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An Eternal Flame: The Elemental Governance of Wildfire’s Pasts, Presents and Futures
Version 1
: Received: 13 September 2019 / Approved: 17 September 2019 / Online: 17 September 2019 (04:00:36 CEST)
How to cite: Neale, T.; Zahara, A.; Smith, W. An Eternal Flame: The Elemental Governance of Wildfire’s Pasts, Presents and Futures. Preprints 2019, 2019090179 Neale, T.; Zahara, A.; Smith, W. An Eternal Flame: The Elemental Governance of Wildfire’s Pasts, Presents and Futures. Preprints 2019, 2019090179
Abstract
Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’.
Keywords
wildfire; governance; Anthropocene; elemental; geography; anthropology
Subject
ARTS & HUMANITIES, Anthropology & Ethnography
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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