Presentation short abstract

In the Catalan Pyrenees, peasants' knowledge of wildfire prevention has been dismissed and prohibited. The increased implementation of wildfire suppression policies, along with the expansion of bureaucratic forest management, has resulted in the neglect of local practices and knowledge.

Presentation long abstract

“Unspoiled landscapes of great beauty” is the claim that opens many official brochures forecasting the Catalan Pyrenees as a tourist site. Celebrated due to its natural richness, rural heritage, and isolated villages, the region falls within several categories of protected natural areas. For many of its inhabitants, though, the woods are “filthy” and “unkempt”. High rates of outmigration in the region, especially during the 60s and 70s, left behind a scenario of depopulated landscapes and abandoned agricultural pasturelands, especially in the upper valleys. The laborious effort of generations to reclaim land from the forest and make way for large, cultivated areas is forgotten, and its obliteration is even celebrated within conservationists’ discourses. Reforestation, rewilding, and land abandonment are widespread dynamics and key to understanding the feeling of disenfranchisement and neglect expressed by the local population. Thus, the structuring of expert knowledge of woods comes hand in hand with a growing sense of slow dispossession. I will discuss the increased deployment of policies for wildfire risk extinction and prevention, together with the expansion of bureaucratic institutions for forest management, resulting in the dismissal of local practices and knowledges. The long-term processual perspective gained through deep ethnographic fieldwork in the past 20 years will help me understand the changing perspectives and the affective dimensions of the current risk of wildfire among anxieties of climate change.