Living with landscape fire: Landholder understandings of agency, scale and control within fiery entanglements

Abstract

Around the world, debates over how to manage and adapt to bushfires (or wildfires) are increasingly prominent as more and different people, many of whom have little or no experience with landscape fire or land management, inhabit fire-prone environments. But bushfire events represent only the most visible aspect of complex entanglements which operate across huge temporal and spatial scales and over which humans have very limited control. In this article, we focus on how Australian landholders of settler or migrant heritage understand scalar complexities and agency and control within human/landscape fire entanglements. In view of the fact that the learning styles of landholders new to rural areas have been developed in different environments with very different challenges, we also ask whether immersion within rural, fire-prone environments influences ways of ‘knowing’ land and fire.