Whose Woods These Are

Fire has a wild and unpredictable capacity to destroy, remake, and renew. In a series of photographs, Zackery Hobler documents conservationists’ efforts to restore landscapes through controlled burns. Fire has come to be recognized as a crucial part of forest and grassland ecology in many recent conservation practices, against earlier methods that took a strictly preservationist approach to forest management. This latter method prohibited Indigenous nations across Canada from managing their territories through fire stewardship, even as controlled burns have been a documented practice for thousands of years.

Some tree species, like lodgepole pines across the West coast, only release their seeds when triggered by fire. This unusual adaption shows that conventional thought must be unsettled to better understand ecological worlds. Like the fiery and combustive imagery of the forge, Hobler’s image asks how transformation can be effected through re-engaging materials and thought processes that have been naturalized or ossified.