Different Ways of Knowing How to Coexist with Fire

Abstract

Geographers are well placed to make valuable contributions to how we understand and live with fire. Knowledge production is upheld as providing the answer to the riddle of our coexistence with such perils, and yet it is marred by uncertainties, paradox and reversal. Such matters are discussed here in relation to the different ways of knowing and learning how we might coexist with fire. Concepts of bushfire risk, threat and tolerance, which are much used here, evince a slipperiness with recent histories of recalibration and nomenclatural additions. They are also deeply imbricated in the dynamic relationships linking society and environment and their messy entanglements, which are well appreciated by geographers. Likewise, the clarification of any disaster typology as definitive comes at a cost. Consider, for example, how events are often framed as ‘natural’ phenomena unfolding from ‘pre-’ to ‘postdisaster’ or reduced to precisely calculable, even if varyingly improbable, occurrences (Williams, 2008; 2012; Williams and Jacobs, 2010). Against desires for prediction and control, notions of normalcy in the world (and our knowledge of it) are necessarily now being abandoned in efforts to manage increasingly excessive disasters (Williams, 2008). Our onto-epistemological edifices are being shaken to their very foundations. This disaster is not all bad though, because we too must respond and can do so by building back better using the latest (and some not-so-new) materials and technologies. Fire research is dominated by the science of quantitative methods and modelling; data are used in audits, reviews, commissions and inquiries, and hard evidence-based policy is now very much in vogue. It is remarkable then that the centrality of myth and iconography to Australians’ relationships with bushfire has become so apparent in the responses to such recent events as the 2009 Victorian bushfires. The environmental historian Tom Griffiths (2009; 2012), for example, notes the importance of remembering, storytelling and meaning-making through art as key to Australians’ coexistence with bushfires. Old ways of knowing and living in the landscape are being lost, he suggests, but they might also be recuperated. It is through the powerful representations of individuals and communities variously hurting, surviving and flourishing (produced often in alternative, nonscientific media alongside more formal persuasion) that innovative new programmes and projects arise. We academics would do well to probe and push further what constitutes data or knowledge in climate change science, disaster management and policy development. Learning to coexist with fire requires experiential insights and embodied practices as much as any purely intellectual pursuit (Eriksen, 2014). The viscerality of affect is also significant in knowledge communication. The graphic image of Tammy Holmes and her five grandchildren sheltering in water beneath a jetty during the Tasmanian bushfires of January 2013 is exemplary. That image and accompanying text, with its depiction of humans revealed as frail creatures caught under a menacing red sky, went viral and rapidly drew international attention to the small fire-afflicted community of Dunalley. The Discussant paper contributed to ‘Coexisting with Fire’ session at IAG, Perth, 2013, prepared for Geographical Review special issue bs_bs_banner