Introduction: Special Issue on Fire Ecology and Ethnobiology

Abstract

Anthropologists have been studying fire’s evolutionary and cultural significance for over a century (e.g., Burton 2009; Pausas and Keeley 2009; Wrangham 2009). For several decades ethnobiologists (e.g., Anderson 2005) have addressed why and how people use fire to manage resources and studied the effects of anthropogenic burning. Attention to fire ecology has blossomed during the last decade within anthropology and ecology, as well as in other academic disciplines such as history (e.g., Pyne 1998) and applied fields such as conservation science (Driscoll et al. 2010). This burgeoning interest in fire ecology coincides with explosive growth in climate change science (Oreskes 2004) and therefore presents a strategic opportunity for contributions by ethnobiologists. In May 2013, we launched a conversation about fire ecology and global change at the 36th Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology, and now amplify this debate about the biological and cultural impacts of fires in this special issue on fire ecology and ethnobiology. Authors of the papers in this collection present recent research addressing ecological, social, and political processes in settings where anthropogenic fire is or was central to cultural landscape dynamics. The papers that comprise this issue are ethnographically thick and scientifically rigorous, exemplifying the strengths of applying transdisciplinary scholarship to complex problems. The methodological tools they draw on—such as archaeobotany, geospatial analysis, and ethnography— are diverse. Nevertheless, they speak similarly to crucial issues about how anthropogenic fires link to multi-scale, multi-species processes. Theoretically, they seek to explore the relationships between fire ecology and human ecology in ways that are relevant for biological conservation and cultural diversity. The issue is organized in three sections. The first includes three contributions on prehistoric burning and vegetation change in North America that apply ethnographic and archaeological evidence to reevaluate widely accepted models of human influences on past vegetative landscapes. The second section includes two articles drawing on geospatial analysis, census data, and ethnographic observation to address the ecological dynamics of anthropogenic fire regimes. The final section is comprised of three papers on the use of fire by Indigenous peoples within conservation lands in Australia and Brazil. In the first section, Anderson and Rosenthal draw on extensive demographic, historical, and ethnographic evidence to argue that prehistoric Indigenous