Fire Protocols: Attention as Autopoietic Space Blog [PIG]

[jrosales]

1. What did you accomplish last week?

-Onboarding
-Got to meet our new community of protocol study!
-Hosted a successful 52-acre burn at the School for Inclement Weather with a diverse group of stakeholders and partners from different cultural backgrounds and diverse relationship to fire protocol. First seasonal case study for our research.

2. What do you plan to do next week?
   -Determine 3rd jury member
   -Design/refine interview questions
   -Refine list of interviewees and begin scheduling interviews

3. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

• I wouldn’t say anything is blocking us, just the natural fledgling process of beginning and finding our feet, calendaring / getting into our rhythm for meetings, protecting our time and focusing attention.

4. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?
   A reflection from the burn we hosted a few days ago:
   fire is a kairotic practice - a study of the right time - when temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, fine dead fuel moisture, soil moisture, probability of ignition, good lift and dispersal of smoke, availability of trained community and water resources, recovery of humidity at night, and much else all align together to allow for the land to burn in the way it is seeking.

(Choosing a day to burn is a matter of consulting the oracle just as much as it is consulting the weather forecast)

Lighting a fire in the wake of colonial disaster requires deep alignment with kairos. The Kashia Pomo burning that has happened here for so many centuries transformed by Old-growth clear cut → climate collapse —> thick tanoak resprout —> fire suppression —> Sudden Oak Death —> bomb cyclone has created a scenario where fire needs to be held in a very specific way. the ravines are suffocated with fallen trees - too soft and the fire wont do anything besides remove the fine fuels. Too hot and the fire will burn up everything including the second growth redwoods and push against our containment lines.

kairos means just the right conditions so that the fire burns up the heavier fuels below the canopy / leaves smoldering logs in contact with the earth, new bacteria to fight sudden oak death, while letting the mature trees stay green above the flames and the perimeters stay where they are. The immense and vital tension is that fire in these deeply damaged places often requires a style of militancy that is unromantic and uncomfortable for many. It requires squads and chain of command, chainsaws, heavy machinery, maps and firing sequence. It also requires prayer, permission, tribal partnership, years of observation, local knowledge of weather, of history, readiness to sit with the impact. It also requires burn plans, Calfire permits, air quality permits, liability release, financing…

I’m curious about that kairos especially - the alignment between weather, fuel, topography, cultural practice, militancy, bureaucracy and heart.

This 52 acre burn held some of the most beautiful fire effects I’ve gotten to participate in. A terra-forming event for this land on a long healing journey.

Jiordi was the Burn Boss (trainee) and evaluated by Sasha Berleman (Federal Burn Boss). Overall the evaluation went really well and will be submitted to the State Fire Marshall in June with a written report.

[jrosales]

[jrosales]

[celerae]

Very cool to see this work in pictures and feel the ways in which your project “rhymes” with ours in some very big ways, in terms of observation, historical analysis, environmental change, etc. We’ve been trying to focus our work more in this shaping phase, and I think we’re asking similar questions as I see in your original proposal, about how to think about the generality of protocols alongside the specificity of local conditions and stakeholders.

[nathalias]

Hi Celeste! Looking forward to learning more about/with your work and excited to rhyme and find companionship in some of these inquiries. As we start to deepen the questions I’d love to get together and share some of our perspectives

[nathalias]

Update:

• This past week we also started drafting the list of interviewees and interview questions for this first phase of the research, as well as refining our scope and methodology
• Here’s a list of references we’re using for writing. We will continue to update/add in as we move forward.

[nathalias]

WEEK 2

1. What did you accomplish last week?
   a. Literature Review: We continued to work on our list of resources, and Nathalia started drafting insights from Prometheus Remorce, Funny Weather, Delirious New York, articles about controlled burns in Brazil, as well as indigenous texts/conversations about the Guarani people’s relationship to fire.
   b. Prescribed Burn Protocols: Analysis of current materials available through the Prescribed Burn Association, TERA, Humboldt County PB Manual, and others. We started categorizing the information available while observing possible missing elements.
   c. Roadmap and Scope: we continued to adjust the roadmap created last week, realizing that burn protocols can change a lot depending on the region. It’s feeling wise to focus on the Sonoma County ecosystem rather than California. We also discussed different formats and approaches we want to focus on when creating our research deliverables.
   d. Sonoma County: continued to draft insights from the burn Jiordi managed last week, and Jiordi attended and co-hosted a meeting with the Good Fire Alliance.
   e. Maps: started looking at tools and scope of the map we want to create.

2. What do you plan to do next week?
   a. Scheduling interviews with Sonoma County stakeholders
   b. Continue literature review and analysis of current burn protocols, the pyrocene, and anthropology/art/philosophy/ancient texts about fire
   c. Continue writing about the pyrocene and the different ontologies and historical context affecting the current fire ecologies
   d. Preparation for a second burn at the School For Inclement Weather

3. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

   I (Nathalia) attended a symposium about native languages in Brazil, and had the opportunity to learn more about the Guarani people’s fire ontology. Some of my favorite stories were about the memory of fire:

   • Fire as messenger and memory

   “We leave messages within the fire” one of them said. The concept of relating to the memory of fire is traced back to the ancient Peabiru trails, a network of paths used by indigenous peoples, including the Guarani, that connected various parts of South America, from the Atlantic coast of Brazil to the Andes and beyond into Peru. These trails were vital for trade, communication, and cultural exchange. One of the ways in which fire was mentioned is as a guide and a provider of orientation. When getting lost, someone would light a fire and ask it for directions, which would be “housed” in the fire over time as messages and wisdom left from those who had already crossed the trail.

   • Continuous fire

   Some Guarani communities have a continuous fire burning in their aldeias at all times. The continuous fire, often referred to as the sacred fire, symbolizes an eternal connection to the spiritual world and ancestors. It is believed that the fire serves as a bridge between the physical world and the spiritual realm, where the spirits of ancestors reside. Keeping the fire burning is a way to honor and maintain a link with these ancestral spirits, and to preserve cultural identity and continuity.

   I’m keen to continue to look at different fire ontologies and how they might inform the way Jiordi and I are surrounding the question of “how to listen to the weather”. I’m especially intrigued about what perspectives we might unearth around the role of orientation in protocols, and how that might add different tones to my previous work in web3 as well. Which inevitably reminds me of Kei Kreutler’s SoP research from last year (and her upcoming book) — I think it would be valuable to connect at some point.

[jrosales]

WEEK 3

1. What did you accomplish last week?

Jiordi attended the CA Prescribed Burn Association Leadership Retreat in Hopland, CA where he met with many of the leaders of prescribed fire in CA including the Calfire Staff Chief of prescribed fire in the whole state (top of the top…). topics included examining statewide coordination between groups, geodatabase results of prescibed fire in CA over the last 5 years, relationships with gov agencies, relationships between tribal and non-tribal entities, failures of the past 5 years and developments of insurance and liability for prescribed fire.

Jiordi shared about the SoP project in smaller groups and conversations and got to receive feedback from a lot of different people of different backgrounds. He identified and reached out specifically to a few stakeholders to ask if they would be up for a future interview specific to answering questions for our research - to take place in the next month.

Nathalia continues literature reviews

2. **What do you plan to do next week?

Another burn at the School for Inclement Weather with the following orgs - Fire Forward, CA State Parks, Kashia Pomo Cultural Dept.

Continue Literature Reviews

3. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?
   Using this fuel mapper technology we learned that the School for Inclement Weather is in especially hazardous fire conditions relative to the region surrounding it. The lidar mapping took place in 2016 (lidar is used to determing ladder fuels, fuel density, fuel type, vegetation type, etc). This means that all of the burning we’ve been doing out here has happened since the last fly-over, so when the next Lidar fly-over happens we’ll have a really great comparison to see how the work we’ve been doing has changed the hazard level out here.

[jrosales]

WEEK 4

1. what did you accomplish last week?

We hosted our final prescribed fire at SFIW for the season. Actually this is post-season… the burn was planned for what turned out to be a heat-wave in CA. though we were still techincally in “prescription” - the conditions were too hot. This allowed us to reach out to our local air pollution control office and get permission to conduct a night burn. Night burns are extremely rare because of the inversion that happens in PM hours, smoke is less able to rise and dissipate and so nearby communites get smoked out. However, SFIW is deep in the coastal range and there are no smoke sensitive communites to the east of us where wind was blowing. Burning at night extends the burn window to include more of summer because you can get away with dry conditions due to the higher humidity levels at night and cooler temp, so fire behavior is gentler. Kashia cultural dept. wasn’t able to join but we were accompanied by Fire Forward, CA State Parks, Sonoma County Regional Parks, Good Fire Alliance.

We lit the test fire around 6:30 PM and ended ignitions at midnight. The fire started out burning really hot and torching up trees, so we slowed ignitions way down so fire could back down the hill instead of run up it. Conditions got more ideal after sunset once humidity levels came up. I stayed up on patrol with small group until 6am - by the time dawn broke and birds started singing I was completely altered.

Midway through the ignitions we uncovered a failed protocol in the emergency comms in the county. Even though we had made all the necessary registrations and calls to Calfire, Redcom, air quality - some comm did not happen on the backend of dispatch (not our fault) and a wildfire was declared by Sonoma Dispatch. for 12 long minutes about 10 engines, 2 dozer crews and 2 hand crews (about 80 people total) were mobilized in emergency fashion and converging on SFIW ready to fight a vegetation fire in super steep terrain (which wouldn’t have gone well at all… they would have needed to call in air support). Fortunately for everyone there was no wildfire. they were corrected and turned back. Good training opportunity? I spoke to the battalion chief the next day and he relayed to me that on a conference call with Calfire overhead that morning the incident came up, and they are improving their protocol so that an additional communication takes place between agencies for all prescribed burns, so this doesn’t happen again. So we improved state prescribed fire protocol

2. what do you plan to do next week?
   Patrol the burn as stumps burn down
   Nathalia arrives to SFIW
   cont literature review
   prep for EE

3. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

Nathalia:
Jiordi and I have been reflecting on the importance of time scale and perspective in relation to this work of prescribed burns. In times of urgency, perhaps people might not have the space or capacity to reflect and situate this work both within a historical context and a larger-scale scope of what and how this work might be important. How might orienting through a longer time scale be relevant to work that is considered urgent? How can protocol support a praxis of navigating complexity and asking better questions, instead of a default of assumed certainty?

How can protocol serve as scaffolding to orientations that are grounded in context?

How can protocols help ground humans toward a quality of attention that supports their decision-making and navigation of complex systems? Does the difference between protocol and ritual become more apparent when we look through longer-term implications and externalities?

[DButler]

This is a fascinating update on many accounts. I love thinking about the act of burning - the science, the bureaucracy, the listening, and the ritual all mixing with the opportunity to change the landscape and yourself. Considering how many groups communicate and coordinate sounds quite complex. Do these groups have aligned or desperate goals?

[nathalias]

Thank you, @DButler Danielle. We believe they have aligned goals toward burning and making this process more efficient/effective, however some might have different incentives and orientations.

[nathalias]

Updates

This past month has marked a significant shift in our research journey as both Jiordi and I are now physically present in Sonoma County. Being on the ground together has enriched our collaborative efforts and allowed us to delve deeper into the complexities of fire protocols. It was crucial to witness the presence of fire throughout this month and observe some of the socio-political dynamics in the area, which we plan on describing in our research.

Research Scope
Recognizing the unique complexity of factors at play locally, we decided to narrow our research scope to Sonoma County instead of the whole state of California. This decision underscores the importance of being place-bound in our approach, enabling us to address the nuanced challenges and opportunities specific to the region we are involved with rather than a broader scope.

Edge Esmeralda

We both attended Edge Esmeralda, where we got to meet some of the SoP cohort and learn more about some contexts within the Ethereum community. It was especially fun to hear more about some of the approaches to decentralized resource management and community coordination, as we navigate similar questions in the context of prescribed burns.

Curious fact: During Edge Esmeralda a wildfire named the Point Fire broke out northwest of Healdsburg, the city where the event was happening. The fire rapidly grew to 1,000 acres, causing significant air quality issues in the region. This incident allowed the entire gathering to witness firsthand the ever-present relationship Sonoma County has with fire ecologies. Read more about the Point Fire.

First jury meeting
We also held our first jury meeting with Tim and Timber, followed by a conversation with Venkat, which helped us sharpen the scope and direction of our process. We drew connections between last year’s cohort pieces and our current work, and outlined some of the following observations:

Some of the Main Challenges of Fire Ecologies in Sonoma County

• Cultural Fear, Misinformation/Disinformation
• Limited number of trainers and support for training opportunities in prescribed burning.
• Difficulty in modulating information for different skill levels and moving users from passive participants to active implementers.
• Digital and Resource Accessibility: user-unfriendly websites, lacking information for different experience levels.
• High costs for equipment rental.
• Coordination issues due to limited resources and short-term & short-notice processes.
• New potential process requiring vinyeards’ approval for prescribed burns, potentially hindering fire management efforts.
• Coordination challenges within organizations, with many inactive members despite high enrollment.

Potential Areas of Improvement

1. Contextualization - we would like to make a sort of ‘tree-ring timeline’ that historicizes the use (and criminalization) of prescribed fire, that recognizes tribal histories, colonization, ecological transformation, healthy fire-return intervals and suppression. We believe an easy to read-and-share learning document that could be utilized as a consensual-reality between diverse partners would help to support healthy collaboration between the immense ‘mezcla’ (post-colonial mash-up of native, non-native, and everything queer and in-between those identities) that is the growing prescribed fire community. What further context feels important?
2. Coordination - how can the organization and implementation of prescribed fire happen more smoothly, with easier access to expertise, holding resources, and participants without reliance on a single actor or organization? This includes but is not limited to clarifying different pathways for Rx ‘applicants’ to get fire on their land based on their unique circumstances, supporting bio-regional groups to lean on each other more, exploring potential software improvement that can assist with Rx sign-ups and on-boarding of resources. While there are many flow-charts and how-to guides for getting a burn to happen, the information that is attempting to be conveyed is often too complex for the average land-steward to make an informed decision for how to move forward (i.e. most people have no idea where to start when attempting to fill out a burn plan or attain a smoke permit, etc…). What improvements can be made here to help the process run more smoothly from planning to mop-up, and happen in accordance with tribal leadership?
3. Memetics - aka cultural ideas, behaviors, images, that pass easily between people on a large scale to determine a shared identity or set of values. There’s been a wide array of what an agent of prescribed fire should be called. Generally, they are required to be a fire fighter (type 2) which bunches them into a certain pre-existing identity of fire-suppression. However, this is often just part of a larger and more complex set of values that make up the identity of those in our community. Some use the term ‘fire-lighter’ some use prescribed fire practitioner, some use forest technician, etc… We are curious to gather peoples’ thoughts on best term to name what it is we do, and accompanying imagery, symbols, phrases, etc that would be generative in conveying the practice beyond our internal community of practice. Can this happen in a way that invites in diversity rather than homogenizes the community of practice?

While we are considering a few other longer-term questions (as in 400 year type questions about the future of Rx, transfusion of knowledge, lifeways, etc…) they don’t fit within the scope of this initial research.

Perspective from Local Stakeholders & Experts

We are reaching out to local stakeholders involved with fire ecologies in Sonoma County to share our proposals and hear their perspectives. We believe that gathering wisdom from those already actively making improvements will be invaluable to our research.

You can view the invitation we sent to local stakeholders here.

We would also love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, both about the overall process of our research and the specific improvement ideas we are considering.

[ceciliyazi]

Hi Fire Protocols! It lingers with me from your presentation as well as here when you made several notes on the crucial need to share and hear perspectives from the local stakeholders. Perhaps it is precisely about setting up these sharing, hearing, passing-ons, gathering-wisdoms, paying-attentions, asking-questions, reflecting…, whether it’s in-person or via the low-tech tools such as emails or spreadsheets, laboring through coordinating, to every relation that will connect different contexts and stakes between the complexities/realities that interests me. I also love the stories about the memory of fire, quoting your “fire as messenger and memory” and “continuous fire,” where the fire (and the protocol) is about paving paths and links across the world and spirits, while revisiting your original proposal and again inspired by the “looking-away-at” which was what first attracked me to your work.

The way I’m resonating with these methods is probably from a documentary lens, which invites us to look at not only the complex dynamics of one side of the people and their environment we are with when filming, but we’re also carefully thinking about the possibilities (and responsibilities) to pass on these acts of looking and hearing to other sides for potential connections, understandings, and discussions. It’s suddently ringing a bell to me how these could possibly be on a shared track with what I’ve been thinking about for my PILL project, such as to think with the “edges”/“paranode”? …if it’s okay for me to draw this association this way, since I’m still thinking on a very surface level of it all… I’m curious about any continuous means of documentations you’d make while leaving back-and-forth spaces as you weave through these dynamic links by taking its own specificity in your process (if it’s for the contextualization-coordination-memetics process?). I actually also wonder if these detailed and vivid field notes (such as the one from your WEEK 4 post) could contribute to the outcome in the building of this protocol. :))

[nathalias]

@ceciliyazi thank you for your company in caring about these processes of observation, the pathways in between, the zig-zags (I’m thinking of Deleuze’s “from A to Z” dictionary and particularly enjoy what he does with the letter Z). The space for a continuous means of documentation, “alive archives” that offer instigations for relationality, “tracking” as intimacy with an ever-shifting/place-based context, continues to feel like a core piece of this process. I also really appreciate the thoughtfulness in your blog post and how much you’ve weaved in there:“make art with protocols”, " connection as material, protocol as aesthetics", Ulises Ali Mejias work, and so many inquiries that I’m excited about & looking forward to continuing to be in conversation with you.

[jrosales]

AUGUST UPDATE:

We have officially completed the interview process and have now moved into design of deliverables and artifacts based on what we heard from the community.

We feel affirmed in our choice to focus on the three key areas of coordination / memetics / contextualization

Each area of focus now has an associated project + space of impact

1. Coordination is intended to primarily impact the Good Fire Alliance (local Sonoma / Marin county Prescribed Burn Association). Based on interviews with members of the GFA steering committee, alongside our own audit of the current coordination of prescribed burns, we’ve determined that the best protocol improvement we can suggest is the creation of bioregional prescribed fire coordinators to act as ‘middles’ between land-owners and the resources necessary to carry out a prescribed burn. This looks like hiring out 4 bioregional coordinators (paid quarter-time positions) who work on the behalf of the GFA and have expertise to carry out site-visits, write burn plans, and guide the overall coordination process (therefore taking that expectation away from the land-owner, whose more appropriate role we’ve determined can be understood as Local-Knowledge Keeper)

   We’ve pitched this concept to the GFA action Sub-committee and it was received with strong support and given some refinement. In order to establish legibility, the funds to pay these positions will be housed within the partner nonprofit: Audobon Canyon Ranch, which holds legitimacy in the eyes of the State as well as can contribute high levels of fire expertise. The proposal will next be presented to the full Steering Committee on Sept. 11 in order to gain approval and pursue pilot program / funding.

Memetics and Contextualization have somewhat blurred but we’ve identified two clear outputs that contain both elements

2. Log-book - we’ve identified a very practical need on the prescribed fireline for a field-notebook that all participants (especially new members) can utilize to record weather and fire observations, which are given out over the radio on every hour by a weather-monitor. These are essential observations to record, however most members don’t recognize they should be writing that information down and incorporating it into embodied knowledge of how fire behaves relative to changing weather conditions. It is one of the most important forms of knowledge in a fire context. This booklet would contain weather tables that could easily be filled out by members, and would be distributed to all members of the GFA (and could continue to grow beyond). Camouflaged within the logbook are 2 other critical elements that require a practical context like the logbook in order to be distributed and become legible.

   The cover of the book is an illustration of a fire-effected redwood stump, visualizing tree-rings that have experienced regular intervals of fire. This meme expresses 3 key components of living within fire-adapted landscapes: 1. it is not enough to burn a forest once. They have to keep burning in cadence, and require that long-term commitment from human populations. Key term: fire-return intervals. 2. the image also shows that fire suppresses growth in order to generate growth (5 ring-years after fire show minimal growth and recovery process, next 5 years show abounding growth and beneficial effect of fire - aka no mud no lotus). 3. the image shows that time to a forest is not linear — nor is it even concentric. The rings turn in on themselves, they fold and diverge, they contain and reflect the madness of nature. We are meeting with an artist later today to discuss commissioning the illustration.

   Lastly, in the back of the logbook are prompts and questions meant to support land-owners aka Local Knowledge Keepers to deepen their observation of the land they are stewarding i.e. what plants are growing there and how will they be affected by fire. This section is meant to support those stewards to be prepared to both support the prescribed fire coordinator who will write the burn plan and require their local knowledge input, as well as prepare them to adapt and integrate changes that they’re seeing take place in the forest before and after each fire. Basically it is designed to make them better observers and participants.

   overall this logbook would be a point of cohesion and shared-identity between all GFA members. Everyone would have one.

3. The School for Inclement Weather - we are exploring how knowledge transfusion of prescribed fire-use happens. What are the pedagogies and contexts that allow for this type of knowledge to be both rigorous and commonplace? This is the long-term approach to the way fire lives in cultural memory, how it is held within knowledge-generating environments. We are particularly interested in one of our interviewees reflections upon seeing indigenous children in her community participating in a prescribed fire: “to them, this will be something we do and have always done - as far back as a child can remember” as opposed to the current cultural relationship to fire which is something we are attempting to ‘recover’ and at times wrestle from the past.

   Secondly, this is the space where we are most excited to explore how our whole project of Fire Protocols: Attention as Autopoietic Space can be a site of experimentation that benefits the larger pursuits and inquiries that Ethereum is opening via SoP.

Additional updates:

We completed our second Jury meeting and have approval from our team to continue along the paths that we’ve identified. We received good questions and nudges toward refinement.

We both plan to attend a week-long fire training put on by the Cultural Fire Management Council from Sept 1-8

Jiordi was finally officially certified as a CA-State Burn Boss. He is now the 40th in the State.

Jiordi was hired by the Kashia Pomo Cultural Dept. to begin writing a burn plan for their 600-acre coastal preserve.

Jiordi had a meeting with the Kashia Pomo Cultural Dept. to learn about their cultural protocols and what guidelines they would like to be incorporated into how prescribed fires are organized and conducted by 3rd parties within tribal territory. (the Kashia have rarely been consulted or invited to prescribed burn projects unless there is legal requirement).

New term exploration: disaster-companionship

While ‘disaster-preparedness’ is an essential part of our work and something we seek to practice in very tangible ways (like tactical fire and medical trainings) — it doesn’t always account for the fact that there are simply things we cannot entirely prepare for because we cannot yet entirely conceive of them. Time is ripening for climate-based realities and catastrophes that have simply not existed on the planet within human memory. By the uninhabited nature of that dilemma we’ve come to focus our capacities on something called ‘Disaster Companionship’ which is the study of how to maintain a hospitable posture towards one another even when things are shit — what are the practices, relationships, places of study that keep us nimble and flexible within rapidly-changing conditions, and ultimately grow our ability to improvise while maintaining collective harmony.