Good Fire /

An Environmental History of Prescribed Burning in Norway and the North

2023 - 2027

The Good Fire Project examines the history of prescribed fire in Norway and the boreal north. The project asks whether fire suppression accurately characterizes twentieth-century landscape management practices and traces the roots of modern mega-fires to a complex collection of landscape management practices extending well beyond wildfire prevention policy. Using historic climate and wildfire data, archival evidence, imagery, and popular accounts, this project will assemble a history of human interaction with fire over time. Although climate change has exacerbated wildfires, Norway and other boreal states arguably have an accumulated fire history that can inform the present. Good Fire frames fire as part of a long and dynamic relationship with combustion which has changed over time in response to social, political, and economic forces.