UC Berkeley

This dissertation develops interdisciplinary methods to illuminate the challenges at the intersection of fire ecology and decision in complex adaptive systems. Contemporary dialogues at the intersection of fire, energy and land use require novel understanding of these interactions to better address complex systems interacting across global and local ecological economic dimensions. The author builds from history and direct experience across institutions to develop an economic geographic analysis in theoretical and practical frames to advance the ecological choices and decisions that affect global climate change and adaptive governance in the face of fire, or rather “internalizing fire.” The practice of internalizing fire engages the transformation of external fire over the landscape through acts of suppression, displacement and exclusion and the rise of an internal fire through industrial and transport processes. As fire moves on the landscape, geographic information informs when fire is in effect present and absent. The term “internalized fire” is also used to investigate decision spaces, how institutions and individual actors may respond to internalizing these values in future stewardship and adaptive governance. These ideas integrated throughout in three distinct chapters using mixed methods conclude in a final discussion of the “Politics of Practice”. The first chapter investigates the economic geography and historiography of “Bracero Burning” by engaging primary archived data to examine the early motivation and administration of the Bracero program. Discussing how this mid-twentieth century migrant labor policy exacerbated the rise of catastrophic fire affecting the fire ecology across North America’s landscapes. The second chapter examines models of interaction between institutions, people and their mobility across landscapes through a Politics of Practice, an adaptive capacity framework to estimate costs and the scale of localized operations decisions in simple geographic models to move “labor over land” in systems living with fire. The third chapter explores this economic geography in theoretical and practical models with the restoration of Arctostaphylos Pungens, the “Mexican” Manzanita, a fire dependent species ranging across North America’s Southwest region, inhabited by participants and descendants of the World War II era Braceros. The Chapter discusses the plant’s significance and provides socioeconomic perspectives on the costs and questions associated with internalizing fire across its habitat. The concluding theory of a Politics of Practice offers a better balance in California’s fire ecology and adaptive decision, amid local and global dilemmas with a proposal of increased frequency of localized and regional interactions through a Politics of Practice.