Different Ways of Knowing How to Coexist with Fire

摘要

Geographers are well placed to make valuable contributions to how we understand and live with fire. Knowledge production is upheld as providing the answer to the riddle of our coexistence with such perils, and yet it is marred by uncertainties, paradox and reversal. Such matters are discussed here in relation to the different ways of knowing and learning how we might coexist with fire. Concepts of bushfire risk, threat and tolerance, which are much used here, evince a slip-periness with recent histories of recalibration and nomenclatural additions. They are also deeply imbricated in the dynamic relationships linking society and environment and their messy entanglements, which are well appreciated by geographers. Likewise, the clarification of any disaster typology as definitive comes at a cost. Consider, for example, how events are often framed as 'natural' phenomena unfolding from 'pre-' to 'postdisaster' or reduced to precisely calculable, even if varyingly improbable, occurrences (Williams, 2008; 2012; Williams and Jacobs, 2010). Against desires for prediction and control, notions of normalcy in the world (and our knowledge of it) are necessarily now being abandoned in efforts to manage increasingly excessive disasters (Williams, 2008). Our onto-epistemological edifices are being shaken to their very foundations. This disaster is not all bad though, because we too must respond and can do so by building back better using the latest (and some not-so-new) materials and technologies.