Internalizing Fire with Labor over Landscapes - Learning from a Manzanita Rising

Abstract

This paper Internalizing Fire with Labor over Land - Learning from a Manzanita Rising, engages with a narrative object in the form of the Manzanita species of plant (Arctostaphylos) and specifically Arctostaphylos Pungens, with common names, Pointleaf Manzanita and Mexican Manzanita. The Mexican Manzanita is a species that ranges across Western North America and has co-adapted with fire cycles that are a major process in the transport and growth of this plant coupled with human impacts and mutualisms with other living forms. Fire interactions and the chemical interactions with digestion of the seeds, or "internalized fire”, create a mechanism for the Manzanita’s renewal. This chapter engages in a discussion of the historic and active human uses and indigenous knowledge of this species in both form and function and what this has meant to the current fire ecology of California and North America more broadly. The paper includes an economic geographic analysis with open source observational and spatial data in an assessment of the transport and economic operational tradeoffs associated with managing for fire and restoring adaptive management of these and other fire dependent species across the California Landscape. Manzanita Rising as a narrative object provides a perspective on a living history of fire, lessons across a range of challenges in the paradox of fire regime shifts impacting its form and function, as it resides among a diversity of people, habitats, food and fire cycles.