The art of making fire-with

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relevance of outdoor adventures in the troubled times of climate catastrophe, mass extinction, and ecological breakdown by attending to human relationship with fire. Informed by post-anthropocentric perspectives found in feminist new materialism and indigenous wisdom, the article reveals how more-than-human agency, care, and reciprocity are manifested in the ancestral skill of making fire by friction. Three relational stories are crafted from my personal experiences with learning the bow drill method of friction fire during a year-long course on ancestral skills. These stories of making fire-with trees, plants, tools, weather, and other human and non-human bodies connect situated experiences from the forest with broader contemporary concerns related to outdoor ethics, technological dependencies of modern outdoor practice, and the conflicting meanings of survival and good life in the Anthropocene. The article contributes with a unique situated account of more-than-human entanglements involved in fire making, along with the ontological and ethico-political possibilities that learning this ancestral skill may present for imagining deep ecological transformations through outdoor adventures. Instead of an archaic reminder of human mastery over nature or an outdated guilty pleasure, fire emerges as a non-human teacher, companion, and a caring host who provides spaces to come together and experiment with more relational ways of living as well as possible in multispecies worlds.