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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Fire and the creation of landscape regimes: Wildness and interconnections in West Australian forests Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1pq6q5m8 Author Nyquist, Jon Rasmus Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FIRE AND THE CREATION OF LANDSCAPE REGIMES: WILDNESS AND INTERCONNECTIONS IN WEST AUSTRALIAN FORESTS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY in ANTHROPOLOGY by Jon Rasmus Nyquist June 2019 The dissertation of Jon Rasmus Nyquist is approved: Professor Andrew S. Mathews Professor Anna L. Tsing Professor Mayanthi L. Fernando Professor Marianne E. Lien Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Jon Rasmus Nyquist 2019 Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi List of figures vii Introduction 1 Part 1 – Figures and frictions of pyro-landscape formation Chapter 1 – Encountering the southwest 42 Chapter 2 – Natural, ancient, and indigenous 84 Part 2 – Ambiguity Chapter 3 – Forest ambiguity and the relation to degradation 128 Chapter 4 – Resilient, forgiving, and on the verge of collapse 171 Part 3 – Heterogeneity Chapter 5 – After forestry? 220 Chapter 6 – Taming and nurturing heterogeneity 266 Chapter 7 – The regime 315 Conclusion 360 Bibliography 366 iii Abstract Jon Rasmus Nyquist Fire and the creation of landscape regimes: Wildness and interconnections in West Australian Forests This dissertation tells a story about environmental change beginning with a group of people who try to maintain close and systematic connections with the landscape, connections they may be gradually losing. Fire managers in the southwest forest region of Western Australia have been systematically burning the region’s eucalyptus forests with planned and mostly low intensity burns for many decades. Through these practices they have intertwined themselves in bodily, affective, and systematic ways with the landscape. Now, they are dealing with two major processes of change: climate change, which among other things comes as a long and ongoing drying trend and a tendency for bushfires to be more frequent and more severe; and a transition away from being a region shaped by an extractive industry, namely the timber industry. Heterogeneity and ambiguity are central elements of fire managers’ modes of engaging with the landscape in this period of change. In the practices of fire managers ambiguity is something quite specific: to be drawn to recognize in the forest simultaneous opposite possibilities, for instance both the possibility of resilience and collapse. Heterogeneity comes in a variety of forms in the practices of fire managers, many of which are oriented around what has burned and what hasn’t. The most iv important figures of heterogeneity for fire managers are future oriented, emergent and heterogeneities they regard to be something they can create or attain. Through figures of heterogeneity—most importantly a ‘whole-of-forest mosaic’ of burnt and unburnt areas, ‘within-burn patchiness’, and what I call ‘favorable adjacency’, fire managers try to maintain “a regime.” When these forms of heterogeneity are all in the process of being actualized in the landscape this can result in an emergent state—the regime—where the landscape itself projects certain futures. Further, I ask what happens when the systematic and bodily ties weaken and when the regime may be about to be lost? I argue that apprehensions of weakening ties occur through expectations that become more elastic, by the past becoming a more tenuous precedent for the future, by a changing affective pull of the landscape, and through being a system that may no longer be to bring about the outcomes it used to. Ultimately, this gives a story of environmental change different from those that dominate discourses both within and outside of academia—a story not of catastrophic newness that confounds people’s attempts at containment and control, but of a landscape that appears to slowly and subtly recede from people’s grasp even while they try to maintain their connections to it. v Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my informants in Parks and Wildlife in Western Australia who let me hang out and taught me how to burn. I’m also especially grateful to Trevor Howard and Rod Simmons for helping me make practical arrangements. A special thanks to Joe Fontaine for help, support, and inspiring conversations during my time in Australia, and for facilitating an affiliation with Murdoch University. My dissertation committee, Andrew Mathews, Anna Tsing, Mayanthi Fernando, and Marianne Lien have been invaluable sources of new inspiration. Thanks for pushing in the right direction and for giving me the freedom to go my own ways! This dissertation has also benefitted from generous and insightful comments from and discussions with Lachlan Summers, Jessica Madison, Zahirah Suhaimi, Joe Klein, Suraiya Jetha, Jerry Zee, Megan Moodie, and Alison Hanson. An earlier version of chapter 5 was presented at an Ethnographic Engagements workshop at UCSC, and parts of chapter 7 was presented at the conference Rubber boots methods for the Anthropocene arranged by Aarhus University. This project has been funded by the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, The American-Scandinavian Foundation Graduate Study and Research Scholarship, Aslaug Johanne and Johannes Falkenberg’s Foundation’s Research Stipend, the Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Fellowship from UCSC, and a Summer Research Grant from the Anthropology Department at UCSC. vi List of figures Fig. 1: Public notice board in the town of Greenbushes Fig. 2: Smoko with the crew in Giblett forest block Fig. 3: The Waroona fire scar nine months after the fire Fig. 4: Map of bauxite mining sites in the Jarrahdale region Fig. 5: Fieldwork in the Waroona fire scar Fig. 6: Epicormic regrowth after the Boddington fire Fig. 7: A drought site in the jarrah forest Fig. 8: A spot fire with low flames Fig. 9: Habitat trees in Graphite forest block vii Introduction It was quite a feeling to throw my first matches onto the dry leaves on the forest floor and see that they “took,” that low flames spread slowly in round and oval shapes, to see them gradually grow, seizing on the vegetation, transforming the landscape. I could hear the crackle of yellow flames curling and crunching long spiky leaves and elongated greyish leaves and turning them into black, white, and grey ash. I could feel the mild exhilaration of doing something that would usually be illegal, a slight sense of being transgressive, even though I knew that, effectively, it was as part of the West Australian state I was setting the forest on fire. And I was struck by the kind of fire my matches produced: small shapes in the leaf litter that sometimes joined up, sometimes grew bigger, but most of the time crept along the ground, behaving in ways that made me appreciate why many people use water metaphors for fire, such as fires that “trickle.” It felt strangely effortless as we transformed shrubby bush into a forest almost free of understorey. With some casual matches here and there, the fire consumed what was dry enough to burn, and left a landscape of green and black. My first prescribed burn was a burn called the Barton burn. It was one of the first burns that the Department of Parks and Wildlife did in the 2016-17 season in the southwest forest region of Western Australia. Around 4200 hectares of jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) forest near the town of Mundaring in the Perth Hills—Barton forest block—was to be burned and on the second day I got to sit in with Jeremy1 and 1 The names of all my informants have been changed, with the exception of those that are public figures. 1 observe and ask questions. We spent the day on dirt tracks amidst the grey-brown furrow-stemmed jarrah trees, between spiky grasstrees (Xanthorroea sp.), the characteristic banksia trees with their zig-zag leaves and large cones; on a carpet of dry leaves, or on open, black and grey, recently burned soil. Most of the burn had been completed the previous day, when an airplane had dropped many small incendiary capsules in a grid pattern across the area and fire crews had manually burned the edges and patrolled to ensure that the burn stayed within the boundaries. On the second day, Jeremy and I drove around in a 4wd ute2 to search for “pockets” that hadn’t been burned, and “fill in” where Jeremy thought it necessary. For a burn this early in the season, he didn’t want to leave too many unburnt patches that could flare up again when it got hotter in summer. Filling in pockets took most of the day, and close to dusk where two dirt roads met at the edge of the forest block, Jeremy and I caught up with the others who worked on the burn. The guys teased me because my work clothes still looked fairly clean and then they talked among themselves about tomorrow and the coming few days. They had several more burns coming up, granted the weather stayed the same. This was one of the season’s first burns, and in the following 9 months or so, at least 50 more burns of different shapes, sizes, and intensities would be lit by the Department of Parks and Wildlife across the corner of Australia called the southwest. In total, nearly 250 000 hectares would be burned that year for a trio of expressed 2 “Ute” is short for utility vehicle, also called a tray-back. It is similar to a pickup truck.