Feeling the Fireline: The Social Formation of Embodied Wildfire Knowledge

This article examines the formation of environmental knowledge among California wildland firefighters in contexts of extreme climate change. Every year, as climate change intensifies fire conditions, wildland firefighters work along the edges of the largest blazes in California’s human history. The lives of people and forests often depend upon firefighters’ abilities to predict and manage the spread of flames, anticipating where, when, and with what intensity fires will move. Firefighters base their predictions on interacting forms of knowledge, but shifting environmental conditions are disrupting the material, sensuous baselines upon which this knowledge is built. This paper examines how wildland firefighters form environmental knowledge, predict fire behavior, and manage fire in unprecedented conditions. The formation of fire knowledge, this work will show, is a social process in which firefighters train one another to see species of vegetation based on their flammability; to feel wind, humidity, and temperature to predict how fire could behave; and to distinguish the smell of actively burning vegetation within charred forests. I argue that the formation of embodied environmental knowledge is an important tool for managing increasingly volatile fire conditions.