Sensing a Planet on Fire and Listening with Forests

Abstract

Wildfires are increasingly consuming forests, grasslands, and peatlands around the world. Forest fires point to the changing sensory ecologies or milieus that could be required to detect and respond to planetary transformations. They can spark and remake collective sensing practices. Environments are now transforming, often irrevocably, through the force of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land-use change. Humans and more-than-humans affect and are affected by these transformations, where the possibilities of sensing, signalling, and acting are composed together in distinct worlds of experience. Forest fires and post-fire landscapes summon different ways of sensing, experiencing, and acting within these altered ecologies. How does fire erupt into or transform sensory worlds? And how do different modes of sensing fire enable practices of collectivising sense? Through a more extended engagement with a post-fire landscape in Chile, this essay considers these questions by moving through locations where fire, forests, technologies, humans, and more-than-humans differently materialise and collectivise sense in a time when the planet is on fire.