Toward Socio‐Legal Geographies of Fire

Human and physical geographers alike have long called for a shift toward the study of fire that re‐politicizes geographies of fire and pyrogeographies. Whether through centering the role of fire in the Anthropocene, proposing the pyrocene to interrogate our current epoch, or looking at the aftermath and governance of fire to better understand social inequities in post‐disaster contexts, geographers have taken up the spatial, metaphoric, and combustible properties of fire. Despite calls to re‐politicize geographies of fire, geographic inquiry into fire continues to focus primarily upon socio‐ecological approaches and a “wildland‐urban‐interface” land designation that stems from colonial definitions of land as “empty” or terra nullius . In addition, when fire is viewed within urban contexts to study the Anthropocene, these works often take the industrial revolution as a starting point and/or flatten urban spaces, leaving unattended the role that colonialism and imperialism have played in creating current geographies of fire. Yet, there is general agreement among human geographers, environmental historians, and fire ecologists that colonial governance and land policy have dictated pyrogeographies. Stemming from these observations, this paper asks: what could socio‐legal geographies of fire entail? Building from existing literature on fire geographies, I suggest that global orderings, and specifically logics underlying property, are rife with socio‐legalities which are spatialized through fire. Such critical interrogations of fire can lay bare the legal, social, and political settings and materialities of fire, including spatial inquiry into the lived and harnessed use, desire, and criminalization of fire, while revealing the underlying powers and authorities that have been naturalized in place.