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Paper short abstract

This paper reads post-wildfire landscapes in Central Portugal as political-ecological archives. Forest parcellation, eucalyptus monocultures and uneven regrowth trace extractive histories, while revealing how multispecies relations shape fire afterlives and possibilities for collaborative survival.

Paper long abstract

Wildfires have become a cyclical and structuring condition of life in Central Portugal. Repeated fires shape patterns of regrowth, collective memory, and everyday relations with land, rather than appearing as isolated moments of crisis. This paper introduces the concept of burned landscapes as political-ecological archives, approaching post-fire environments not only as sites of ecological loss but as terrains where colonial legacies, state-making, extractive forestry, and rural abandonment are materially imprinted, alongside emergent forms of multispecies life.

Based on ethnographic engagement with post-wildfire landscapes, I attend to forest parcellation, eucalyptus monocultures, abandoned agricultural terraces, and uneven regrowth as traces of land ownership regimes, forest policies, and fire governance. These features do not merely reflect past interventions; they actively shape how responsibility, risk, and care are distributed and lived across human and more-than-human actors.

Bringing multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology, the paper follows how plants, animals, and infrastructures participate in the afterlives of fire. Some multispecies configurations reproduce fire-prone, extractive ecologies, while others, such as community agroforestry projects or the use of animals in fuel management, open more tentative possibilities for regenerative care and collaborative survival.

Treating burned landscapes as both archive and method, the paper argues that ecological transformation cannot be separated from political economy and governance. It asks how multispecies politics take form in landscapes repeatedly shaped by fire, extraction, and uneven state intervention.