SETTIN‘ THE WOODS ON FIRE: RURAL INCENDIARISM AS PROTEST

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Fire is a fundamental tool within a broad spectrum of vegetation‐management strategies, from swidden agriculture to plantation forestry. Through the seemingly pyromanic activity of incendiarism, fire assumes additional significance in the human‐environment relationship. Case studies from England, Algeria, and the southern United States serve to illustrate the circumstance of fire as an indication of agrarian discontent and a weapon of peasant resistance. Other documented cases of incendiarism reveal that use of fire in the landscape has expanded from a constructive ecosystem‐manipulation technique to a destructive form of protest undertaken by the oppressed or disempowered.