Special Issue: 4TH International Fire Congress: Fire as a global process

Abstract

Debates about the scale, ecological effects, and motivations of pre-scientific anthropogenic burning have been present since the inception of the scientific study of landscape fires as the following quotations show. Local communities have in many places burned the land for centuries. Because many of these communities were part of larger cultural systems in which there was either no opportunity, reason, or desire to transmit knowledge through writing, much of their traditional ecological knowledge remained diffuse, embedded in oral tradition, ritual, or other forms of cultural or symbolic communication alien to the scientific mindset. However, as any contemporary fire researcher with field work experience in areas where local communities still exist knows, there exists a wealth of site-specific, detailed, and often reasoned as well as articulate, unwritten knowledge about the use of fire for ecosystem management among local communities of the type exhibited in the second quotation appearing below.