Attuning to animals’ experiences of recovering from wildfires

Filipa Soares

What can we learn from and with animals about recovering from disasters? How can we attune to their perspectives, experiences, and stories? How might we weave their ‘beastly places’ (Philo and Wilbert, 2000) into disaster governance? These questions guide ABIDE (“Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities”), an ERC-funded interdisciplinary project based at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. ABIDE explores how multispecies communities recover from wildfires and cope with uncertainty in three fire-prone countries and regions: southeast Australia (New South Wales), central Brazil (Cerrado biome), and central Portugal (Serra da Estrela Natural Park).

As the team plans and starts fieldwork, we have grappled with some epistemological conundrums that will be the focus of this short article. These conundrums are tied to the choice of the animals and relations to follow, the choice of methods, and ethical commitments.

Trac(k)ing animals

In the book On the Animal Trail, the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot describes tracking as “investigating the art of dwelling of other living beings […] and their relations with each other and with us: their conflicts and alliances with the human uses of territory” (Morizot, 2021, p. 4). This means, he adds, “focusing attention not on entities, but on relationships” (idem) — an approach that resonates with ABIDE’s focus on relationality, which prioritises multispecies entanglements over individual species. These entanglements reflect ecological roles and functions within food webs and their complex ties to local communities, thus addressing the socio-ecologies that co-constitute the post-disaster landscapes of the Pyrocene, the age of fire (Pyne, 2021).

Given the unpredictability of what emerges and (co-)becomes amidst the scarred landscapes, these multispecies entanglements were not chosen a priori. Rather, their traces have been tracked down through political, media, and scientific narratives, as well as exploratory fieldwork. Inevitably, these traces make present what is more visible, literally and metaphorically. When it comes to animal species, media and policy narratives tend to highlight charismatic and endangered ones, notably mammals, as well as those with economic or affective value. A clear example is the koala, which emerged as a symbolic and emblematic figure in the 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia (McAvan, 2023), while invertebrates were highly overlooked (Cox, 2021). During our initial fieldwork in Serra da Estrela Natural Park, the species that our interlocutors mentioned more frequently were the ones they are used to encountering in the post-fire landscape, those that are already perceived to be too many and causing agricultural damages, and/or the ones that hold particular significance to local communities. In other words, the most visible species to them — for their proximity, abundance, value, damages. Most of these species are large or medium mammals (e.g. wild boar, roe deer, foxes, goats, sheep, cows), alongside occasional mentions of birds and eagles, without specifying which.

This raises an important question: if we focus on these more visible animals, might we inadvertently contribute to the further marginalisation of less visible species—an epistemic injustice of sorts?

Firebug in a burned trunk. Serra da Estrela, Portugal, 2024 ©Kuai Shen/ABIDE

Navigating Methodological and Ethical Challenges

Different animal classes and species require distinct knowledge practices and technologies, each demanding specialised expertise. Studying an insect, a bird, or a mammal — and even within mammals, a bat or a deer — entails significantly different approaches. Adding to this complexity, our team has established a set of ethical principles and guidelines that, while central to our work, somehow limit our choices. For instance, we are committed to the principle of do no harm, employing strictly non-interventional methods. This means that we will not capture nor kill any individual animal. However, this ethical stance presents challenges when mapping animals’ movements and recovery experiences, which is an important goal of ABIDE. Using technologies for tracking animal movements like radio collars and telemetry exemplifies these challenges. While these have enabled compelling narratives, such as the story of the famous Bear 71, it involves intervention (capturing, tagging). Digital technologies also raise complex questions about nonhuman consent and privacy (Paci et al., 2022) that remain unresolved, besides important social impacts (Simlai and Sandbrook, 2021).

For now, we are experimenting with various modes of inquiry, combining conventional and more innovative methodologies: semi-structured interviews, ethnography, direct observation, and visual and acoustic techniques, such as transects, camera trapping, and aural recordings (passive and active). By experimenting with these diverse tools, we seek to attune to the ‘immense world’ (Yong, 2023) of nonhuman sensings and sense-makings in the context of wildfire recovery, thus addressing the bias towards ‘human sensings of nonhumans’ within animal geographies (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015, p. 287).

https://player.vimeo.com/video/1049316898?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

Sneak peek of animals captured by the camera traps we used. Serra da Estrela, Portugal, 2024 ©Nuno Negrões/ABIDE

Conclusions, or new beginnings

I am aware that this article may pose more questions than answers regarding animals’ geographies methodologies. The epistemological and ethical conundrums and reflections shared here illustrate the challenges — and occasional frustrations — of this topic. Yet it is precisely within these complexities that the field’s most exciting opportunities and promises lie. Methods, as John Law (2004) argued, do more than describe worlds; they are involved in creating them. Carefully considering what they (in)visibilise and entail — and how — is particularly important in a time of escalating biodiversity loss, disasters and violence, to care-fully co-create possibilities of living and dying well with others (van Dooren, 2019).

____

Filipa Soares (filipa.soares@ics.ulisboa.pt)

Filipa is an environmental geographer whose research examines the sociopolitical dimensions of environmental management and restoration – with a special focus on rewilding, nature conservation, and (wild)fire –, and the complex spatiotemporal and more-than-human entanglements that these governance modes entail. She holds a PhD in Environmental Geography from the University of Oxford, and a BA and MA in Anthropology from the New University of Lisbon. Filipa is currently a PDRA on the ERC-funded project ABIDE, at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon.

The ERC project ABIDE - Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities, coordinated by Verónica Policarpo, is funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). Views and opinions expressed here are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

References:

Cox, L. 2021. ‘‘Overlooked’: 14,000 invertebrate species lost habitat in Black Summer bushfires, study finds’, The Guardian, 19 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/20/overlooked-14000-invertebrate-species-lost-habitat-in-black-summer-bushfires-study-finds.

Hodgetts, T. and Lorimer, J. 2015. ‘Methodologies for animals’ geographies: cultures, communication and genomics’. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), pp. 285–295.

Law, J. 2004. After method: Mess in Social Science research. London: Routledge.

McAvan, E. 2023. ‘“I Just Care so Much About the Koalas”: on grief, value and ethical response to non-human others in the anthropocene’. Angelaki, 28(5), pp. 21–38.

Morizot, B. 2021. On the Animal Trail. Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity.

Paci, P., Mancini, C. and Nuseibeh, B. 2022. ‘The case for animal privacy in the design of technologically supported environments’. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 8, 784794.

Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. 2000. ‘Animal spaces, beastly places: an introduction’. In C. Philo and C. Wilbert (eds.) Animal spaces, beastly places: New geographies of human-animal relations. London: Routledge, pp. 1–34.

Pyne, S.J. 2021. The Pyrocene: How we created an age of fire, and what happens next. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Simlai, T. and Sandbrook, C. 2021. ‘Digital surveillance technologies in conservation and their social implications’. In S.A. Wich and A.K. Piel (eds.) Conservation technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 239-249.

van Dooren, T. 2019. The wake of crows: Living and dying in shared worlds. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yong, E. (2023). An immense world: how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. London: Vintage.