous renewal in organizations is embodied in the concept of learning organizations. Building shared vision is one of the cornerstones of a learning organization and is the first step to incorporating disturbance ecology in land management practices.
Boom, 2014
This article is about the benefits of fire in the context of traditional land management, the devastating effects a zero-tolerance fire policy has had on ecosystems, and what happens when fire is sensitively returned to the land. Hannibal discusses research into how the cultural burning practices of the Plains Miwok people in California have historically affected tribal livelihoods. The article also suggests how returning fire to the land could affect California Indian communities and cultures in the present and into the future. In addition to looking at the traditional uses of fire by the Plains Miwok, the article considers the experience of the Martu in Australia, and the attempt to restore the landscape at Quiroste by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in Año Nueva State Park.