Remembering and Igniting Fires: Prescribed Burns as Memory Work
Sutherland explores the practice of controlled burning in Canadian national parks.
Sutherland explores the practice of controlled burning in Canadian national parks.
Baez Ullberg presents examples of disaster recovery scenarios from Argentina and Sweden.
Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.
The authors illuminate the power relations between state actors and the local people in accessing fuelwood in Zimbabwe, and how discourses of scarcity enhance these power dynamics.
This paper contends that recent scholarly interest in systems of colonising knowledge, whether called ‘scientific forestry,’ or ‘development,’ has paid inadequate attention to the historical processes shaping such knowledge production in specific colonial locations.
Mention of the island nation of Madagascar conjures up images of exotic nature, rampant deforestation, and destructive erosion. Popular descriptions of the island frequently include phrases such as ‘ecological mayhem’ or ‘barren landscape.’
Burning cultivation of peatlands has been practised in peat-rich countries at one time or other throughout Western Europe. In these and other peat-rich countries, the inclusion of the emissions from burning cultivation could substantially alter historical carbon dioxide emission estimates.
The author argues in this paper that the basis of these cattlemen’s use of fire to manage the land was their understanding of the practices during the ‘pioneering’ period of European settlement and of Aboriginal people before that.
Scrubland grazing by the omnivorous goat could reduce the risk of widespread fires. But goat populations have been controlled by bans and restrictions for many centuries. The political, economic and cultural reasons why the animal had such an unsavoury reputation are explored.
Only in recent times have serious historical studies been published about floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storm tides, forest-fires, and other natural disasters and their effects on human life.