Encountering the burn: Prescribed burns as contact zones

Abstract

Encounters with fire and landscapes that burn have the potential to be both disastrous and life-giving events. In Canadian national parks, where a century of fire suppression has ruled human encounters with fire adapted landscapes, fire managers and ecologists are eagerly returning fire to diverse ecosystems in the hopes of building healthier ecosystems and reducing the risk of larger wildfire events. Ongoing changes to park policy have made new relationships with fire possible on these federal lands. Prescribed burns, whereby fire is applied to the landscape by park managers, is one such emerging encounter made possible by these policy changes. By reconceptualizing the burn as a process constituted by encounters, in what Mary Louise Pratt would call a contact zone, we gain insight into how thinking and working with fire requires an attention to how humans and more-than-humans encounter one another and the institutional settings which narrate and often constrain these encounters. In the case of Parks Canada’s fire program, this tool of active management, and an alternative to full-suppression, illustrates how thinking and working with fire consists of a set of encounters which take place at both an institutional and embodied scale.

Keywords

More-than-human geography wildfire conservation fire management plant studies encounter

Introduction

In national parks across Canada, park managers are returning fire to diverse ecosystems in the hopes of reigniting what they frame as an ecological process with an ancient presence, a process that has been actively suppressed by most resource management organizations in North America. Setting fire to a landscape like a beloved national park is no easy task and is a practice that requires attention to the dynamism of a landscape at both an institutional and material register. Prescribed burns, a practice of diagnosing a landscape and treating it with fire so as to achieve ecological or hazard reduction goals, is a calculated process involving several parties, not all of whom are human. It is a series of steps and hurdles that unfold over several months, sometimes years, and requires fire managers, ecologists, and resource conservation staff within institutions like the Parks Canada Agency (PCA) to carry out a careful diplomacy as they convince colleagues, superiors, and communities that dropping the torch is the right thing to do. As fire professionals know, encounters with fire and landscapes that burn have the potential to be both disastrous and life-fostering events.

According to the Canadian National Wildland Fire Situation Report, as of September 2018, over 2,250,000 hectares of land in Canada burned (Natural Resources Canada, 2018). This was not necessarily a higher figure than any other year, but the proximity of these fires to areas of interest, such as sites of resource extraction, to communities, and to national parks, made it yet another year of dramatic events with disastrous consequences. Though these spectacular and disastrous encounters with fire dominated news headlines across the country, less has been said about the other varieties of encounter with fire that are taking place in the very same regions—the work of prescribed burning. This approach to fighting fire with fire deserves consideration as it signals a departure from one articulation of resource management to another. This paper is about how fire managers move beyond an approach that wholly excludes fire from the landscape and instead works toward a practice of making use of it.

For Parks Canada fire managers, burns have value for their role in building healthier, more biodiverse ecosystems. Fire management in many park management plans, along with their complementing fire management plans, is note fire use as a legislated resource management tool that can be used to maintain or restore ecological integrity (see Parks Canada Agency, 2010, 2017). Burns also have value for their role in mitigating the risk of larger, more uncontrollable wildland fires. By lighting smaller planned fires, also referred to as burns, fire managers can manipulate the landscape on their own terms, avoiding those larger fires and changing the composition of the landscape so as to protect certain assets. The prescribed burn, I argue, is an attempt by fire managers to engage with a dynamic and agentic rhythm (Ogden, 2011: 55), an attempt to encounter fire and the vegetation that burns in such a way that fire managers narrate the direction of that relationship into the future, one that is materially and institutionally distinct from a suppression approach. A burn is an articulation of its context, where fuel types, weather conditions, and institutional decisions about those landscapes come to impact how a wildfire or planned burn will unfold. A burn is thus a process fueled by encounters as much as it is fueled by vegetation. What goes up in flames and who comes to encounter a burn matters, combustion is only one piece of the story. Thinking with and through these burns requires conceptual tools that can make both the institutional and the material contexts of these processes legible.

Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone is well suited to facilitating this particular discussion of encounter as it is attuned to the unevenness and difference between parties participating in the act of encounter, while simultaneously being sensitive to the role geography plays in these events. Pratt suggests that these encounters in the so-called contact zone are between figures who are significantly different from one another. Participating in these contact zones does not leave each party unmarked; each is, or will become, something else in the process (Pratt, 1991), each is changed by this encounter. Reflecting on colonial encounters, Pratt (1991) explains that these meetings can be violent, uneven, and disastrous affairs.

Scholars inspired by Pratt's focus on human encounters in the so-called contact zone have moved beyond analyses of explicitly human encounters in colonial settings to include meditations on and analyses of human encounters with the more-than-human (Wilson, 2017: 4). Collard and Gillespie (2015), as others in this issue have already noted, have made an explicit call to think with Pratt in this regard. Including the more-than-human within the fold of our analysis not only identifies new sites of inquiry but also prompts more nuanced understandings of ourselves (Haraway, 2008). This desire to consider more-than-human encounter demands an ability to qualify a broader range of others and the possibilities of contact, some of which have been explored in this special issue. This growing literature has made more diverse articulations of agency possible (see Lorimer, 2015), more complex manifestations of power relations legible (see Braverman, 2015), and has also explored new sites of exploitation (see Collard, 2013).

This paper considers how a prescribed burn can be understood as a kind of contact zone, a particular set of actions and processes that ignite new relationships between humans and landscapes that burn. The places where burns unfold are already entangled in specific political and institutional geographies. In the context of national parks, a century, or more, of management has often remade the ecological communities and fire dynamics of these places. In an attempt to snuff out combustion, suppression has maintained an encounter with environments premised on the refusal of fire’s role on the landscapes and its relationship with species that depend on it. Unlike a wildland fire, the prescribed burn is an attempt to introduce the process of burning on terms set by the managing institution. It is what resource conservation staff refer to as a form of “active management.” I want to argue that the “Contact Zone” allows one to consider interactions with landscapes and processes, like that of combustion on fire-prone landscapes, through a register of encounter rather than via the constraining narrative of management which tends to ignore the unruliness of creatures, landscapes, and materials often relegated to a passive category of “nature” that are propped up by human exceptionalism. Looking closely at the process and methods of the prescribed burn carried out by Parks Canada staff, this paper considers the way in which fire managers come to encounter flammable landscapes and their own institutions’ response to them.

This paper begins with a reflection on how fire management has proceeded in the context of Canadian national parks. Fire management, I argue, has been, and continues to be, about managing what kind of encounters happen between people and landscapes that burn. My goal here is to not only give the reader a glimpse into the trajectory of human–environment encounters through the narrative vehicle of fire, but to illustrate the material implications of these histories that haunt landscapes and those who encounter them today. I then move on to my empirical section which outlines three distinct dimensions of human encounters with landscapes that burn. First, I consider how there has been an expansion in the possibilities of encounter with landscapes that burn. I consider the transition from suppression to ignition that is unfolding within the PCA and what policy changes authorize these new actions. More specifically, I explore how policies and legislation that aim to improve the “ecological integrity” of these spaces and reduce the risk of more disastrous fire not only make new encounters possible but empower staff to follow through with other ecological work that a suppression approach would have refused. Next, I consider how these new encounters are contained by park staff. The fire prescription, a document that outlines the use of fire as a management tool in a specific context, is used to illustrate how the encounter will be contained under human control but also how it simultaneously paints a picture of the limits of human agency in these flammable landscapes. Finally, I turn to the reflections made by park staff on the experience of working with fire, with the flame and landscape, in the context of the deployment of the fire prescription. Here, I consider how fire managers come to witness more-than-human agency through their respect and assessment of the burn. I reflect on how both parties become changed by this experience, one affectively while the other materially, in ways that go beyond the institutional register of encounter.

Methods

This research comes out of an interest in what it means to live-with more-than-humans in the context of the so-called Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016). In Canada, where wildland fires, along with urban interface fires, are expected to increase in light of a warming and drying climate, understanding our relationship with landscapes that are already fire adapted will be important for both human and more-than-humans alike. Coupled with this emerging challenge is the reality that Canadian, particularly in more human populated regions, landscapes have been altered through fire suppression and land use change (Johnson et al., 1998). Countless scholars and practitioners have noted the key role prescribed burns will play in reducing the risk large fires pose to human populations, but they have also identified the role this practice will have in attending to ecological communities negatively impacted by an era of fire suppression (Jensen and McPherson, 2008). This is a practice of environmental management that is receiving increased interest in Canada, but which often conflicts with contemporary policies in forestry, municipal planning, and agriculture. Parks Canada was identified as a key player in the work of ignition and the use of prescribed burning to achieve ecological as well as hazard reduction goals.

This paper is based on a multi-sited analysis of Parks Canada’s fire bureaus in national parks across Canada between 2016 and 2018. During this period, the author visited over a dozen national parks across Canada where fire suppression and/or prescription is a key component of park management. During this time, the author completed interviews with 30 Parks Canada staff including fire managers, ecologists, and recourse conservation officers. Interviews were coordinated via the head office for the PCA and were conducted in-person. These meetings lasted between one and two hours and focused on the work of governing, knowing, and encountering fire in the context of Canadian national parks. Given the diverse ecological contexts of Canadian national parks, most of these conversations focused on the deployment of national strategies and approaches in relatively unique ecological and institutional settings whereby managers are tasked with making sense of the realities of local politics, ecological health, risk, and funding resources and how these variables will impact their work with fire adapted landscapes. In some cases, they included visits to burn sites. These meetings were also an opportunity to discuss fire management practices that did not fit neatly within the container of institutional documents and procedures. These meetings were complemented by interviews with staff working in neighboring jurisdictions or institutions that partner with Parks Canada.

Interviews accompanied analysis of national park fire management plans, prescribed burn plans, and other institutional documents that inform the use of fire and fire’s suppression. These documents, as key components to the practice of fire management, were not only analyzed for their role in carrying out the work of fire suppression and prescription but were also key points of departure for considering the practices of fire management that go beyond said documents. Interviews and documents were coded using NVivo software to identify common themes and references made by respondents.

Remembering landscapes that burn

As environmental historian Stephen Pyne (2017) has been keen to identify, Western fire management, characterized by a suppression approach, is not the only way of living with fire adapted landscapes. He has shown at length that the fire management practices of today, particularly in settler colonial contexts, have displaced diverse ways of knowing and living with landscapes employed by Indigenous peoples from North America, and beyond (Pyne, 1997, 2011, 2012). Indigenous people, he has argued, as some of my respondents have also echoed, have engaged with burning practices and/or lightning fires for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For Pyne, burning is a social process, one that troubles any distinction between nature and culture, as fire is continuously shown to be a process steeped in, and capable of impacting the social context in which it unfolds (Pyne, 1997). Through the succession of different periods of settlement, landscapes in Canada have been remade and Indigenous relationships with fire have been partially or completely disrupted (Pyne, 2011). Understanding current encounters with fire requires reflection on which relationships were forbidden as a result of settler colonialism (Myers, 2017b), while any contemporary celebration of the return of fire must be understood within the context of not just the suppression of combustion, but the suppression of burning practices and knowledge as well. In the context of Canadian National Parks, this process of displacement was articulated by the forced relocation of Indigenous people and their relationship to park land—a process receiving uneven attention within the federal agency. As Zoe Todd (2014) reminds us, the displacement of land practice has fundamentally and violently changed the multispecies relationships we see on landscapes and is a process that continues today. Though beyond the focus of this paper, it is important to remember that in the colonial context of Canada certain encounters are taking place at the expense of others. The authority to encounter fire, like many components of jurisdiction over land, is an authority that has been secured as the settler colonial state emerged (Pasternak, 2014).

The advent of suppression is perhaps the most notable and pronounced relation with fire and landscapes that burn and punctuates what has become the set of relations we call “fire management.” It is an approach born out of a relation to forests as resource, where the value of timber but also the infrastructure that weaves through these landscapes must be secured. While suppression has had varied success through history, it has been successful in changing the presence of fires at the landscape level and has altered the trajectory of ecosystems across the country and beyond. In Canada, most wildfire and forest management agencies continue to apply a suppression approach, with most of this work done at the provincial and territorial scale.

Today, one of the greatest challenges facing the PCA is reconciling current practices with over a century of fire suppression. Up until the 1980s, Parks Canada’s approach to fire mirrored those of their provincial colleagues, whereby suppression ruled supreme (Pyne, 2011). Fire had no place in most national parks, particularly in those parks in close proximity to major highways and urban centers.¹ Up to this point in time, fire was not only a risk to the beauty and sublime nature of Canada’s famed national parks, but a risk to lumber and other extractive industries neighboring various parks, as it remains today (Pyne, 2011). The fires that were encountered during this time were “wildfires,” fires whether caused by lightning or human error, that were deemed out of place and extinguishable by park administration.² Landscapes where fire had been present prior to settler colonialism were interrupted by these interventions, changing in many cases the very makeup of various grassland, forest, wetland, and savannah ecosystems (Pyne, 2011). The absence of this process would impact park ecosystems in several ways, including the slow deterioration of populations of fire-dependent species, the encroachment of species into landscapes traditionally maintained by a fire cycle, and the buildup of fuel loads on already quite flammable landscapes. This work of fire suppression would ironically put people and species at further risk as fuel loads increased and larger, hotter, more unruly fires became a possibility.

As Isaacs (p. 732) reminds us, consensus around disturbance in conservation biology, ecology, and more-than-human social theory is a relatively innovative way of thinking about more-than-human relationships in western scholarship, and ecological thinking is still a relatively new addition to the suite of knowledge systems that inform resource or environmental management in Canada. Death, disturbance, cycles, and unruly processes do not fit neatly within linear modernist logics of management and are not easily integrated into institutions that have been tasked with mandates that would theoretically resist these characteristics of functioning ecosystems. As Prudham (2005: 67) found with the Oregon logging industry, successful firms had to reckon with the ecological realities of Oregon forests or face a crisis. In the 1980s, when Parks Canada would be given a legislated mandate to consider the ecological integrity of the lands that they manage, Canadians would witness the slow change of the institutional architecture of policy connected to fire management. These changes prompted by park staff and ecologists (Canadian Park Service, 1989) would give managers in select national parks the tools to make “fire use” a possibility within Canada’s park system. Fire as a disturbance event, nested within a broader regime of ongoing balance, historical presence, and essential role to the ecological integrity of the places under Parks Canada’s care, would disrupt mainstream understandings of fire’s role in Canadian parks and “wilderness.” Much like the United States, the Canadian public had during much of the mid to late 1900s embraced a Smokey the Bear politics toward fire, a logic whereby most fire was disastrous, if not alien, and out of place (see Kosek, 2006). Untangling this logic and reconciling it with new knowledge altered by an ecological lens would prove difficult to deploy and challenging to reconcile with public attitude toward the now “natural” process.

Today Parks Canada, as a federal-level environmental management institution, is in a unique position. It is a federal agency with near complete authority over its land base and a mandate significantly different from most provincial bodies as it is premised on the protection of representative samples of Canada’s ecosystems and is authorized explicitly to use fire, among other tools, to achieve these goals (Parks Canada Agency, 2017). In addition, it carries with it the mechanisms to finance these expensive operations. Parks Canada must also balance this work with its other mandate, that of human use, which has positioned many parks as very popular tourist attractions. Critics have questioned the compatibility of these two mandates (Dearden and Dempsey, 2014). Though a suppression approach still reigns supreme, ecological thinking and risk management have made new encounters with fire possible.

During my conversations with fire managers, I was continuously urged to consider how burns are fueled by past institutional encounters with the landscape. Coming to know and remembering what a landscape used to look like, and how it has been manipulated by human beings and their institutional practices, is one of the core tasks of their work when it comes to both fire suppression and designing prescribed burns (Sutherland, 2018). For resource conservation officers of various sorts, it is necessary to contemplate contemporary encounters and past encounters with a landscape in order to shepherd in future decisions. Furthermore, staff must reckon with the fact that the impacts of these decisions may not be observed in their entirety within the span of one’s career (or even lifetime). In the context of fire management, this means being attuned to the kind of species that have been present through time, what kind of material remnants they have left behind as they decay, how humans have altered the landscape through management and the expansion of infrastructure, and even what kind of contaminants and hazards may be lurking in these sites from previous extractive or agricultural industries and communities.

As Helen Wilson (2017) reminds us “encounters are not free from history and thus whilst the taking-place of encounters might be momentary, they fold into multiple temporalities” (12). Similarly, burning as an ecological process depends on material that has grown over time and that will fuel the process of its own undoing. Ecosystems that burn, as Anna Tsing (2015) and Laura Ogden (2011) have considered, draw-in multiple temporalities and actors in as materials go up in flame, and remake these times, materials, and actors in the process. Furthermore, Tsing (2015: 168–169) urges us to think about burns as a happening rather than a singular event, simultaneously fueled by past human–environment histories, and intimately embedded in the creation of new human–environment histories. For Tsing, fires, along with mushrooms, highlight the implications past encounters of capitalist production of the forest have had on futures both distant and close at hand. Rather than bracket these sets of encounters in the natural world as being irrelevant, we are urged to see how encounters are etched into the material landscape and consider what implications these encounters will have.

Prescribed burning: Encounters with landscapes that burn

Treating the prescribed burn as an encounter allows us to situate the prescribed burn as a social encounter with landscapes—an encounter that situates subjects and processes typically relegated to the realm of “nature” as part of a social process unfolding in and through the production of a place. The contact zone concept, as a way of thinking through and with encounters, invites us to situate these relationships between specific humans and more-than-humans in a historical and spatial context, to see them as a set of relationships taking place in and actively part of the creation of a new geography. It also allows us to attend to the ways in which parties come to, in the words of Pratt (1991), “grapple with” one another, including those engagements with more-than-human processes like burning. This notion of “grappling” acknowledges that both parties, the institution and the many more-than-humans that make up the landscape, come to be changed by each other in this process.

The prescribed burn is an attempt to harness an encounter that has been actively suppressed but is now authorized. Prescribed burns today are an attempt to articulate an ecological vision of fire through the institutional constraints at hand but are also an engagement with an unwieldy process that can escape those constraints. Institutional intentions are forced to reckon with the messy reality of human actors managing processes that are sometimes beyond their control. For fire managers operating within the context of Parks Canada, fire can play many different roles, from a process that recycles nutrients on the landscape, to a tool for protecting archeological sites from vegetation. This particular tool can also be read as an attempt to control, guide, and/or prescribe how, when, and where fire takes place on the landscape. It is, in other words, a prescription for how fire and the landscape are to be encountered, or how we will burn together.

Authorizing encounter: From suppression to ignition

Though prescribed burns are becoming a more common feature on the landscape, the PCA remains a suppression agency. This means most fires, particularly in southern parks closer to major populations, are actively extinguished by fire management teams. Parks Canada’s Wildland Fire Management Directive (Parks Canada Agency, 2017) continues to frame public and fire fighter safety as paramount, meaning these parameters continue to impact all fire management practices, including the use of fire as a form of active management. Park management plans, which dictate how the park operates, echo this mandate. Changes within the organization at a policy and operational level were required in order for the agency to be able to tend to fire in a manner outside of a logic of complete suppression. Policy, legislation, and management plans were required to, in a sense, authorize different kinds of encounters, and funding needed to become available to facilitate these different approaches to fire. In other words, these steps were required to make flammable landscapes encounterable as such. By authorizing specific kinds of encounters, new landscapes could emerge.

As I’ve already described, the PCA has a dual mandate to protect the environment and to facilitate human use. The articulation of the environment in park policy has most recently been facilitated through the advent of “ecological integrity,” as an organizing principle (see Mortimer-Sandilands, 2009 for a more detailed history and interrogation of the concept as used by the PCA). The Canada National Parks Act (2000) defines ecological integrity as: “(…) a condition that is determined to be characteristic of its natural region and likely to persist, including abiotic components and the composition and abundance of native species and biological communities, rates of change and supporting processes” (Section 2 (1) of the Canada National Park Act). This new approach, confirmed in federal legislation to apply to all Canadian national parks, made explicit room for processes characteristic of Canada’s diverse but often fire-dependent or adapted regions. In addition to this change in legislation and the network of policy that would develop around it, a great deal of work by scientists and managers within Parks Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in a document entitled “Keepers of the Flame,” was required to make fire a process legible to park bureaucrats as a form of management required for the maintenance of said ecological integrity (Canadian Parks Service, 1989). Documents like “Keepers of the Flame” highlight change as a natural component of the ecosystem and made room for management approaches that attempt to replicate historical disturbance events like burning.

In many cases, the facilitation of ecological integrity has required the completion of a “fire history,” a look back on what a landscape used to look like prior to park establishment, but also settler colonialism. In the case of fire, this has and continues to spark important reflection for ecologists and fire managers tasked with piecing together the natural rhythm of fire on the landscape or what they refer to as the fire regime. This institutional process has provided an explicit opportunity to reflect on management practices that have negatively impacted native species and ecological communities but has also prompted important discussion around the relationship between diverse Indigenous communities across Canada and their use of fire in specific ecosystems like Garry Oak Savannahs in British Columbia, or in the Grasslands of southern Saskatchewan and other prairie parks. Despite this, across the Canada traditional knowledge is passed over for Western scientific knowledges as the primary source of knowledge informing burning practices. Ironically, the original “Keepers of the Flame” document highlighted the need for an “ecocultural” approach to fire management within the agency.

Today, this ecological work is simultaneously supported and constrained by other pieces of legislation and policy such as the Migratory Birds Convention Act and the Species at Risk Act. In particular, the Species at Risk Act is often what props up various applications to apply fire to a landscape because it is used to help support the success of specific fire-dependent species. Species that require fire for habitat creation, as is the case with whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), may depend on such fires especially in parks where most, if not all, wildland fires are suppressed. Funding for prescribed burns often orbit the health of species populations rather than the reintroduction of ecological processes. Given the expensive nature of returning fire to the landscape, respondents explained that it is almost impossible to return fire unless it is linked to a specific species or within the realm of hazard reduction. Returning burning as a process in its own right is not enough to secure funding under contemporary policies.

Operationally, though authorized within legislation, fire needs to be explicitly positioned within a park management plan and other supporting documents as well. For example, the Banff National Park Management Plan (2010), which outlines the management of Canada’s oldest national park (and in many ways the birthplace of the use of fire for ecological reasons), positions fire both as something that is natural to the park and as a tool for achieving mandated goals. It does so all while acknowledging that former policies have interrupted these processes and created new challenges as this short excerpt illustrates:

Fire is a natural force of renewal and disturbance. Its suppression over more than a century has altered the structure and composition of forests and grasslands, contributing to the loss of landscape biodiversity and wildlife habitat, resulting in forests that are more susceptible to forest insect and disease, and increasing the threat of high-severity, difﬁcult-to-control wildﬁres. These changes have implications for public safety, property risk and the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems;

Forest thinning in and around the community and prescribed burning, are restoring vegetation communities to a more natural state and reducing the risk of uncontrolled wildﬁre losses;

This said, this institutionally prompted ecological interruption is not only seen as a risk to ecosystem functions but to public safety and property as well. Historical anxieties around fire remain, but new approaches are simultaneously made possible. As the risk of uncontrolled fires are made legible by new technologies, knowledge of fire dynamics, and perceptions of where risk lies, prescribed burns have emerged as a means of mitigating risk. Hazard or risk reduction, which focuses on the threat fire poses to various values at risk like infrastructure and critical habitat, has become a register through which encounter with fires is narrated in park documents.

The category of values at risk is a common concept across North American fire management agencies working with large landscapes and is used to denote and map values worthy of protection from fire. These values can include things as diverse as infrastructure, homes, endangered species habitat, and valuable timber. Different kinds of values at risk, and where they are located in a given landscape, come to impact where fires are suppressed (and the resources applied to those operations), and where it is possible to make use of burning. All encounters with burning, prescribed or otherwise, come to be through a register that accounts for the geographic articulation of these objects of value. The reduction of this risk, something that had traditionally interrupted attempts to put fire on the landscape, has and continues to be a register through which some prescribed burns are achieved, as confirmed by many of the activities described to me by park staff. Some fire managers have even used risk as a means of partnering with neighboring stakeholders, engaging municipalities, First Nations communities, and provincial partners with burns along park borders.

Prescribed burns are one particular articulation of these new understandings and practices of fire management. They are premised on building different relationships with landscapes that burn but also on an attempt to dictate the geography of encounter so as to build these more livable landscapes for certain species. This said, burns continue to challenge the organization’s hold on public safety and can put many assets and so-called values at risk, straining relationships with neighbors and partners along with the public’s support for prescribed burns. This means that burning may be legitimized and rendered to be in place within a national park in some respect but out of place and deemed extinguishable if certain variables change.

What remains is that slowly the PCA has produced scenarios in which active burning is possible, it has produced institutional infrastructure that does not just makes fire adapted landscapes encounterable but authorizes those encounters through a set of institutionalized responses and practices, moving beyond a suppression model. There is a departure from encounter as response, to encounter as invitation to make contact, albeit within specific geographic containers dictated by a geography of values at risk and competing institutional mandates.

Containing encounter: Crafting a contact zone

If policy, legislation, and management plans make fire encounterable through the authorization of new possibilities, the fire prescription itself is the spatial and institutional articulation of these new possibilities. Given the parameters described above, the work of putting fire back on the landscape takes a great deal of time as multiple variables, from institutional funding to the response from species, are considered. Public safety, the interests of neighboring stakeholders, and public perception come to matter as discussions proceed on how best to carry out this work of ignition. Since fire managers are manipulating the landscape, impact assessments must also be completed to account for what risks and alterations will be posed by this form of active landscape management. Prescribed burning thus consists of a series of documents that support the eventual use of burning as a tool on the landscape.

This new kind of encounter unfolds within a temporal and institutional framework of its own, prompting a network of park bureaucrats, fire managers, ecologists, and colleagues across the national system to become involved in drafting the encounter of the prescribed burn. Fire managers and their colleagues often reflected on the extended timeline that is required for the creation of such a plan:

You know, you’d think it’d be that easy, but they are complicated. An easy one is 6 to 8 months, not that you’re working on it 6 to 8 months straight, but [writing the plan] often involved a lot of back and forth [with other staff]. Some of them have taken us years between writing the actual prescribed fire plan and the impact assessment. [They could take] 2 to 5 years at a time. And that’s just generally for the more complicated ones.

The fire prescription gives us a glimpse not only into how the encounter is institutionally narrated but also the extent to which these social actors are entangled in the return of a process through their institution. It is difficult to pinpoint a single trajectory for the authorship of a prescribed burn, as a burn can be prompted by different institutional goals but also prompted by the interests of different staff. What remains clear is that these burn plans are not necessarily mobile, they are intimately dependent on the context in which they are designed to unfold. It is a process that requires an attention to what an encounter could mean for both the material and the human, moving beyond a purely ecological model of management. As one respondent put it, using Yoho National Park in British Columbia as an example, it begins with looking at the landscape:

[We] start with [asking] what did fires look like in the past and then we look at what does the park […] look like now with respect to fire? So how far deviated are we? We had a lot of fires in certain zones, none in others, then we focus on those zones. In the case of Yoho there hasn’t been much fire in any of them so its wide open, we can burn pretty much wherever we want to go, except for places where there’s high values at risk, or places where the park is not going to want us to burn. Like they’re not going to want us to go burn Emerald Lake, right? Lake O’Hara, places like that where people come [to visit], they don’t want to come and see a prescribed fire.

This manager is describing how the process of authoring a prescribed burn begins with simultaneously identifying locations where fire is needed, which is conceptualized as places where fire has been missing as a result of fire suppression, and where it would be institutionally viable to burn without interrupting other park priorities, like tourism. Prompting an encounter within the constraints of institutional mandates and responsibilities is thus also about containing that encounter. This becomes a mapping exercise of sorts whereby the articulation of these various variables becomes something that is traced onto the landscape both through the text of the document and the eventual burning of the land. Mindful of these diverse interests, fire managers attempt to craft a scenario agreeable to their senior management and within the parameters set by their park’s management plan.

A prescribed burn, in other words, is an attempt to dictate the parameters of how a burn will unfold. It is an articulation of how the fire will behave on the landscape, the conditions under which it will burn, the location where it will burn, and the time of year at which the desired impact and ability to safely manage the fire will be at its best. Multiple forms of expertise come to play a part and this work can require a degree of diplomacy as park managers weigh the perceived positive and negative impacts of fire on their colleagues’ portfolios. This can involve staff considering the impact on park visitors, infrastructure, but also on respective species that may be positively or negatively impacted by a prescribed burn. As one respondent reflected, this is work that requires ongoing discussion with colleagues:

There are almost two elements: the actual writing of the prescribed burn plan itself, there’s often quite a bit of back and forth, you gain information and you re-think your objectives and often rethink how you will actually do it, where you will put your anchors and that sort of thing. Once you’ve got a good plan, the impact assessment piece is usually like the winter’s work. But it can get more complicated when you’re back and forth with someone like a wildlife specialist or an aquatics specialist that’s telling you, [or] not telling you [what’s going on], but you’re trying to figure out how to restore fire on a piece of landscape where there might be complications relative to stream habitat concerns [for example].

This manager hints at how returning fire to the landscape for ecological reasons is not straightforward and requires collaboration with staff with different forms of expertise and who are tasked with representing different species, park functions, or park mandates. Managers engage ecologists from their field unit, an administrative unit comprising one or more parks and sites, who speak to how vegetation or wildlife will respond to a burn. Ecologists may even disagree on the use of a prescribed burn in a given area as they may be considering the interests of different species with competing responses to fire on the landscape. One example of this would be the corresponding interests of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou (mountain ecotype)) in the Canadian mountain parks who require old growth forest and whitebark pine (P. albicaulis) which benefit from the open landscape provided by fire to thrive in similar regions. Both are species at risk, meaning they have special protection on federal land in Canada under the Species at Risk Act, but also require different relationships with fire. Their interests also begin to compete because of the relatively small parcels of park land where these policies are enhanceable. Staff must work together to not only ensure that federal policy regarding species at risk is respected, but that the actions these policies spur do not interrupt the livelihood of other species at risk. This particular scenario offered insight into the scales at which this effort to identify agreeable places to burn unfolds. As one fire manager reflected, this approach can be a frustration when attempting to return a naturally occurring process to a landscape with many species with diverse needs:

[W]hat drives me crazy is single species management, where we get hung up on the needs of a single species, and that dictates what we can and can’t do [for] all the other species that are either fire adapted or fire dependent. Aren’t we doing detriment to them by focusing on one species, as opposed to being like ‘look at the whole landscape as a whole’, [shouldn’t we be asking] what historically did it do? Because historically caribou moved through here, so ok, we should burn...it would have burned in the past. [In this case we] are guided and strongly influenced with respect to fire for a single species that isn’t even on the landscape anymore.

Once again, thinking about fires as a burn functions as a reminder that this process engages other more-than-humans, humans, and variables in different ways and that each burn is an expression of the particular relationship between those that come to burn. A whole “crowd of others” (Haraway, 2008), whether they are grasses or municipalities come to contribute to the creation of the zone, whether directly or indirectly. Accounting for the different modes and spaces through which species might come to encounter a burn suggests that a prescribed burn is about creating a zone, a space for particular encounters, but where the goal of changing, manipulating, or safeguarding many of those more-than-humans, as members of an ecological community or landscape, is the goal.

The creation of this zone for the prescribed burn also includes articulating the ideal weather conditions for achieving the desired outcome. Wind speed, humidity, incoming weather (like a rain storm to follow), and various moisture codes for fuel types are just some of the variables considered for the creation of an ideal burning environment. Especially in larger parks where valleys and mountains can create unique settings when it comes to those variables, perfect conditions can be difficult to achieve. These variables impact not only how the fire will behave in relation to various species on the landscape, but how the burn will behave under human care as it is carried out. These ideal conditions are ideal not just for controlling how the fire will move through the landscape, but describes the conditions needed for the fire crew and managers to respond safely to the fire. The creation of the zone is meant to contain encounters to a desired quality of risk in relation to those actually carrying out the fire, but also in relation to values at risk. Much of these anxieties outline the limits of an encounter under control, and in doing so outline how burns can become otherwise. The fire prescription is thus the description of the ideal container for encounter and the instructions for how the encounter is to proceed. These documents, while outlining the ways through which these fires will be controlled, also tell us where the limits of human control lie if this fire were to be set by lightning or to escape the parameters of the polygon described in the plan.

Pratt contends that the contact zone is where subjects grapple with each other. Prescribed burn documents and the landscape itself can be read as texts where the ideal encounter is described but also where the possibilities of how the fire could become otherwise are meditated on. What is striking is that the text itself is used as a means of controlling that encounter, of narrating how the encounter should proceed, while simultaneously reading the material risk the landscape poses. This process of attempting to contain and narrate the encounter thus also acknowledges the potential for a more-than-human refusal of this strict format of encounter as thresholds simultaneously describe the possibility for success and failure.

Witnessing encounter: Respect in the contact zone

If a prescribed burn plan attempts to situate the ideal conditions for the burn to take place, the actual enactment of the burn, and the ways combustion and the burning landscape respond, becomes a setting where immediate but also future-making encounters with fire take place (Neale, 2016). Through the articulation of ideal burning conditions the fire prescriptions make legible the conditions under which a fire could escape this plan and disrupt the “controlled” nature of the burn. Within such descriptions of the ideal soil moisture, weather, and communication strategies we can also find a description of the distinct thresholds of human control over this process. A prescription is as much about nodding to the unknown and the uncontainable as it is about control.

While some managers outside of Parks Canada and beyond refer to prescribed fires as “controlled fires” or “controlled burns,” one manager from Parks Canada pointed out the bravado of this thinking, and in doing so they invite us to understand how burning is conceptualized by some park staff:

No matter what you think and what models you use and what you predict is going to happen, sometimes you get lucky. So, we used to use the term ‘controlled burns.’ We never ever use that term anymore. I’ll go to the point where if people call it a controlled burn, I’ll correct them because until you can control the weather you can never control the fire. Like we can do everything for a prescribed fire. You can have all the guards in, do your test burn so you know what the fire behavior should be like. And everything’s perfect. And you light it up and all of a sudden there’s a wind shift. That’s happened to me a couple of times. Can’t predict that. You’re in the mountains, you can never predict the wind in here. You can do your best.

This nod to the limits of one’s agency over fire and the landscape is an acknowledgment of a burn’s potential to be otherwise, to escape the limits of the prescribed encounter. This manager is positioning fire not as one entity but a collective of components. In doing so, they identify specific more-than-human variables as components that require our attention.

In addition to identifying the limits of what is under human control, there is also an important register of respect for fire being articulated in this statement. A sense that this refusal of containment on part of the burn also carries with it a kind of more-than-human agency worthy of our attention. Assessing the possibility for the burn to take place or for the burn to escape control goes beyond the metrics described in the burn plan. In addition to using mobile weather stations, weather forecasts, and models depicting fuel conditions in the park, managers will also make use of small test fires to “see how the fire will behave” and use their own body to get a sense of the soil conditions, leaf litter, and wind conditions that may not be captured by technical tools. As one manager describes:

[We] generally walk the site before we burn, so we’ll get out and walk the forest, we’ll snap twigs, we’ll feel stuff, is it ready? Is it not ready? Because you can tell a lot, right, because you might have a weather station there but maybe a rain storm came through, and it didn’t get reported on the weather station, […] or you get in there and you say ahh it’s still not quite right. The feather moss is still wet, it’s not going to carry fire. So, we might take a lighter with us and just burn little stuff, little test fires, snapping twigs, checking stuff, burning lichen, burning moss, is stuff going to burn? Is it not going to burn?

Even before the prescribed burn begins, leadership for the burn is interacting with the different components of what will burn. They are feeling, sensing, and in some cases burning, to consider how the larger burn will unfold, they are burning to know the landscape and how it responds (see Myers 2017a). Technical tools are coupled with the body, the sensor that will in fact narrate the rest of the process as leadership on the burn observe the behavior of the fire and the surrounding landscape. Depending on the scale of the burn, this close proximity may be replicated when ignition specialists walk the line with a drip torch.

Knowing the fuel types, which are various categories that describe the makeup of vegetation on the landscape, though a key component of the fire prescription variables, is not the only way through which this manager comes to know the vegetation and behavior of the fire. When asked about other kinds of knowledge at work during a prescribed burn, one veteran fire manager and ecologist responded:

There’s almost these— and they’re not written down anywhere— but there’s almost this suite of unwritten rules that we have, or little sayings, [for example] “You gotta burn to learn”, is one of ours, you know. We’ve had that for years. It’s about these different ecosystems, till you’ve applied some fire. Learning about fuel types, you can stare at them for a long time and pick them apart scientifically, but until you see some fire in them you won’t understand them well. There’s a whole suite of those and they’re almost all tongue and cheek and have come from us sitting around in the evenings chatting and that’s why they’re not written into any of our documents, but they’re pieces we share with each other that kind of bind us together and are part of the team’s vernacular and logic.

Encounters with burns are thus not only mediated by institutional registers of ecological and economic risk but are also narrated by embodied respect and knowledge for what burns are capable of. Thinking here with Pratt, there is a sense that fire managers are grappling with the possibilities of encounter presented by these landscapes that burn. This grappling is defined both by the knowledge of what can happen and an acknowledgment that there are unknowns. This said, continuous engagement with landscapes that burn leaves these managers with new knowledge, new appreciations, and understanding for how different vegetation communities burn.

This notion of respect for fire was articulated in a number of ways by those I interviewed. Fire managers explained to me at length the respect they have for what fire can do for the landscape through their continued framing of fire as a central component to diverse ecological communities. For these individuals, fire was a particularly important process that needed to be returned to the landscape. For them, fire had been bracketed from entire ecosystems at a cost and there was a sense of duty to this project of return. They also explained the embodied danger burns and wildfires can pose as they told stories of the deaths or close calls of colleagues, thus extending this respect to the risk fires can pose to the fire managers themselves, their staff, and the public. Fire was something that deserved attention, which was articulated through the detailed plans they would craft and deserved a form of serious attentiveness during the act of burning. In a sense, their quest to find the ideal conditions for a fire is also an articulation of this respect, an acknowledgment that things can go sour. Respect as a register of encounter was a means through the limits of one’s own agency and the possibility of an other’s was witnessed.

Respondents acknowledged that much of the anxiety surrounding a prescribed burn takes place before, and in the very first moments of a fire. Respondents explained that once you have an opportunity to see how the fire is actually behaving on the landscape, to see how vegetation is responding, the behavior of the fire, and your staff’s ability to respond, you become more comfortable. A respondent describes this period:

[The] most nervous times, the times of heightened anxiety, are usually the day of, [and I’m saying to myself], OK is this going to work or is it going to work too well and then there’s always stuff, its windy, its dry, its there’s a storm coming, [there’s] a chance of 70km winds hitting our fire that afternoon, you know? Less than a 20% chance, do you go with it or not? […] You have to take those risks in order to do it, if you don’t take the risk with prescribed fire, you’re never going to burn. So, you have to be wanting to take those risk, so that’s the risky part that kind of worries me, that always worries me the most. […] Then you make a decision, ok we’re going, a little bit better and then you start to go and you’re burning and it’s not doing as much, its doing what you want it to do: excellent, carry on. And you get past the crusty spot, that’s the challenging pieces, and so you get past that 25% mark […] and its holding and everything is going well and you’re like ahh cool we can do this. Then the rest of the 75% happens as long as something weird doesn’t happen, like an accident or something where somebody is hurt or injured, its honky dory, you’re cruising.

Encountering the burn well means to acknowledge its unwieldiness, to give it the respect you’ve come to learn it deserves. Further, it is this affective component of encounter that is required for the institutional goals to be achieved. Though not recorded formally, this institutional knowledge has to be lived in order to be successful.

Learning from the challenges of encountering landscapes that burn

Donna Haraway, in her work on companion species, works with Pratt to describe the contact zone as a zone of becoming and play—a place where significant-otherness is discovered and witnessed (Haraway, 2008: 216). This significant-otherness is an acknowledgment of one’s co-constitutedness while also an acknowledgment of the difference of the parties involved in that process. Haraway asks us to think about how we are always becoming-with others, others that may not necessarily be human but may be critical to making us so. The process of igniting fire on the landscapes described above echoes this image. Fire managers, though working within the constraints of the institution, are attuned to acknowledging the significant-otherness of burning vegetation and the flames these communities produce, but this had to be made possible within the architecture of the institution through changes in legislation, policy, and available science.

The process of the burn poses important challenges to compartmentalized notions of who and what we encounter, as a burn is an encounter with many, with what Haraway (2008) might refer to as “a crowd of others.” Managers are tasked with not only accounting for diverse more-than-humans but are also tasked with tracing their place within the material and institutional infrastructure of the burn site, and how they might be changed by this encounter. The burn is not a straightforward process of becoming-with or becoming something different in the process, but is also a process of becoming undone, as landscapes go up in flame consuming life while also making more livable futures for others that depend on these landscapes—places that some may consider ruinous but others may see as places of possible flourishing (Tsing, 2015: 151). Natasha Myers (unpublished manuscript) tells us that fire compels us to contemplate what we really mean by “life” and “death” in multispecies work. She challenges us to think about how processes of transition, specifically fire, trouble categories as broad and sweeping as the more-than-human.

Combustion as a kind of process and encounter links multiple humans, more-than-humans, and materials together through their mutual destruction and the production of new possibilities. Encounters with processes challenge us to consider whom else we are encountering and when and where those encounters began. As Laura Ogden (2011) suggests in her analysis of everglade ecosystems in Florida, where fire plays an important role, “… landscapes are assemblages constituted by humans and nonhumans, material and semiotic processes, histories both real and partially remembered” (35). Landscapes for Ogden are laced with encounters, and an attention to those multispecies encounters tells different stories than those that would be purified of what some may consider more-than-human chaff. Burns are great to think with in this respect. Burns cannot be understood without an attention to both the material implications these processes have nor without the meaning they carry with them in the minds, policies, and management plans of human actors.

For good reason, there is a recent trend to imagine how to build more livable worlds, whereby the concept of flourishing encourages us to think about building more livable encounters and futures (Collard et al., 2015; Haraway, 2016). The burn troubles our notions of flourishing and compels us to think about how any notion of flourishing needs to be interrogated for any hidden stench of modernist “progress,” any notion of a “climax community” in an ecology that could flourish in disruption (Tsing, 2015). As Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us, disturbance of the environment “realigns possibilities for transformative encounter” (152) and makes room for constant opportunities for the making of new relations. These possibilities must also be articulated by those who wish to engage with these disturbance events. For this to happen, disturbance must be rendered encounterable. This paper has considered how opportunities within a governing institution like Canada’s national park agency made it possible to encounter fire and landscapes that burn differently via mandates for so-called ecological integrity and hazard reduction. These alterations made room for the use of prescribed burns as a tool of active management—a form of encounter with these landscapes that narrated new possibilities beyond a refusal of encounter.

Conclusion

Thinking with the contact zone not only invites more-than-humans into discussions of encounter, but it also helps us to understand how these encounters proceed and how they may proceed differently. In the case of Parks Canada, disturbance had to be rendered encounterable before landscapes could be encountered differently. Through the lens of the contact zone, these encounters were seen to be the meeting of a multitude of humans, variables, and more-than-humans—a process where a landscape and those burning it become something else together. In this paper, the contact zone also enabled a means of understanding encounter as something that can be facilitated. While fire managers are attuned to the unwieldiness of vegetation and the burns that they can produce, fire managers work to co-produce these landscapes as a means of achieving specific institutional goals. While burning is only invited to take place on the terms set by the fire manager and within the architecture of a colonial institution, it is done with an appreciation and respect for how the burn can escape control. Finally, this paper pushes the contact zone, like others in this special issue, to consider affective encounters with fire. Touch (Isaacs: 732) among other senses, along with a register of respect, aids practitioners as they attempt to carry out the burn. This process of burning becomes a shared experience as the human carrying out the prescription of the burn comes to meet vegetation going up in flames, they are invited to burn together.

Highlights

In order to encounter landscapes that burn, manager’s and institutions must first make fire “encounterable” through changes in policy and practice.

Prescribed burns are an attempt to contain and narrate how these encounters proceed.

Fire managers themselves come to encounter fire through institutional and embodied forms of contact.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Guest Editors of this special issue, Rosemary Collard, and Mary Louise Pratt for their patience with my various attempts to work with and through the contact zone.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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