Sightlines returns to one of Fuel Loading’s central insights: that fuels build up “not just via ecological accumulation, but also via social tradition and routine.” Sightlines suggests that our ecologies and societies may be so deeply and complexly intertwined that only art can disentangle them and help us see the distinct threads, and their intersections, more accurately. Recognizing that we’re all implicated in the buildup of these social fuels, how might we form new partnerships for justice? What new collaborations might be fertilized in the ashes of wildfires? How does resilience feel, and what practices and modalities—from mapmaking to performance art—might help nurture it? Does justice require a new suite of emotions to kindle and fuel it, and if so, what might that suite include? A sense of humor can be a kind of lifesaving device, a kind of fire shelter for the heart. As the wildland-urban interface (WUI) takes center stage in larger conflagrations, irony and dark humor can remind us of the incongruities in our attempts to integrate prevention into communities. Gerard Sarnat’s ironic treatment of a poorly-attended online fire safety session for residents of the City of Beverly Hills suggests the difficulty of reaching even privileged communities. Sarnat’s alliteration is harsh—hard-hitting home-hardening—but it uses that attention-getting craft technique to alert us to class-based injustice. The poem is structured like an interlocking toolkit, with line lengths that could be assembled like puzzle pieces. The lines of verse mirror the Zoom screenshot’s blocky text, which (if we read it “right”) is red to green, left to right, implying a tidy, simple building block style of home protection that eludes the randomness of fire’s impacts. Anyone who’s seen its impacts will have noticed the way fire jumps around, skipping some structures entirely while demolishing others. Like Kehoe’s small animal shelters, Sarnat’s work questions which protective tools are available to which kinds of animals. Sarnat notes a moment of perhaps unintentional humor—the meeting host asking if there are “any burning questions.” Intentional or not, this gestures toward the multitude of ways that fire rhetoric permeates everyday discourse, shaping material practices alongside attitudes about fire. The audience member’s question about whether large animals are evacuated to “Cow Palace,” a former livestock pavilion converted to an indoor sports arena, warns of a potentially unhealthy use of humor: as a deflection or self-protective mechanism, a way to avoid grappling with the seriousness of wildfire risk. left: Gerard Sarnat’s zoom screen capture, right: from Doug Tolman and Alec Bang's Response and Responsibilty Doug Tolman and Alec Bang take direct aim at colonialism, reckoning with injustice at both personal and broader scales. Their short film opens with Bang eating a sandwich and seeming oblivious to his surroundings: the empty place setting across the table, the barbed wire fence to his right. The camera cuts to a scene in which two people roll a bundle of barbed wire (which the artists describe in their statement as “a tool of bifurcation and colonization”) down a hill like a giant tumbleweed. We get a glimpse of them wrapping the table in the wire before cutting to a black screen, when the familiar crackling sound of fire consuming wood reveals that they’ve set the wrapped table ablaze. The artists describe this work as a performative response to an especially large wildfire in their region as well as “a response to the barbed wire that colonized the West, and a responsibility as settler-descendants to find our roles in unsettling.” What’s left of the table is threadbare, barely holding together. A film still looks alarmingly as though Bang is about to be, or has just been, burned over by the flames to his right, conjuring memories of activists using self-immolation to make their points. Sitting face to face with fire, engulfed in smoke and breathing its toxicity in close proximity to the burning table, Bang forces viewers to bear witness and to feel complicit alongside him. Tolman and Bang find inspiration in the concept of serotiny, which they visualize via a family heirloom: a maul with its sharp edge embedded in a conifer, which was cut down after a prescribed burn in Tolman’s home region. Serotiny strikes me as a kind of performative land acknowledgment that recognizes colonial legacies and invites reflection on what reconciliation might look like, both in terms of fire management—recentering Indigenous burn practices and enabling serotiny—and in terms of social justice as well. Megan Davis’s work gives voice and vision to a community trying, collectively, to process the Almeda Fire’s impacts. Davis and other members of the Confluence Lab Stories of Fire team partnered with Coalición Fortaleza and Our Family Farms to host a workshop in 2022. Lab members brought art supplies and a simple prompt: participants were asked to map their visions for a resilient future. Some teams braided yarn to signify their interwoven community; others created a door using layered paper, signaling a sense of welcome. For Davis, an experienced graphic designer, rendering hand-made images with a professional, design aesthetic allows her to create “unified digital designs” that are impactful and versatile. Working closely with community members to ensure integrity of vision, Davis’s creation of shareable files results in both distinctive artifacts unique to this community, this fire—artifacts that can be posted publicly to amplify community members’ voices—as well as templates that can be repurposed elsewhere. My favorite is an image of a large wave about to crash and overwhelm a tiny sand castle in the corner of the frame. But this impending destruction is not something to be feared. Rather, a small caption reads: “May our needs propel us to break and rebuild the very systems that left us in need in the first place.” This mantra, or prayer, bears repeating. Some structures and systems need to be “burned down” so they can be rebuilt with justice at the center. For settlers, recognizing complicity with land theft, displacement, and repression of Indigenous burning practices is essential. As Indigenous fire practitioners have always known, fire is not necessarily destructive. Fire also cleanses, as Lab member Isabel Marlens reports in her essay “Fire Lines.” Fire’s ashes are seedbeds for necessary new growth. Like a wildfire, art can be a mechanism for “burning down” systems of injustice, clearing space for better futures and providing the seeds to grow toward them. Pyro Postcards exemplifies this creative destruction. Schlickman and Milligan repurpose Smokey’s neoliberal paternalism (“Only You…”) for decolonial ends in a postcard showing California’s tribal borders that implicates viewers in justice, captioned: “Only You Can Decolonize.” Another reads, in bold, all-capped, block letters, “LAND BACK.” Their “Right to Burn Fire Service” postcard speaks to a future where Indigenous burning practices are upheld as a valuable right as well as an ecological good. As we continue to make the future now, moment by moment, day by day, fire season by fire season, we’d do well to find more ways to invite, center, and amplify Indigenous fire knowledge. As a writer, I had hoped Sightlines would help me articulate a sort of conclusion to our three-part exhibition series. It didn’t. Instead, Sightlines leaves me feeling productively unsettled. These artists showcase the power of art to generate visions of futures that will “stick in your mind” for some time, and I’m left with wildly dissonant affective orientations to fire, with no single end game, no clear future, to pin my hopes on. But this lack of resolution doesn’t have to be scary. As Sasha Michelle White puts it, each “wound is an opening,” an opportunity to see the world more clearly and to rebuild it with new insights, better tools, and sharpened vision. It’s true that the future is an open question. But it’s equally true, as Sonia Sobrino Ralston reminds us, that “the future is always in the present.” Our vision of what comes next may be patchy, but these artists remind us that isn’t a bad thing. A patchy forest can be a sign of a healthy ecosystem, one where fires have been able to do what they’re meant to do: produce a messy mosaic and a resilient natural landscape. Perhaps human-led resilience efforts might be patchy in this positive sense, as we feel our way forward, toward murky but more just fire futures. ​ further considerations contributed by Sightlines Juror Jennifer Ladino, February 2024

Sightlines challenges artists to envision what happens when the smoke clears and we are confronted with fire’s impacts on human bodies, landscapes, and the built environment. The exhibition bears witness to these impacts, sparking a range of emotions about what becomes visible, and felt, when the flames are extinguished. What emotions are mirrored back to us in the eyes of wildland firefighters and others facing fire’s front lines? What pressures do we put on younger generations to both symbolize and create a better future? Who and what survives, and might even thrive, in fiery futures? Sightlines artists invite us to learn lessons from fire that might shape not just how we respond to it but also how we anticipate and prepare for it, how we work with fire as an agential partner in a shifting and shared world. ​ Part of a hotshot crew, Jackie Barry took a camera into the field in 2020 to film their fellow crew members. The result is an intimate set of images that challenge us to reckon with, perhaps to justify, what firefighters do: the labor, the risk, and the “burnout.” Many people are aware that firefighters are underpaid and overworked, and that romantic visions of firefighters as akin to war heroes can encourage us to put them in harm’s way unnecessarily. But beyond stereotypical images of urban firefighters—with their red trucks, their fire stations, the highly visible structure fires they extinguish—what is life like when the backcountry is your workplace, when wildland firefighting is your job? Barry’s position as hotshot crew member enabled them to catch their coworkers in casual moments and expose the gritty realism of a very hard job. In Medio Fire, a cluster of hotshots gaze across a valley at smoke on the ridge opposite them. What seems like repose is both warranted (they work excruciatingly long days, sleep on the hard ground, and carry extremely heavy packs) and also probably not repose at all; most likely they’re analyzing fire behavior and strategizing for the next day’s work. This perspective contrasts with the close-ups of the “boys” in Boys in Truck, an image that makes me curious to hear what they’re talking about right then, and to understand more about their day-to-day work lives. Too often we only see fire from afar, on a distant ridge or not at all—a far-off flame front, or billowing smoke columns, or orange skies in a photo next to an alarming headline. Barry’s photographs make fire personal, not by showing flames but by showing us what human bodies that work with fire look and feel like. I feel challenged by Cole’s close-up stare, and by his slightly downturned lips: Is this worth it? Are you asking too much of us? And what does his unflinching look juxtaposed against a field of sunflowers begin to tell us about this traditionally masculine workplace? What becomes visible when we focus on the people who work in and with fire are questions of justice, then, at root. Allison McClay’s Olallie Burns echoes Medio Fire in that it frames a distant fire from the perspective of a human—and, in McClay’s image, companion animals. Facing fire alongside these figures, we viewers are looking out with them on a landscape that is burning, has burned, will burn. Here we see the familiar red skies and what looks like a lake reflecting that umber hue. What I find most fascinating about this image—aside from the dogs, who outnumber and look up to the human figure—is the hands on hips stance. This can signal frustration, bemusement, determination, or anger. Without a facial expression, it’s hard to tell. But the piece is powerful for the way it shifts attention from figures to background, asking us to reflect on what we see and feel looking across this landscape with this triad of animals in the foreground. As McClay puts it in her artist’s statement, her work implores us to reconsider “what a healthy relationship to destruction and to existential doom could look like.” In Sucia Saves Us McClay recalibrates doomism toward hope. Gently winding tree limbs cradle a harmonious multi-species community of ravens, white-tailed deer, and human children, in a magical realist mood that suggests salvation. Pushing back against depictions of children as emblems of the future or requisite symbols for hope, though, it is Sucia—an island in the San Juans—that “saves us” here. As the Pacific Northwest adapts to longer and more intense fire seasons, McClay’s paintings are refreshing in their indication that “alarm” is only one affective attunement, even when fire is always in the background. Returning us to central tensions in Ground Truths—between mourning and renewal, death and regeneration, destruction and new growth—Andreas Rutkauskas’s Silent Witnesses series refuses to resolve them. Instead, these photographs expertly show how fire’s power is both destructive and restorative, and prompt reflection about what roles humans should play, as witnesses and stewards, in capturing, rerouting, or simply admiring what Ruskauskas describes in his artist’s statement as “fire’s power to sculpt the land.” Rutkauskas’s photographs get at this question, in part, by re-centering plant agencies, using an outdoor strobe light to illuminate what he rightly considers valuable “members of a community.” Rutkauskas’s framing disrupts the common anthropocentric perspective of looking down and out across a burned-over area by positioning a dried-out shrub in the foreground. What first appear to be almost black-and-white shots quickly take on multiple dimensions of color and texture. White tufts of dandelions pop against a blackened forest. Ponderosas are marked by vibrant orange splotches beneath the bark, which shine neon against charred trunks and signal the emergence of new layers of growth. In all three images, the foreground glows, attracting my eye and heart to brightness rather than the threatening sense of dread or the grief that often overwhelms us when confronted with destruction. One thing that becomes visible, and felt, from this vantage point is a sense of near-miss relief: the feeling that things could have been even worse. But what strikes me most is the bright green understory, which brings a spirit of resilience, even joy, to the darkness. Katie Kehoe’s Wildfire Shelters for Small Animals operates in a similarly dissonant mode. Small animals often imply cuteness or play, but fire shelters are deadly serious. Trained firefighters practice deploying shelters very quickly, with the knowledge that they are last resorts for survival, to be used only when a flame front is overtaking the crew—in other words, when death is imminent. These triangular shelters are arranged so that their tips touch in a kind of wheel, conjuring a “circling the wagons” sense of protection. But who is included in the circle, and who is the implied enemy? How do we protect not only ourselves, but other animals as well, from destruction? What “survival architecture,” to cite Kehoe’s provocative phrase, is required for our hearts? Kehoe’s art asks what “lifesaving devices” we need to develop to survive and perhaps even thrive in uncertain fire futures. They also beg a more basic question: who is the “we”? Why should large mammals—humans in particular—get priority for survival? Kehoe’s shelters, like Pyro Postcard’s “babes in the woods” avoid a sentimental Bambi-ism but nevertheless tap into a profound and common human concern for “small animals,” harnessing that concern for fire awareness. Ultimately, Kehoe’s project, like all of the work in Sightlines, confronts us with the harsh material realities and the “survival architecture” we must create in the face of extreme conditions—individual wildfires, changing fire regimes, and, more broadly, the climate crisis. further considerations contributed by Sightlines Juror Jennifer Ladino, February 2024

Sightlines, the third and final exhibition in our Stories of Fire series, builds on the themes of Ground Truths and Fuel Loadings, adding new dimensions to art’s ability to represent “fire’s mercurial nature as well as the rich range of emotions that fire can produce.” Sightlines envisions what Pyro Postcards creators Emily Schlickman and Brett Milligan emphasize is a “multitude of futures”: some are “bleak. Some are exciting. Some are just fucking weird and stick in your mind.” Any of this multitude could come to fruition depending on how creatively we navigate the climate crisis, how honestly we reckon with injustice, and how successfully we learn to live with more fire. The Sightlines exhibition grapples with the reality that, as one of the more unsettling pieces in Pyro Postcards reads, “the future is patchy.” Like a serotinous cone opened by fire’s heat, Sightlines releases a range of aesthetic and affective “seeds”: new ways to visualize, reimagine, and, to cite Schlickman and Milligan’s artists’ statement, “feel [our] way into possible fiery futures and our potential role in making them.” Pyro Postcards, Schlickman and Brett Milligan With a palette of earthy colors that echo historical public lands promotional materials and PSAs, Pyro Postcards operates in unusual and sometimes startling affective registers. Some postcards invoke nostalgia for familiar images and aesthetics with playful reinvention of what we think we know; others traffic in more ominous tones that conjure but defamiliarize the dominant fear-and-dread mode of engaging with fire. On the playful end of this spectrum, the artists replace Smokey Bear and his individualistic “Only You” campaign with fresh nonhuman animal faces, shifting to a collective model of fire resilience led by more-than-human community members. (Vote for a new “pyrophilic mascot” here) A savvy squirrel named “Sooty” welcomes other “Pals” to help reseed after fires. Clothed in an official-looking uniform “Grazie the Goat” stands ready to chomp on flammable matter and reduce fire risk. A cougar crew boss with “Pyro” inscribed on their hard hat appears determined to take advantage of the perfect prescribed burn conditions. Like their human counterparts, these critters put safety first; woodpeckers and bobcats alike sport hard hats and Nomex. These “babes in the woods” are not passive victims; they have co-evolved with fire and can teach humans how to live with it. Other postcards take more serious turns: a promotional postcard featuring Giant Sequoia offers tourists the chance to see “earth’s largest dead trees,” and one postcard that seems to be burning from the top down simply warns: “We’re Fucked.” Overall, Pyro Postcards invokes a kind of affective dissonance, asking us to sit with uncomfortable, conflicting, non-cathartic emotions about fire and to harness that dissonance for justice. Kasia Ozga's RE_MOVE N.22 & N.24 Kasia Ozga also recognizes the mixed feelings about fire that so many of us carry. In her artist’s statement, Ozga describes being struck by wonder when confronted with the scale of Pacific Northwest forests, where trees dwarf and humble us, reminding us that we’re a tiny part of a vast ecosystem. At the same time, Ozga feels “exhaustion from the intense thick smoke that blankets the region when forest fires are in abundance,” a common embodied reaction to what Lisa Cristinzo, in her artist’s statement for Fuel Loading, calls “the build up, the burn, and the burn out.” Yet Ozga’s work brings me from suffocation to relief and a kind of release. RE_MOVE N.22 draws the eye upward from root system to canopy, from a rich soil-like red clay, to wispy smoke-like tendrils. The texture of the hand-made paper conjures the crispness of burned bark. The perspective is road-like, two throughlines coming closer together, gradually, to simulate motion. A cleverly placed set of binoculars offers itself up as a tool for sharper vision. I feel poised to turn right, with the lines, and face what’s around the corner—our always invisible future. RE_MOVE N.24 is even more viscerally inspiring, with a beating heart at its center, and tree-like branches that are also lung-like, signaling for us to breathe deeply, spread our arms, and trust the ways that new growth post-fire will re-oxygenate our bodies and sustain our lives. Forests as Data Governance, part of Sonia Sobrino Ralston’s more expansive Uncommon Knowledge project, also moves viewers, but taking a digital rather than an organic approach. Ralston’s project responds to a 2022 fire that threatened Google’s first hyperscale data center in The Dalles, Oregon, prompting the use of LIDAR scans to envision and anticipate future threats to digital infrastructure. Ralston adds forests to these pointlouds of data at the site to show how “plants become critical infrastructure, a form of long-term information storage” that requires protection and stewardship. Converting a forest into binary code, Ralston illuminates the motion, beauty, and agency that are easy to miss in more mundane representations of tree life. By turning plants themselves into infrastructure, Ralston highlights their vulnerability as well as their essential role in planning for a healthy future. Like Ozga’s, this work guides our vision in multiple directions: upward, to migratory birds and tree canopies, and downward, by way of an elegantly twirling conifer, to the intricate and enormous root systems that anchor individual trees in place, reminding us there’s often more going on below ground than what we can see above. Real forests are messy places; in Ralston’s deft hands, digital forests become uncanny pixelated versions of the real thing, both defamiliarizing our relationship to the material world and introducing us to magical new materialities, in which trees are information-rich, illuminated, and illuminating. left: from Sonia Sobrino Ralston's Forests as Data Governance. right: from Miriam Morrill's Pyrosketchology At the other end of the representational spectrum from binary code, Miriam Morrill uses analog methods to bring the fire environment to life via a practice she calls pyrosketchology: a unique kind of nature journaling that builds hand-on awareness of fire by using sketching “to develop better observation skills, awareness, and understanding of the natural world.” Pyrosketchology uses simple materials—drawing tools, sketchbooks, human hands—to reveal the complexities of what Morrill calls the fire environment, which includes the traditional components of the fire triangle along with “fire seasons, ignitions, mitigation, effects, and regimes.” Available for free online, the full Pyrosketchology book includes guided activities to invite us into a more intimate relationship with the fire environment—a relationship founded on simultaneously apprehending fire’s visual, emotional, and scientific dimensions. Two activities featured on our site include one for measuring flammability by way of a leaf burn test and another for estimating tree cover in a forest by isolating and sketching a representative section of the canopy. Through generative prompts like these, Morrill’s pyrosketchology renders science and art deeply embodied, intertwined practices and inspires us to be curious as both citizen scientists and citizen artists. Whether through the white spaces on a page, the distance between pixels, the layers of handmade paper, or the tensions between nostalgic, familiar aesthetics and ironic, playful reinventions of them, the art in Sightlines complicates well-worn emotional ruts and opens up other ways of feeling about, and with, fire—including those that are exciting and just fucking weird. Typically, fire feelings are reduced to variants of fear and sadness, and for valid reasons: when apocalyptic orange skies dominate news headlines, our anxieties are stoked; when catastrophic destruction and loss of life result from unfightable wildfires, we grieve. Yet to focus only on fear and sadness oversimplifies the range and complexity of our feelings about fire and can have negative impacts on management: a frightened public might be more prone to support total suppression and to shun the prescribed burning that is essential for healthy fire management. Sightlines encourages a more expansive affective repertoire as we resee and reconsider our “patchy” fire futures.

Jennifer Ladino, Erin James, and Teresa Cavazos Cohn are the Co-Founders of the Confluence Lab. Jennifer Ladino LAB CO-FOUNDER Professor, English Department University of Idaho jladino at uidaho.edu Erin James LAB CO-FOUNDER Professor, English Department University of Idaho ejames at uidaho.edu Teresa Cavazos Cohn LAB CO-FOUNDER Associate Professor, Department of Natural Resources & the Environment, University of New Hampshire; Climate Change Fellow, Harvard Divinity School teresa.cohn at unh.edu FELLOW IN RESIDENCE Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho, lhampton at uidaho.edu Leah Hampton's website Leah Hampton PRE-DOCTORAL FELLOW Doctoral Candidate , Environmental Science, University of Idaho Sasha Michelle White PROJECT AFFILIATE Regional Fire Specialist: Willamette Valley/North Cascades, OSU Extension Fire Program Kayla Bordelon GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT Doctoral Candidate, Environmental Science, University of Idaho Jack Kredell GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT Doctoral Candidate, College of Natural Resources, University of Idaho Phinehas Lampman Devin Becker PROJECT PARTNER Program Head Library, University of Idaho Devin Becker's website Ruby Fulton PROJECT PARTNER Composer and Musician Ruby Fulton's website Kristin Haltinner PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Academic Certificate in Diversity and Inclusion Jeffrey Hicke PROJECT PARTNER Professor of Geography, University of Idaho Stacy Isenbarger PROJECT PARTNER Mixed-media Artist Associate Professor of Art + Design , University of Idaho Stacy Isenbarger's website Benjamin James PROJECT PARTNER Clinical Assistant Professor, Film & TV studies, University of Idaho Leda Kobziar PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor, Wildland Fire Science, Director, Master of Natural Resources Dilshani Sarathchandra PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor of Sociology , University of Idaho Evan Williamson PROJECT PARTNER Digital Infrastructure Librarian, University of Idaho Evan Williamson's website RESEARCHER Creative Writer, Bellingham, WA North Bennett GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, Art + Design, University of Idaho Megan Davis website Megan Davis GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English / Natural Resources, University of Idaho Kelsey Evans GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Emily Holmes GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Daniel Lurie GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Isabel Marlens John Anderson AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor, Virtural Technology Lab Co-Manager, University of Idaho Bert Baumgaertner AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho Kerri Clement AFFILIATED MEMBER Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, University of Idaho Rob Ely AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science, University of Idaho Matthew Grindal AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor, Department of Culture, Society & Justice, University of Idaho Leontina Hormel AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor of Sociology University of Idaho Graham Hubbs AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Politics and Philosophy, University of Idaho Ryan S. Lincoln AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, University of Idaho Markie McBrayer AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Idaho Ryanne Pilgeram AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor of Sociology, University of Idaho Aleta Quinn AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Idaho David Roon AFFILIATED MEMBER Clinical Assistant Professor of Ecology and Conservation Biology, University of Idaho Scott Slovic AFFILIATED MEMBER University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho Rochelle Smith AFFILIATED MEMBER Reference & Instruction Librarian, University of Idaho Alexandra Teague AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Chair, Professor of English, Co-Director of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Idaho Alexandra Teague's website Lee Vierling AFFILIATED MEMBER University Distinguished Professor, Director of the Environmental Science Program and Department Head, Natural Resources and Society, University of Idaho

AIF crew 2024 Adam Huggins Galiano Island, BC, Canada Adam Huggins is an artist, podcaster, practitioner of ecological restoration, teacher, and naturalist living in the Salish Sea of southwestern British Columbia, on Galiano Island - the unceded lands and waters of Hul’qumi’num speaking people. As an environmental professional, he implements watershed-scale ecological restoration projects for the Galiano Conservancy Association and teaches a class in the Restoration of Natural Systems program at the University of Victoria. As a storyteller and musician, he produces and co-hosts the Future Ecologies podcast, which is currently wrapping up a 5th season of long-form audio pieces at the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. Out of the Green, Into the Black: A Journey into Cultural Fire Adam Huggins Cover art by Ale Silva for episode 6.9 of the Future Ecologies podcast I stand on the edge of the narrow, one-lane road, staring down a steep, brush-filled slope. Harsh sunlight filters down through the canopy of Douglas-fir, arbutus, and black oak, illuminating a dense tangle of hazel, bay, and huckleberry in the understory. I’m already sweating under the weight of my pack in my borrowed NOMEX clothing, shifting back and forth trying to break in a very expensive and uncomfortable new pair of thick-soled leather boots. “What’s your burn experience like?” asks the nearest crew member on the fire line. “None” I say. “This is my first time.” He nods and murmurs a polite response. I pause for a moment, adjusting my hardhat, and then venture, “I am amazed at how steep this site is, and how much material is still on the ground.” He grins. “Yeah, you’re like whoa, there’s a lot of fuels on the ground, and it’s steep.” “That’s my impression,” I say, eyeing the precipitous slope with mounting trepidation and thinking, ‘are we actually going to attempt to burn this today?’ “Yep.” He laughs, a twinkle in his eye. “Welcome to the Klamath!” CFMC Burn block for September 26, 2025, featuring thick underbrush on a very steep slope - - - This past September, I returned to the northwest corner of California for the first time in nearly a decade. I followed the Klamath River, liberated from the four dams that until recently blocked the passage of its once-famed salmon runs, from the arid steppe of southern Oregon down to the rugged coastal forests of Yurok territory. For three days, I would be a guest of the Yurok-led Cultural Fire Management Council, or CFMC (https://www.culturalfire.org/ ) as a representative of the Artists-In-Fire program, an artists residency created by the Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho (https://www.theconfluencelab.org/artists-in-fire-residency ). Months of wading through the online classes and field exercises required to become a ‘Wildland Firefighter Type II’ had brought me at last to that one-lane road perched narrowly above the river below. My goal: take part in a cultural burn, and document the experience for the Future Ecologies podcast (https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-9-on-fire-out-of-the-green-into-the-black ). With a pulaski in one hand and a microphone in the other, I gathered my senses and steeled myself for the trial by fire to come. - - - A short distance away, the assembled crew of 30 awaits the lighting of the test fire. It’s an eclectic mix of Yurok elders, youth, and settlers, goofing around and relishing a bit of down time between the prep work and the burn itself. A hush falls over the group as Rick O’Rourke steps forward, holding a long bundle of aromatic silvery-green wormwood. We’re about to burn 2 acres of Rick’s family land. He lights the bundle and then brings it gently to the ground, igniting the dry oak leaves and fir needles that blanket the soil, murmuring a prayer: “Creator, we’re here to put fire on the ground in a good way. Please look after all of our people who are here to do your service. Help them heal our land, heal our people, bring back our animals, create balance. It’s an honour.” He takes a deep breath as the leaves begin to crackle and hiss, then turns around to face the crew. “It’s receptive!” A moment passes, and then one of the young Yurok crew members arches his back and lets loose a feral yelp. Soon, other members of the crew pitch in, releasing a chorus of fierce howls, guttural cries, and excited yips. As the collective catharsis comes to an end, we find our respective squad members and make our way down the seemingly near-vertical lines cut through the duff to give a boundary to the fire. The burn has begun. Rick O’Rourke offers a prayer as he lights the test fire on his family’s land - - - I have been periodically interviewing people involved in prescribed fire since 2018, and have had a keen interest in the topic since at least 2013. That was the year I lived on the Klamath, just upriver in Karuk territory, and was first exposed to the practice by my neighbors on Butler Flat after nervously witnessing the Orleans Complex fire consume over 20,000 acres, including a chunk of the remote rural town I was living in. But none of these conversations and experiences prepared me for the exhilaration of actually participating in a prescribed burn myself. Smoke over the Klamath River from the Orleans Complex Fire in July of 2013 That first day, the fuels are indeed receptive. As the flames quickly spread, the crew kicks into action, manning water lines and drip torches. I’m forced to drop my microphone as a hose is shoved into my hand, and I’m immediately in the thick of it, spraying water on a “catface” at the base of a venerable black oak, preventing the fire from entering the wound and harming the tree. A sign of my inexperience, black smoke kicks back into my face, clogging all of my senses at once and instantly demonstrating why firefighters often say “eating smoke” instead of “breathing smoke.” I’m forced into a hasty retreat, and a helping hand steps in to take my hose. On this crew, there’s always a teammate ready to step in when you can’t take the heat. After a few hot minutes, the fire settles into a gentle backing burn, creepingly slowly downhill in graceful arcs. Members of the firing team shuffle back and forth just below the trail of flame, mostly watching with satisfaction as it burns merrily away. Occasionally, they offer encouragement in the form of small dots of incandescent fuel from their drip torches. Along the top and sides of the burn, members of the holding team make sure the fire stays within the boundary, immediately snuffing out the few embers that manage to float across the fire line. I watch the flames consume a kinky hazelnut shrub, the leaves slowly curling and the bark blistering under the low-intensity fire. After the burn, as we move through the ashy landscape to wet down any remaining hot spots, Rick will explain that the blistering tells him they generated just the right intensity of fire to ensure that the hazel will resprout with long, straight shoots - perfect for weaving the baskets that the Yurok people are famous for. Beautiful, gentle backing fire consumes understory fuels but leaves trees unharmed - - - The reader may wonder, as I did, what distinguishes ‘cultural fire’ from ‘prescribed fire.’ In reality, they share many characteristics, but the key difference is that prescribed fire is typically applied by settler authorities and organizations to reduce fuel loads and achieve ecological objectives, while cultural fire is applied by Indigenous peoples to sustain a wide variety of cultural values, from improving habitat for game to restoring traditional oak prairies. Ideally, cultural fire and prescribed fire can be applied in concert at a landscape scale, allowing communities at the wildland-urban interface (or the ‘WUI’) to reduce the mounting risk of wildfires, improve the health and productivity of ecosystems, and uphold long-held cultural values. On the second day, as we shepherd the fire through the understory of a black oak woodland, I corner Annelia Norris with my microphone. She’s a Yurok basketweaver, and as we sit underneath a hazel bush, hypnotized by the fire, she tells me, “There are a lot more weavers coming along and coming up. And so there's a need for it, like we need to take care of our materials.” In reality, it takes a healthy cultural landscape to produce a single basket. Vigorous hazelnut shoots are joined by spruce root, maidenhair fern, and even porcupine quills to create a wide variety of functional pieces of art, from the open-weave baskets that cradle Yurok babies to the watertight baskets used for leaching tannins from acorns. She continues, “Our lands have seen trauma. Our people have seen trauma. So when you think about fire, it's cleansing, you know? It cleanses the land. And so when we're talking about healing this is very healing for us.” Beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta californica); inset shows blistering of bark at base of plant Later, I will speak with Yurok Elders who will reference the challenges that they and their ancestors faced through generations of fire suppression, when keeping traditional fire practices alive meant risking imprisonment or even death at the hands of agents of the Californian government. Today, their children are leading the way in restoring healing fire to their territory, and teaching anyone willing to lend a hand how to do so safely and effectively. Annelia concludes, “We've normalized the cultural burning. Like, we've really taken leadership in asserting ourselves and our culture and our land management. You know, it just started catching fire.” Annelia Norris stands on the fire line, separating the unburned ‘green’ from the ashy ‘black’ - - - At the end of three days, we had applied cultural fire to over 30 acres - an impressive feat. We would burn through the night into the early hours of the morning, the flames and starlight merging into conflagrations of stunning beauty. On the morning I was scheduled to leave, as an early fall deluge quenched the landscape, I woke up completely exhausted, with blistered feet and chapped hands, wishing that there had been time for just one more burn. As Rick had told me the day before, “Now you’re addicted and afflicted!” As I returned to my home on Galiano Island in the Salish Sea of western Canada, I reflected on just how similar the ecosystems I work in as a professional biologist are to those I helped to burn in California. We too enjoy a dense green canopy of Douglas-fir, arbutus, and scattered oak, with an understory of huckleberries, blackberries, and the occasional hazel. Our community also faces unprecedented fuel loads and an elevated risk of wildfire due to generations of fire suppression and a spiralling climate crisis. This land shares a long evolutionary history with fire and a rich cultural legacy of Coast Salish peoples burning to maintain camas prairies, oak woodlands, and village sites. Why then, are the Yurok and Karuk restoring fire to thousands of acres of their territories, while we wring our hands with worry at each escalating wildfire season, “eating” smoke as a staple of our diet for months during the summer drought? Why had I needed to travel south of the border for the opportunity to take the first steps in my fire journey? There are a variety of answers to these questions, manifesting as a series of cultural, ecological, and regulatory hurdles which must be approached to bring good fire back to small rural communities like mine. But my experience in Yurok territory showed me that these hurdles are not so high as they may seem. The CFMC started out 10 years ago as a volunteer effort by a rag-tag group of Knowledge Holders cobbling resources together, and now they’re a well-oiled professional unit employing dozens of community members. Over the winter, Joe Gilchrist of the Interior Salish Firekeepers made a tour of coastal British Columbia, stopping on Galiano Island to speak with me, my colleagues, and Indigenous community members. We stood together overlooking the Salish Sea, sharing stories and talking about bringing good fire home to the Salish Sea. Surveying the steep, brushy slope below, he looked at us and said, “Oh yes. You could definitely burn this.” After my time on the Klamath, I now knew it was possible. And I felt that, in good time, we would return fire to this place. As Annelia told me before I left, “This is our purpose. This is why we're here, and this is what we need to be doing.” The author, helping to extinguish the last remaining embers after the fire passes through QR Code for episode 6.9 of the Future Ecologies podcast Chat back to AIF residency Chat

Fire Humanities Theory and Practice Establishing a new interdisciplinary field of study Initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Contributors Include: Jenn Ladino and Erin James (editors) Karin Bolender Teresa Cavazos Cohn Nigel Clark Ashley Cordes Nick Earhart Gretel Evans Greg Garrard Jessica Horton Mica Jorgenson Gavin Kroeber Stephanie LeMenager David Lewis Brett Milligan Miriam Morrill Jesse Oak Taylor Lenya Quinn-Davidson Andreas Rutkauskas Emily Schlickman Jennie Sekanics Bruno Seraphim and Chook Chook Hillman Sasha Michelle White Fire Humanities is a book project, an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration, and the name of an emerging field of study. Growing out of collaborative projects in the Confluence Lab—most recently, a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities , awarded in August of 2024 and defunded in April of 2025—the fire humanities takes as a foundational premise that learning to live well with more fire is not just a matter of educating people about preparedness or conducting more fuels reduction projects. We need to understand fire’s human dimensions. While fire science draws on quantitative data analysis, digital modeling, and remote sensing to predict fire behavior and ecological effects, the fire humanities add qualitative methods to fire research by foregrounding the dynamic historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships humans have with fire. In an essay for the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network , Sasha Michelle White coined the phrase “fire humanities” and explained that “reckoning with landscape fire means reckoning with cultural fuels as well as ecological ones. Effective fire adaptation will require that the cultural ‘fuel loads’—the stories, values, beliefs—and ‘fuel ladders’—the social networks, partnerships, and trust or lack thereof—that have contributed to the current wildfire crisis be examined, and that new ‘loads’ and ‘ladders,’ in which fire is recast as an ally and progenitor of community strength, be created.” Fire Humanities as a book project aims to both expose and shift the dominant paradigm that has fomented the current wildfire crisis, including the demonization of fire, the criminalization of Indigenous fire practices, and the preeminence of fire-phobic settler cultural values. We take several sets of questions to heart. The first set is about how humanities and arts practitioners can make the cultural dimensions of fire more legible, both exposing unhelpful representations and creating or amplifying better ones. We ask: How can the humanities and arts make legible the cultural dimensions of fire? How can humanities scholarship expose and challenge the violence(s)—historical and ongoing—related to fire? What narrative and aesthetic forms might be harnessed, amplified, or created to support more nuanced understandings of landscape fire, whether wild, prescribed, or cultural? The second set of questions demonstrates a commitment to being self-reflexive about our own disciplines and methodologies in the process. With that in mind, we ask: How does fire challenge the methodologies of humanities scholarship? What is humanities knowledge in a world increasingly understood as in crisis? How are our methodologies useful, and how do they need to change? How can humanist scholarship avoid re-inscribing dominant paradigms of fire, and how can western-trained and Indigenous scholars collaborate meaningfully? How might humanities knowledge and methods be enhanced by learning from practitioners who specialize in applied research and fieldwork, including “boots on the ground” fire scientists and fire practitioners? Fire Humanities project team members have shared our work-in-progress at the 2025 ASLE Conference, Penn State’s “Heat and the Humanities ” event and, most recently, a public panel discussion and conversation at the Burke Museum, in Seattle. We hope the book will be in print in 2027 and that this emerging field will continue to build momentum.