{"id":197,"date":"2014-04-16T16:48:14","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/?p=197"},"modified":"2014-04-16T16:48:14","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:48:14","slug":"fire-nomadic-science-and-ancestral-generosity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/2014\/04\/16\/fire-nomadic-science-and-ancestral-generosity\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire, Nomadic Science, and Ancestral Generosity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"spot-fires-kimberley\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As we reach the close of Inhuman Nature<\/em>, we finally begin to gain a sense for what Nigel Clark\u2019s radical project is trying to do.\u00a0 I see it as instilling a mode of sincerity, in which we must be really honest with ourselves, with what our ancestors have accomplished for us, and with what Earth can do and undo to the things we\u2019ve built together.\u00a0 While initially Clark intimated a planet that was radically indifferent to human life \u2013 an inhumane nature <\/em>\u2013 Clark seems to be refocusing this sense of complete non-agency to a balanced, restorative, and collaborative practice that is mindful of Bataille\u2019s general economy<\/em>, or all of the Earthly forces (cosmic even, with the Sun) that have enabled human civilizations, which now arguably shape the geologic patterns of Earth itself.\u00a0 While Clark initially intimated how these forces decimate human life at the blink of an eye, Chapter 7 \u201cBurning for the Other: Colonial Encounters on a Planet of Fire\u201d reframes one type of force that some have embraced, and others have tried to vanquish.<\/p>\n

Clark wishes to examine our relationship with fire by drawing upon ancient fire histories, the ancestral Aboriginal Australians, early controlled fire practices in Western Europe, and the social control of fire (or fire practices).\u00a0 When white settlers first moved to the new lands of Australia, they were amazed to see indigenous peoples\u2019 \u201cease and dexterity with fire,\u201d utilizing various techniques to fight fire with fire<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cThe white expended the energy of panic; the blacks acted in familiarity, as knowing how and what to do.\u00a0 They used arm action only, where the white man used his whole body \u2026 The aboriginals said that not only must fire be met by fire, but that it could only be fought while still not too hot\u201d (cited in Clark, p. 166).\u00a0 Here, Clark quotes the essayist Mary Gilmore, who spent her childhood in New South Wales (a state on the East coast of Australia) and witnessed the incredible, actionable knowledge the darker-skinned locals drew upon.\u00a0 Clark later suggests that this keen intuition develops at a young age, when Aboriginal children can \u201clearn their respect for fire through playing with it\u201d (Clark, p. 187).\u00a0 He contrasts this with Gaston Bachelard\u2019s notion that because European children are prohibited from playing with fire, they lack this \u2018playfulness\u2019 that is necessary to engage with fire, leading to \u201ca repression \u2018which leave(s) little room for the acquiring of an unprejudiced knowledge\u201d (Clark, p. 187).<\/p>\n

Playfulness may allow children to become sensitized to fire at a young age, but it is generations of indigenous fire experimentation that Clark argues made the Aboriginals such astute controllers of this force.\u00a0 Looking at the fossil record for indications of wildfires in Australia over the last ten thousand years, Clark indicates that around 5,700 years ago there was \u201cdramatic spike in the graph of charcoal deposits\u201d which is the \u201csignature of irrupting wild fire\u201d (p. 169).\u00a0 These sediments suggest \u201cwildfire of a scale and ferocity that could only have come as a shock to those who had experienced thousands of years of much less intense El Nino events,\u201d yet around 3,000 years ago, despite there not being a major shift in the atmosphere system ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), these large scale wildfires suddenly gave way to \u201csmaller and more numerous low-intensity burns.\u201d\u00a0 Since there was no natural <\/em>explanation for this division into smaller fires, Clark suggests that the Aboriginal land management strategies had developed into a more sophisticated network of burning that was able to mitigate this period of deadly wet-dry fluctuations.\u00a0 Australian Aboriginals were not only playing with fire at a young age, but they had also been doing so for thousands of years.<\/p>\n

\"deb_7_gollings_20120426224040738930-420x0\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Stephen Pyne believes that massive strategies of fire prevention, in which wildfires are not permitted to spread in regions where they occur naturally, is actually counter-productive to proliferating biodiversity.\u00a0 Additionally, Clark and Pyne argue that fire co-developed with the biosphere and actually helped to engender rich new worlds: \u201cit is life itself which generated the conditions that render the earth uniquely conducive to fire\u201d (p. 171).\u00a0 Oxygen was a by-product of photosynthesis from marine phytoplankton, carbon fuels were the result of plant life, and as a result of these stabilized atmospheric oxygen levels and thermodynamic processes like lightning and volcanism, fire and vegetation evolved together to shape the ecological systems of the Earth.\u00a0 There are also studies that suggest that the biodiversity we value so highly in tropical areas today were also enabled by this conflagration.<\/p>\n

The indigenous knowledge of fire we looked at earlier was not solely existent in major wildfire areas like Australia, but for a period of time, Europeans also had land management practices that incorporated intentionally set fires.\u00a0 \u201cThese [fire practices] were all variants of shifting cultivation, in which cropping and animal foraging briefly took advantage of the ash-enriched soil before moving on to freshly fired clearings\u201d (p. 176).\u00a0 Eventually, this mode of constantly shifting plots of agriculture led to a fixed field rotation system known as fallow.\u00a0 Rather than seeking new plots of enriched soils (caused by fires), farmers began to incorporate fire directly by letting vegetation accumulate until they were burnt for \u201cthe next round of sowing and reaping\u201d (p. 177).<\/p>\n

This vital part of \u2018rural folk culture\u2019 in Europe eventually suffered from city-educated agricultural experts who saw fire as an \u201cexpression of social unrest or breakdown, a mark of excess and disorder\u201d (p. 177).\u00a0 These \u201cEnlightenment agronomists set about closing the loops of agricultural production,\u201d thereby locking Bataille\u2019s general economy<\/em> from a glorified state of energy from the sun to a closed system that could be more \u2018rationally\u2019 controlled.\u00a0 As Clark writes, \u201cIf the practice of fallow came to appear as a glitch in the strict cyclicality of Nature\u2019s economy, fallow that went up in smoke was an unconscionable waste\u201d (p. 177).<\/p>\n

This \u2018closing\u2019 of our agricultural system to fire led, however, to incorporating a different form of untapped energy into farming: fossil fuels.\u00a0 Pumped into the closed circuits of agriculture to be used as extra energy and fertilizer, we were effectively tapping into a different type of general economy: the accumulation of biomass from millions of years.\u00a0 With Enlightenment science and technology in their corner, as well as a generally wet climate that did not proliferate as many wildfires as drier areas, Europeans were poised to lead a fire-free existence \u2013 until the early European settlers moved to Australia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201c\u2026the fires of the dark child of the forest have cleared the soil, the hills and the valleys of the superabundant scrub and timber that covered the country and presented a bar to its occupation.\u00a0 Now, prepared by the hands of the lowest race in the scale of humanity \u2026 the soil of these extensive regions is ready to receive the virgin impressions of civilized man\u2026\u201d\u00a0(cited in Clark, p. 185)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clark here quotes Joseph Byrne, who in 1848 addressed the invaluable knowledge and practices of the Aboriginal Australians that allowed white European settlers to build and setup their colonies.\u00a0 These \u2018nomadic scientists\u2019 may be, or represent, some sort of key for adapting to changing climates, and even larger than that, changing worlds.\u00a0 The Aboriginals\u2019 use of fire, in some respects, is a \u2018world that worlds worlds\u2019 \u2013 it is a mode of engaging with the environment, acknowledging that it is entirely indifferent to whether you <\/em>live or not, but that you still possess an ability (and even responsibility) to learn how to exist with it.<\/p>\n

In showing the generational extent required to learn how to channel fire (and even then, only to a degree), Clark wonders how our Western scientific system can be augmented by the knowledge one can only gain through swift adaptive intuition and on-the-ground experience.\u00a0 If Bataille conceived of an economy that deemed the Sun to be a generous entity whose gifts were incalculable, how could we conceptualize ourselves as a \u2018generous force\u2019 that gives back to the world, somehow transcending this for-us mentality?\u00a0 While Clark seemed to initially wish to remind us of our puny, mortal existence, he now firmly places us as stewards that inherit from an ambivalent past.\u00a0 Yes, Kant perhaps led us to perceiving Nature as \u2018other\u2019, but he himself was reminded of his finite existence by a natural catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Clark, in dialogue with speculative philosophy, now hopes that we perceive this \u2018other\u2019 as not solely destructive (and indeed this would be unfair since we ourselves have become a geologic force), but rather an opportunity to be really honest with ourselves in what we have become, which requires truly acknowledging our inheritance from humans and nonhumans.\u00a0 It is here that Clark converges with Latour in his \u201cinsistence that our humanity, our communities and our bodies are an amalgam of more-than-human ingredients\u201d (p. 192).\u00a0 While previously I had conflated inhuman nature with inhumane <\/em>nature, I believe Clark is onto something more deeply hybrid than Latour: just as man-made fire fosters biodiversity, even inhuman nature, or the indifferent force that Clark initially instilled in us, is intertwined and shaped by human beings.<\/p>\n

\"Bushfire\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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