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Paper short abstract

Restoration ecologies of fire in the Pyrenees challenge traditional conservation by blending historical ideals with novel, resilient landscapes. Ethnographic accounts reveal contested ecological knowledge and political tensions that shape future imaginaries amid climate change and wildfire anxieties

Paper long abstract

Restoration ecologies of fire are pivoting between attempts to recreate past ecosystems and efforts to design novel, resilient landscapes, challenging traditional conservation paradigms. Amid fears of unprecedented and devastating wildfires that threaten to disrupt rural landscapes, new negotiations are emerging to imagine and project alternative visions of resilient ecosystems. Drawing on co-constructed memories and idealizations of former countrysides shaped by specific productive needs, new projects are taking shape that contest official and institutional conservation policies. In this presentation, we explore how ecological knowledge is being produced and disputed among different social actors, based on our ethnographic research in a Southern European mountain range. Competing narratives arise from anxieties about climate change, landscape degradation, and the abandonment of marginalized areas, reframing novel interventions as spaces of ecological opportunity.

In the Pyrenees, the reintroduction of fire for landscape management and the restoration of fire-resilient mosaics are opening new strategies for reappropriating the landscape and reclaiming local sovereignty. These approaches challenge core ecological concepts—native vs. invasive species, baselines, and historical fidelity—while generating new imaginaries of nature and futures no one has seen yet. Restoration ecologies of fire are not only ecological—they are deeply political, shaping governance, property regimes, and cultural identities, and producing tensions between global conservation agendas and local communities.