Fire practices refer to the methods by which communities and organizations respond to fire events. Currently, in Chile and worldwide, most resources are oriented toward “fighting” fires. In this sense, fires differ from other disasters and hazards, as they can require  greater attention to preparedness. As Moritz and co-authors note, “The ‘command and control’ approach typically used in fire management neglects the fundamental role that fire regimes have in maintaining biodiversity and key ecosystem services.”Moritz et al., “Learning to Coexist with Wildfire,” 58. Fire is an ecology that extends beyond the moment of the blaze. For this reason, fire practices need to engage with all aspects of fire ecologies. Fire practices can encompass a range of activities, from community plans and preparedness committees to local observations and educational programs. While they can include efforts to respond to fires when they occur, they can also extend to restoring landscapes and supporting communities to recover after fire events have impacted them.

The previous chapters have examined fire networks, or who is involved in addressing fire, and fire technologies, or what infrastructures and tools are mobilized in response to fires. This chapter investigates how communities and organizations undertake concrete actions to improve resilience across fire lifecycles. In our Field Schools, interviews and fieldwork, we documented multiple practices related to prevention activities, particularly at the levels of governance, territorial planning, and environmental education. In the focus on prevention, participants emphasized the importance of training and education, creating defensive infrastructures such as firebreaks, vegetation clearing and pruning, and preparing for coordinated responses. Further practices included the construction of preventive infrastructures, mobilization of local knowledge, and fire management.

While participants and collaborators identified many successful fire practices already underway, they also noted several opportunities for improving efforts, including by addressing shortcomings in the design and implementation of fire prevention plans, overcoming the disconnection across diverse communities and institutions, improving the resources and education available to support fire practices, and enhancing post-fire restoration and recovery.Tiara Torres et al., “Community Fire Plans.”

Community fire prevention plans

Community fire prevention plans are a prominent strategy used nationwide in Chile. These practices acknowledge the increasing risk of fires and the need for local and grounded responses, while incorporating collaboration with institutions, territorial planning, diverse ecological knowledge, and technical measures, together with community-based action. CONAF has developed a methodology for communities to adopt in relation to the different regions of Chile. This strategy involves mobilizing community groups to engage in eight steps outlined in the method, including:

In this standardized process, CONAF representatives work with communities to establish a community council and then host four workshops on topics including strengthening homes against forest fires; creating community fuel management actions and areas of self-protection; creating an emergency action plan; and establishing detection, warning, and community first-response plans.CONAF, «Metodología para la elaboración de planes comunitarios de prevención de incendios forestales».

Alongside these methods, several local and regional governments are undertaking territorial planning in wildland-urban interface zones (WUI), which can involve participatory practices. When managing risk related to land use and fire hotspots, local and regional governments often work with local actors and communities to identify hazards, develop training and monitoring programs, conduct preparedness drills, and establish prevention committees to ensure coordinated approaches. These measures can also incorporate risk mapping that CONAF conducts at a regional level, which models potential vulnerability, susceptibility, and exposure to fire.

With these more standardized methods, there is recognition that further adaptation to local contexts is always required to ensure the viability of plans and practices. In areas such as La Araucanía, fire is an important component of agriculture and clearing vegetation, as well as Mapuche traditions. Community fire plans and practices would then need to adapt to customary fire uses by identifying practices and developing plans for managing risks, such as not permitting fires during hot and dry periods, and ensuring a burn-permitting process is in place. As mentioned in the earlier chapter on networks, communities also have memories of fire patterns that are often not documented by CONAF but can be crucial for establishing finer-scale understandings and responses to fire events. As our interviews across multiple regions and territories further demonstrated,Tiara Torres et al., “Exchange of Community Experiences for the Prevention of Forest Fires.” some fire practices might not be viable in all territories, such as the Buena Cabra technique of grazing animals to consume vegetation and create natural firebreaks.Fundación Lepe, «Buena Cabra».

Collaborative practices among community members and local institutions, which involve mapping and understanding the local territory, are central to crafting effective wildfire prevention plans and strengthening local preparedness and leadership. During our Field School held in Pucón, participants especially noted the importance of building self-managed initiatives that build trust between organizations and communities while also facilitating exchanges and learning within communities.Tiara Torres et al., “Exchange of Community Experiences for the Prevention of Forest Fires.” However, as participants across Field Schools held in Temuco and Pucón noted, changing demographics within regions can create tensions among different types of residents, while potentially creating obstacles to consistently adopting tools and protocols such as home safety plans, evacuation strategies, responsible burning practices, and community drills. In these cases, it could be useful to have local and regional agencies, including CONAF, contribute to mediating exchanges and providing educational resources on responsible fire practices to residents and visitors.

Beyond the blaze

As our many conversations and research have demonstrated, fire extends well beyond the moment of emergency.UNEP, Spreading Like Wildfire. In addition, fire is not only a natural ecology, but it is also a cultural one. As Field School and interview participants noted, it is crucial to understand that people have complex, cultural and even spiritual relationships with fire. As one Temuco Field School participant noted, there is a certain inevitability to fire in the Araucanía region due to the long-standing use of fire in land practices, including Mapuche cultivation techniques. The participant notes:

Among participants, there was a common sense that, rather than simply banning burning, it was necessary to better regulate it. As one participant noted:

Here, participants emphasized that regulation should include education, so it is not merely a matter of prohibition. Furthermore, regulation needs to involve territorial knowledge and be co-constructed with communities so it is not perceived as a top-down mode of governance. These local and cultural engagements with fire presented an opportunity to promote cultural understanding and change through territorial actions. As one Field School participant summarized:

“This means that we generate a link with the territory, and the link generates care and responsibility for us. Therefore, when we are linked, we recognize that we are part of a territory.”Group discussions at Smart Forests Field School, Temuco (April 2024).

Territorial connections can facilitate a sense of shared responsibility for land and forests, while also integrating ancestral and local knowledge through sharing and communicating traditional practices and “histories of the land.”

Such territorial connections extend to building and maintaining preventive ecological infrastructures to facilitate fire strategies. These practices can include vegetation management, pruning, and prescribed burns. Firebreaks are a measure that CONAF widely uses and promotes, along with mapping and even creating water sources to support fire response efforts. Efforts to improve road access in topographically challenging mountain regions can also be crucial for enabling effective fire response.

At the same time, while community fire prevention plans, protocols, and infrastructures can enable more robust responses to fire, they are not always applied consistently. For this reason, as noted in the Pucón-based Field School, hands-on and practical activities can be an important way to ensure grassroots infrastructures and initiatives are effectively implemented. Such practices can further involve collaboration with municipalities and forestry agencies, who can provide technical assistance as part of field-based activities. This perspective resonates with contributions from the Temuco-based Field School, where one participant noted:

“In practices, the most concrete one is that the creation of physical prevention structures is done with substantial community participation […] because there I think people understand, get involved and also understand how the field works, how those practices work, like prevention, like in situ, in the part of networks, that is, that there are community fire prevention committees with representation not only from neighborhood associations, the typical regulated organizations, so to speak, but also from communities and social organizations that can be like NGOs or social movements.”Group discussions at Smart Forests Field School, Temuco (April 2024).

As the interview with Fernanda Romero in this collection further notes, regular training sessions can be a way to build awareness and readiness for fires, while also communicating how fires tend to start, what difficult decisions might need to be taken to shape environments in response to fire risk, and what modes of community organization are needed to ensure people are ready to respond and support one another. In other words, “Fires aren’t real until they happen to us, and it shouldn’t be this way.”See Romero and Fundación Mar Adentro, “Signs of resilience.” The efforts at Altos de Cantillana indicate the central role that environmental education plays in understanding fire ecology and contributing to fire practices that enable prevention and conservation. For many Field School participants and interviewees, environmental education involves not only sensitizing communities to wildfire risks but also engaging them in detection efforts, understanding land histories and ancestral knowledge, contributing to land stewardship and conservation efforts, and participating in community events and collaborations.

While participants and interviewees were optimistic about the fire practices underway and in development, they still identified challenges in ensuring consistency and sustaining engagement. Fire plans and protocols can be unevenly implemented, access to resources can be unequal across communities and regions, wildfire monitoring is not always systematic, and new residents or visitors to rural areas such as Araucanía can be unfamiliar with fire risks and traditional land practices.

At the same time, there are challenges in ensuring that fire practices are community-oriented and community-led. While CONAF’s fire prevention method expects communities to be self-managed, this can create disparities across communities that differ in their level of resources and access to technology and data. For this reason, participants felt that fire prevention and detection should include standardized practices and resources at a level similar to those for earthquakes, while not excluding local adaptations and community input. The development of such fire practices also includes more significant engagement with post-fire response and recovery across ecological and human communities. This would be a way to ensure that fire life cycles are fully addressed and incorporated into broader strategies for adapting to and regenerating changing environments.

In December 2023, the Altos de Cantillana Nature Reserve suffered a fire that destroyed almost 100 hectares. In this interview with Violeta Bustos Vaccia from Fundación Mar Adentro, the coordinator of the protected area and president of Así Conserva Chile,Así Conserva Chile [This Is How You Preserve Chile], https://asiconservachile.org.
This interview was originally published on the Fundación Mar Adentro website at: https://fundacionmaradentro.cl/en/articulo/brotes-de-resiliencia-tras-los-incendios-en-altos-de-cantillana. Fernanda Romero, reflects on the fire. The ecologist and landscape architect has been a regular visitor to these sclerophyllous forest landscapesAccording to the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB), the sclerophyllous forest is an ecological system that delivers nature to living beings and provides ideal conditions for the development of life. Among the species that make it up in our territory are peumo (Cryptocarya alba), boldo (Peumus boldus) and espino (Acacia caven), as well as the Chilean palm (Jubea chilensis). See https://ieb-chile.cl/noticia/los-servicios-ecosistemicos-del-bosque-esclerofilo-chileno. since childhood, becoming the fourth generation of her family to live in the area and the official coordinator for the conservation of the 12,000 hectares that make up the reserve.The reserve covers the municipalities of Melipilla, San Pedro, Alhue, Isla de Maipo and Paine. Weeks after the fire spread, Fernanda says that new shoots have emerged from the ground, a sign of nature's regeneration. How can we balance the need to tell hopeful stories in the face of disasters? What ways of interacting with each other as humans and more than humans contribute to disaster risk prevention? These are some of the issues addressed by one of the conservation leaders in Paine, who in 2022 was named a Living Human Treasure for her work in the Aculeo basin.

Native trees on the verge of extinction that resist the heat of the fire, plants that germinate in the wake of a blaze, micro-worlds that regenerate within the forest. Is there a pattern to their ability to survive? Is the adaptability of the plant kingdom a model to follow?

Being alive implies the ability to breathe. When we exhale, the breaths, particles, and gusts of the different beings that coexist in a milieu intertwine. Could we then converse with other kingdoms through our breaths? How can we communicate with these resilient ecosystems to learn from them? How do we breathe after the fire?

Breathing in the Blaze is a project that explores the understanding of life through the observation and comparison of the relationships that exist in the plant and animal kingdoms, establishing possible conjectures at the moment of breathing,I have based my work on the postulates of biologist Gregory Bateson, who proposed that the observation and comparison of figures, forms, and relationships could establish patterns and criteria to understand the other as a living being. and reflecting, as Haraway would say, on the relationship with meaningful otherness. Using a three-channel CO₂ measurement suit, I connect my body's exhalation, that of a plant, and the emissions present in the air. This captured data is transformed into words that appear in real time on an LED screen incorporated into the suit, and are associated with each kingdom and the effects that the various factors of the climate crisis have on each body.

During the Ecologies of Fire residency in Bosque Pehuén at Fundación Mar Adentro, this relationship occurred during a walk in the forest, between the breathing of Araucaria trees, plants close to the ground, and my exhalation. From this action emerges a diagram of relationships that connects the inhabited landscape with fire and the human, making visible the micro-interactions at the chemical level that occur internally and externally. From this diagram emerge the words that generate a poem in real time, which I incorporated into a photograph of the forest.