Presentation short abstract

Post-wildfire landscapes in Portugal reveal how state policies, land histories, and multispecies practices shape wildfires and regeneration. This paper examines burned forests as political-ecological archives and explores local alternatives to dominant fire-fighting regimes.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the political ecologies of post-wildfire landscapes in Central Portugal. While state approaches continue to privilege suppression, surveillance, and technocratic prevention, the afterlives of wildfires reveal a more complex socio-ecological terrain in which histories of state formation, land reform, extractivism, and rural marginalization become materially and politically inscribed. Drawing on the first year of an ongoing ethnographic study, the paper explores how burned forests operate as political-ecological archives: they expose the failures of monoculture forestry, the extractivism of the cellulose industry and the privitazation of forests.

Engaging with political ecology, feminist and decolonial environmental anthropology, and multispecies studies, the paper foregrounds how communities, plants, animals, and land practices collaboratively inhabit and reshape post-fire environments. Emerging local and multispecies responses, such as regenerative agroforestry and collective land-care initiatives challenge state narratives of degraded or empty landscapes and instead highlight possibilities for collaborative survival and socio-ecological repair. These practices complicate dominant framings of rural residents as passive victims or irresponsible land managers, showing how knowledge, care labour, and ecological memory contribute to alternative fire futures.

By examining post-wildfire landscapes as sites of political contestation and multispecies negotiation, the paper moves beyond destruction-oriented disaster narratives. It argues that attending to the lived realities of burned territories opens pathways for more just and ecologically attuned approaches to wildfire governance across Mediterranean climate zones.