Fire Conservancy: The Origins of Wildland Fire Protection in British India, America, and Australia

Abstract

The advent of modern wildland fire protection was almost everywhere associated with the advent of modern forestry. Professional forestry itself evolved beyond folk practices when the Enlightenment applied its rationalizing impulses to the peculiar environmental and social circumstances of central Europe. It became a vital export to overseas colonies as the industrial revolution and imperialism established a global economy and a global ecology, and as Western science promulgated a global scholarship. Foresters joined other transnational cadres of European engineers and administrators. But everywhere that European foresters ventured they encountered fire practices vastly different from those of central Europe in the 19th century. Everywhere their precepts conflicted with local lore, their practices with local custom. Everywhere they found themselves immersed in a conflict over fire practices that was virtually instantaneous, often violent, and unavoidable.

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“Of the many problems which have to be dealt with by the forester, there is none which is so constantly with him as that of fire. Its shadow is always over him: the dread possibilities are ever present in his mind.” - C.E. Lane-Poole (1920)

“He [the Forester] is a soldier of the State and something more.” - Sir D.E. Hutchins (1916)