Colonization of fire: why biophysical sciences must teach environmental justice
Crystal Kolden
INTRODUCTION
For nearly two decades, I have taught in the biophysical sciences (often referred to as the “hard sciences” or “physical and life sciences”). But only recently did I begin to understand that I was unwittingly perpetuating racism, social injustice, and structural inequities in my science classes. Not overtly or intentionally, but rather by ignoring the human agency and power structures embedded in the history and evolutions of the sciences, even as I presented science to my students as a truth-finding endeavor, independent of bias. However, the specter of climate change, manifesting in my own discipline as an escalating number of wildfire disasters, has challenged me to confront both the racist and socially unjust history of my discipline, and the way I teach my classes and engage with my students.
Wildfire is a natural ecological process that has been present on Earth since just after vascular plants appeared and for the entirety of human history. The control and use of fire as a tool were key factors in the evolution of humans, setting us apart from other closely related species. Across millennia, Indigenous peoples globally adopted myriad uses for fire in broader land and resource stewardship, and it became a core element of many cultures. During European colonization, however, colonial powers sought to end Indigenous fire use, first discouraging it and then outright prohibiting it as part of broader policies of erasure and cultural extermination against Indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, and beyond. In the process, Western colonial powers slowly recast the use of fire on the land in a negative light, an enemy of progress. They also cast the people who used it as villains. In the US, these included not only numerous Indigenous tribes across the expanding western states, but also newly freed slaves-turned-sharecroppers in the south during the Reconstruction era and impoverished, immigrant homesteaders seeking to clear land for farming quickly and effectively with fire.
The colonization of fire was congruent with the needs of those in power. Southern plantation owners had just lost both a war and their slave labor pool, and sought to unofficially re-enslave Black laborers through Jim Crow laws. As timber baron capitalists expanded their empires to the vast virgin forests of the west, they ignited destructive wildfires by running spark-spitting log trains through miles of their own clear-cut slash and then sought government-funded firefighting efforts to protect their assets. This capitalist hierarchy demonstrates why major fatality wildfires in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871 (at least 1,500 killed), Hinckley, Minnesota, in 1894 (418 killed), and Cloquet, Wisconsin, in 1918 (450-plus killed) generated no substantial government policies on wildfire. Rather, it was the loss of 3 billion-plus board feet of virgin timber in Idaho and Montana in 1910 that catalyzed and funded the modern firefighting machine: the US Forest Service (USFS).
Contemporary wildfire science in the US germinated in the ashes of wildfires that killed “heroic” USFS firefighters sent to protect timber assets, namely the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire. In a Montana research facility, engineers sought to develop physical models of forest fire spread and atmospheric scientists focused on models of ignition probability and forest fire danger. They sought to accurately model and predict where fire would ignite and spread, so that it could more quickly be suppressed. Biologists were some of the earliest to acknowledge that fire was beneficial in ecosystems in the southeastern US; but this, too, stemmed from concerns about declining habitat for key game species, and the desire of upper-class whites to hunt such species. When ecological scientists became interested in wildfire, it was to note the detrimental effects of its absence due to suppression in wilderness areas where lightning was frequent, without acknowledging that the same so-called wilderness likely benefited from regular Indigenous burning as well. All of these perspectives stem from a central pathology of natural resource management that is fundamental to European colonization: command and control of nature.
I came to wildfire science after serving as a USFS wildland firefighter in California, a state that utilizes hundreds of incarcerated citizens as firefighters through a demonstrably flawed criminal reform program. I worked on wildfires shoulder to shoulder with these so-called “inmate firefighters,” who were kind to me and hardworking, but made only $1 per day under what was essentially forced servitude. As a young, privileged white woman, I failed to connect the dots between the Jim Crow laws of the 19th century and the brown and black men and women working next to me on the line. They represented a continuation of the long history of structural racism embedded in the US criminal justice system that unfairly and disproportionately imprisons people of color, and uses the incarcerated as a cheap labor pool. When I came to fire science as a graduate student, and then ultimately as a professor, I did so naively, assuming that the scientific method required no social context. I taught my science courses focused on a physical world generally devoid of humans, only introducing our species to describe our contemporary role in altering burning landscapes through land use.
Then came the Camp Fire.
On a dry, hot, and windy day in November 2018, a wildfire started in the remote Feather River Canyon in northern California. In less than two hours, it had consumed two small communities and the town of Paradise, with a population of over 20,000. Thousands of homes and livelihoods were gone, and 85 people were dead. Three years later, only one-third of the town had been rebuilt, and refugees left homeless by the fire were still scattered across the country. It was the greatest contemporary wildfire catastrophe in the US. It will also happen again unless we finally begin to address social vulnerability as a root cause of such disasters.
In the aftermath of the Camp Fire, debate raged over whether people should be allowed to live in such fire-prone places, and whether the displaced fire survivors should be allowed to rebuild. Those in positions of privilege and power expressed righteous disbelief that anyone would willingly live in such a dangerous landscape. They ignored the skeletal steel frames lying amidst a sea of white ash in what were obviously mobile home parks (many of them senior “55+” communities), and overlooked the high proportion of fatalities that were disabled or mobility-limited persons. For me, however, the moment it crystallized that we fire scientists had failed miserably was when journalists began to ask me, “Didn’t they know how high the fire hazard was?” As if that information alone would have automatically induced a resident to relocate to a safer place, regardless of their social, fiscal, or family situation.
This was particularly ironic, of course, because another large wildfire started on the exact same day as the Camp Fire, but in the very wealthy and celebrity-laden community of Malibu, California, nearly 500 miles to the south. Many Malibu residents fled in luxury vehicles and headed for second homes elsewhere. Some hired private firefighting crews to protect their homes. Three people were killed by the Woolsey Fire, but media outlets focused reporting on a celebrity home being wrapped in tin foil and doused in fire retardant gel, as if that was the solution for the masses.
The contrast between the impacts of dueling wildfires on these two towns across the vast divide of one state, and the public response to the outcomes, clarified the problem and my role in it in a heartbeat. Wildfire disasters, like other natural hazards, stem from and are exacerbated by social inequity, with the privileged merely inconvenienced while the socially vulnerable are destroyed. Although I had taught my students the basics of combustion and fire spread, I completely failed to convey the environmental and social justice angles of the problem. I had focused solely on the physical and ecological elements of fire and ignored the biased perspectives I brought to my own frameworks as a scientist.
This was a watershed moment for me as a science educator. As I began to re-evaluate my courses and my teaching objectives, a key question repeatedly arose. How does science currently perpetuate social inequity and, more critically, how do we as educators break that cycle? This is the question I ask at the beginning of every term now, and I try to integrate it into every aspect of my activities as a fire scientist and educator. I seek to break the cycle in three key ways.
THE GOAL: TEACH SCIENCE FROM A PLACE THAT ACKNOWLEDGES AND CHALLENGES SOCIAL INEQUITY
1. Acknowledge that science is biased because humans are asking the questions, and humans are inherently self-interested
It is often said that history is written by those in power. While we rarely acknowledge it, science is conducted by the same. The history of science is littered with immoral, inequitable, and inhumane experiments and studies constructed and conducted through the lens of bias. Some of the most egregious examples, such as the entire field of eugenics or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, led to revolutions in standards for ethical conduct. Ecology is not immune to bias; ecologists spent decades assuming that change events such as floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. were “natural disasters” that “disturbed” an otherwise stable ecosystem (which had evolved without substantial human influence). Ecologists today still struggle to apply other worldviews and acknowledge such events as necessary components of a healthy system, rather than an outside, negative force. The tendency to centralize ourselves and our human needs in every scientific query is a colonial legacy that normalizes structural inequalities not just between different populations of humans, but also between humans and the non-human world. Many species of trees and plants need fire to survive; but in wildfire science, the perpetuation of colonial, human-centered worldviews includes characterizing wildfire as a negative event, erasing a long history of Indigenous fire use prior to European colonization, and framing research questions complicit with power hierarchies.
In my fire ecology class, I previously began with the physics of combustion, which I thought of as basic, grounded scientific facts. I now begin with an entire segment on the history of fire science, perspective and ways of knowing, and Indigenous relationships with fire (see Middleton, this volume). We explore the reasons humans sought to understand fire in a scientific context in the first place, stemming from capitalist natural resource ownership structures. We discuss how this has led to a scientific focus on being able to predict fires and their spread, in order to stop them. We also discuss how European notions of land tenure and ownership of resources fundamentally differ from other cultures and how colonization altered land stewardship practices.
Such discussions and introductions to alternative ways of knowing and doing science have repeatedly appeared in course reflections and assessments as highlights for students unaccustomed to such ideas in science courses. It has also opened the door to integrating social science, ethics, and critical theory into relatively biophysical science courses. For example, when I teach GIS (Geographic Information Systems) courses for environmental science students, I introduce coordinate systems developed in Europe and the Americas; but also highlight how those coordinate systems were used to facilitate American colonization, the African slave trade, and the Homestead Act, which evicted tribes from their homelands in order to fulfill the racist ideology of Manifest Destiny. When we discuss cartography and mapping, we have a larger conversation about how maps generalize the nuance of the real world, and whose story gets told versus erased when victors and colonizers make the maps. We dive into ethics around types of data and who data belong to, particularly when marginalized groups are the source or topic of such data. Students finish the course with a section on remote sensing, where we talk about privacy laws and who they protect (or don’t), and the ethics of creating data and maps that can be used in unintended and sometimes harmful ways. Such conversations about bias and ethics rarely happen in science courses but they are critical to addressing environmental justice.
2. Rebuild science pedagogy and assessment to reflect diversity of learners
The biophysical sciences, despite seeking to advance understanding of subjects, have pedagogically changed little in the classroom, and have been exceedingly slow to diversify. We biophysical scientists are still overwhelmingly white, majority male, and we are trained to use conventional, standardized teaching and assessment tools, which are known to be biased against many types of students we educate, with little reflection of the contemporary understanding of methods that can bridge such gaps and remove biases. Years ago, I worked with education faculty to develop a climate change curriculum for Indigenous high schools that embraced alternative, culturally congruent ways of knowing. It challenged many of my own entrenched ideas about my courses.
Scientists are not often trained in education pedagogy, so my approach has been to seek out more inclusive methods and assessment tools through STEM-oriented collaborations with education faculty and colleagues who draw upon their own experiences to teach more inclusively. All of my courses now use longitudinal assessment and self-reflection rather than rote memorization exams. I’ve dropped expensive textbooks in favor of open-source materials to reflect that most of my pupils are first-generation college students. Like many faculty, I use a flipped classroom approach, and am intentional about including a mix of activities that appeal to auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners. I am also constantly redeveloping my material to be place-based, experiential, and relevant to my students. This is something that all science faculty can do given the availability of materials online and by asking their students to draw upon and potentially share their lived experience; I have learned much about the challenges and traumas my students face simply by listening. Teaching cellular biology? Create space to discuss the ethics of the HeLa cell line, taken without permission from Henrietta Lacks. Teaching geology? Illuminate the incredible transformation that Western imperialism has wrought on the Earth’s crust in only a fraction of the planet’s long history. Astronomy? Introduce Indigenous worldviews on the skies. Doing so is not simply an effort to diversify ideas; it is also acknowledging that interdisciplinarity is central to understanding the world and breaking down the disciplinary silos that have contributed to enduring structural inequities.
In California’s Central Valley, my freshman fire course (usually > 60% Latinx students) has pivoted to focus more on the experience of Latinx and immigrant agricultural workers and families dealing with smoke, which my students relate to better since many have never been to the nearby Sierra Nevada forests. I use trauma-informed tools such as nature journaling to facilitate both discussion and processing of emotions. Nature journaling is widely recognized as complementary to the traditional biophysical sciences and honors alternative ways of knowing and perspectives, which is critical for achieving climate justice. It creates space for healing, facilitates user-led engagement with a subject around which many students have experienced trauma or which they have been preconditioned to fear, and encourages emotional and sensory connections that are often absent from the biophysical sciences. It helps students overcome the fear of “not knowing” that is so common in the biophysical sciences (see Dunkin, this volume). Finally, it opens the door for further critical assessment of Western science and the solutions to the wildfire disaster problem that are produced by colonial perspectives, amplifying the content-based discussions.
3. Initiate a cycle of change that both transforms our relationship with fire and prioritizes environmental justice
If you ask a natural hazards scientist what their goal is, you will inevitably receive a variation of the same answer: to understand and better quantitatively predict physical phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, tornados, or volcanic eruptions in order to mitigate disasters. If we can accurately predict what will happen, the dominant assumption goes, we can prevent the disaster. This is, of course, a fallacy that ignores social complexities and prevailing structural inequities.
Wildfire science has followed the same trajectory for much of its comparatively short disciplinary history, focusing on understanding how and when fires ignite and spread in order to stop the spread and suppress the fires. The field is substantially more complicated, however, by anthropogenic feed- back — the role of humans in shaping wildfire events. The frequency and intensity of some hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, are completely unaffected by human activities. Meteorological events like hurricanes and floods, in contrast, are demonstrably altered by human-caused climate change that warms the atmosphere, a clear human feedback. Similarly, wildfire has been altered by climate change, but it is also substantially controlled by how humans steward the land. In the modern era, wildfire disasters have revealed the extreme hubris of colonial attitudes toward fire. Colonial powers criminalized and removed Indigenous cultural fire, suppressed undesirable natural wildfire, and incentivized deforestation to facilitate agriculture (a practice which still drives contemporary tropical deforestation). These feedbacks have increased the potential for wildfires to burn ever more intensely and uncontrollably, releasing substantial greenhouse gas emissions and with dire effects on humans.
The structural inequities perpetuated by colonization determine who is most negatively affected by hazards, including wildfire. As with other disasters, the most vulnerable to wildfire disasters are those lacking personal transportation (e.g., children, the elderly, disabled, unhoused, and economically disadvantaged); those living in highly flammable, semi-permanent housing (e.g., mobile home parks) that is quickly consumed in conflagrations; the migrant labor groups who conduct the majority of outdoor day labor (e.g., crop harvest, construction, landscaping); and the most socioeconomically vulnerable (e.g., renters), who have neither the fiscal resources nor the legal ability to alter the structures where they live to be less flammable. In contemporary America, these groups are also statistically more likely to be marginalized populations.
In the wake of nearly every major wildfire disaster in California, there are calls to simply ban people from living in “fire-prone” places. Apart from the lack of a clear definition of what a “fire-prone” place is, this proposed solution ignores why people live in rural areas in the first place. California has one of the highest income equality gaps in the country, and the only affordable areas for many are rural towns in places that burn. For Indigenous people globally, such “fire-prone” places are their homelands and asking them to leave perpetuates centuries of Indigenous erasure. Further, there are Earth hazards everywhere, yet we do not simply ban people from living on earthquake fault lines or in the vast swath of the midwestern US better known as Tornado Alley. Instead, we mitigate the hazards.
What if we challenge our students to imagine a future where we don’t fear fire and we prioritize environmental justice? In my fire science courses, I introduce environmental justice early so it becomes a thread throughout the course. Subsequent conversations about restoring Indigenous cultural fire can then be framed in two ways: applying a different world view to fire management, and overturning an unjust legacy of colonization. Similarly, the roles of land use planning and fuel modifications are no longer simply quantitative assessments of how far apart homes and trees should be, but rather a broader discussion of how a landscape can burn regularly with minimal detrimental effects to everyone who lives there because the most vulnerable have been prioritized and protected. Fire management has historically been about protecting natural resources. By teaching fire science through a climate justice framework, I am pushing the potential fire managers of tomorrow to approach land stewardship from a place of decolonization, with the hope of creating a feedback cycle that draws a more inclusive pool of students that see themselves and their worldviews represented in management agencies. If a diverse and justice-oriented pool of professionals decide to engage in and revolutionize a field that has historically not been diverse at all, it could affect the transformative change that has long been needed in fire science.
CONCLUSION
The biophysical sciences approach climate change disasters (e.g., wildfires) by assuming that understanding the physical process can solve the problem. Because understanding the biophysical problem doesn’t address structural inequities, however, disasters are ultimately a function of continuing inequities. Science asks, “What happened?” and looks for Band-Aid solutions to treat the symptoms. We should ask, “How do we address the structural problem that produced the disaster in the first place?” and seek equitable solutions from more inclusive science that addresses root causes of disasters. To get to that point, we must break the cycle of structural inequities in science, and the science classroom is the best place to begin. It can be daunting for biophysical science faculty to address environmental justice, but I have found it easy to thread my courses with the changes I describe above. In response, I have seen students adapt quickly to this more cross-disciplinary approach, hungry to critically address traditional Western science. They leave the course not only as better scientists but as humans more engaged in creating an inclusive, sustainable future for all.