Closing conference of the FIREUSES — Burning Landscapes project where the main results will be presented combined with other perspectives and geographies of fire.

Burning Landscapes:

A political and environmental history of the large wildfires in Portugal

Over the last three years, the FIREUSES project has subjected Portugal’s current major fire regime to a historical investigation into its origins and evolution throughout the 20th century. Not forgetting the increasing incidence of rural fires over the last four decades, which has been widely studied in ecological and forestry sciences, the project looked mainly at the Estado Novo period, mapping on the one hand the emergence of the fire problem in political and scientific discourse, and on the other the transition between fire agriculture and forest fire in the period 1950–1980. These two fundamentally different burning landscapes were analysed in two mountain areas, the Lapa and Nave plateau to the north and the Monchique mountain range to the south.

It soon became clear, however, that the Estado Novo’s fire policy and science were based on previous intellectual and legislative foundations, such as the Forestry Regime approved in
1901–1905 and the consolidation of scientific forestry in the late 19th century. Since then, the Portuguese mountains have been imagined as fire-free landscapes. The exclusion of fire practices was supported by a growing scientific consensus that condemned the cultivation of cereals through fire as “primitive” and a source of environmental imbalance. Fire came to be seen as an “enemy” of the forest in the context of an ecological opposition between trees and fire and a broad project to modernise the highlands through afforestation.

However, it seems clear that these attempts to limit fire have failed. From the 1960s onwards, rural fires became increasingly common and destructive. In the summer months, once devoted to extensive slash-and-burn cultivation, insistent warnings about the risk of fire dominate radio and television broadcasts. In an ironic twist of fate, the recovery of the “pernicious traditions” of fire, such as controlled burns and counter-fire, are now presented by experts as a way out of this burning conundrum. Research focused on fire has gradually led to the emergence of a long-term historical perspective that offers a fresh and critical look at Portuguese rurality over more than 150 years. The concept of “burning landscapes” thus encompasses, at the crossroads of research practices in social history, the history of science and environmental history, both the persistence of fire and its transformation in the Portuguese mountains, as well as the universe of political-scientific discourses built around the idea of a landscape without fire.

The FIRUSES final conference, which will take place on 24 April, the eve of the 51st anniversary of 25 April, aims to present the main results achieved through six papers that will make up the morning panel and which will be commented on by architect and historian Marta Macedo. In the afternoon, other perspectives and geographies of fire will be presented in an attempt to sketch out a global multidisciplinary picture, which will be finally commented on by historian and anthropologist Ricardo Roque. We will hear the histories of fire in the neighbouring mountains of Galicia (Lourenzo Prieto and David Fontán) and Kroumirie, crossed by the colonial partition separating Tunisia from Algeria (Myriam Amri), the first results of a study on the “resurgence” of fire-damaged landscapes between Arganil in Portugal and the Brazilian Cerrado (Kátia Favilla and Susana Matos Viegas) and, to conclude the panel, an informed reflection on the “paradox of fire” in Portugal (Paulo M. Fernandes).

The opening lecture will be given by Francisco Moreira, a researcher in ecology and fire behaviour, and also a consultant to the project, who will address the need to change the paradigm of fire management. The day will conclude with a lecture by Simon Pooley, a long-time researcher into the ecological and scientific history of fire in South Africa.

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