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November 2000
Paige West, Contributing Editor
Section News
Since the last newsletter there have been a few changes in our section.
First, A&E membership dues will change on December 1, 2000. In
the past dues were $15.00 for everyone, now they are $25.00 for professionals
and $15.00 for students. Second, A&E has two new executive board
members, Kelly Alley and Kathleen Galvin, and a new treasure, Susan Lees.
Finally, Josh Lockyer, a graduate student at U of Georgia, is now both
the A&E webmaster and the list manager for the EANTH-L listserve.
If you wish to make a submission to the section web page, or join the EANTH-L
discussion group, you can e-mail Josh at jlockyer@arches.uga.edu.
The A&E web page can be found at
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/anthenv/.
As you all know the AAA meetings are coming up later this month and A&E has an exciting sponsored program planned. Don't forget that all section members are also encouraged to attend the annual business meeting which will be held on Thursday, November 16 from 12:15-1:30 PM in Yosemite B. You can show your support for A&E at the meetings by attending our invited sessions and the business meeting, and by buying an A&E "ecomug." These insulated mugs will be available at the AAA booth in the book exhibit hall and at the business meeting.
Paige West
Department of Anthropology
Rutgers University
cpwest@rci.rutgers.edu
Anthropological Analysis of Recent Forest Fires
This month, Marsha Brofka summarizes a recent US government report on wildfires and Andrew P. Vayda gives a summary of his recent wildfire work in Borneo.
Anthropological Inquiries into the 2000 Fire Season
Marsha Brofka
Department of Anthropology
U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Anthropologists of the environment may find interesting a recent federal
government study on the wildfires of the summer of 2000. In the worst U.S.
fire season in half a century, heavy media coverage made it nearly impossible
to avoid hearing about the wildlands wildfires that raged in several states
west of the Mississippi, particularly in the inland West. On September
8, the White House issued a report commissioned from the Department of
Agriculture (under whose jurisdiction the National Forests lie) and the
Department of the Interior (which includes the National
Parks Service and the Bureau of Land Management) entitled “Managing
the Impact of Wildfires on Communities and the Environment.”
The report suggests that two main factors caused the wildfires of 2000: La Niñainduced weather patterns, which encouraged the growth of, then dried out, highly flammable grasses and also increased the incidence of dry lightning storms in the West; and a history of fire suppression in the West that left much of the forested land in that area a tinder box waiting to explode. As humans have yet to find the means to control weather processes, the report focuses its attention on controlling pre- and post-fire conditions on the ground. It is this section that I think will most interest anthropologists of the environment, as it raises questions about human-environment interactions.
Although the report’s suggestions in this area can be roughly grouped
under the rubric “change human practices in the forests,” the changes suggested
ultimately rely on the paradigm of “human control of the environment” that
has informed much forest management to date (and contributed to the current
wildfire situation). The report points out that “new development...in
fire-prone areas, often adjacent to Federal land, creating a
‘wildland-urban interface’...means that more communities and structures
are threatened by fire,” yet never questions the continuation of such development.
Instead, even after much discussion on how cyclical wildfires are a “natural”
pattern in Western forests and how such fires actually benefit the ecology
as a whole, the report presents controlling the forest—intentionally removing
plant material that might create conditions for a large-scale wildfires,
rather than the all-out fire suppression of
previous decades—as the best course for protecting human property,
lives, and financial investments. (Unclear, however, is whether future
fires will be allowed to burn “naturally” or if they will be put out by
firefighters.) Here, the proposal seems to differentiate between
“nature’s” interests and human interests and attempts to strike a balance
between the two. The report’s recommendation, however, that federal agencies
encourage local
communities to become more involved in fire-reducing and post-fire
restoration programs may signal a turn toward encouraging greater awareness
of human impacts on their immediate surroundings.
Many of us who study “anthropology and the environment” are interested in not only how humans physically interact with their environments, but also how we imagine our relationships with and define the environment. The wildfires of 2000 and the White House report provide fertile ground for an examination of such questions. The report is available at
www.whitehouse.gov/CEQ/firereport/html.
Forest-Fire research in Indonesia
Various claims have been made about underlying causes of the severe
forest fires that occurred in Indonesia during the 1997-98 El Niño
event. Seen by many as correlating with the political sympathies or interests
of those making them, the claims range from blaming unjust and predatory
forest exploitation during thirty years of the Suharto regime to blaming
the ignorance or backwardness of peasants and indigenous shifting cultivators
living in forest-edge communities and using fire irresponsibly to clear
forested land for farming. If it is asked whether the claims are supported
by evidence of causal histories extending back from ignition events to
the posited underlying causes, the answer must be that they are supported
only partially, if at all. Some of the evidence raising questions about
the claims concerns forest wildfires spreading from the unextinguished
cooking fires and campfires of hunters, forest-product collectors, and
tree-cutters in the forest and also wildfires possibly starting, under
conditions of drought, from long-burning coal seams extending to or near
ground surface. Such
evidence about proximate fire causes not readily connectible to the
posited underlying ones provides support to appeals for conducting
more systematic studies of the ignition events that result in wildfires
and for deferring claims about underlying causes until a larger corpus
of evidence on causal histories connecting ignition events to so-called
underlying causes is established.
Vayda’s initial report on his forest fire research, “Finding Causes
of
the 1997-98 Indonesian Forest Fires: Problems and Possibilities,” was
published in 1999 by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) – Indonesia.
He will report on the research at the AAA meetings in San Francisco,
and other reports are forthcoming.
Paige West, Contributing Editor