Surface, Crown, Ground · Siobhan Angus

SURFACE, CROWN, GROUND

By Siobhan Angus

Consider a photograph of an iconic Canadian landscape: clear blue water, verdant tree-covered mountains rising in the background, darker tones fading into soft, hazy shades of blue. The puffy, gentle cumulous clouds soften the soaring peaks of the mountains. Two casually dressed women stand in the middle, looking at the mountains and water, unaware of the camera. The foreground, however, is more dissonant: we see the charred remnants of a fire. The canopy of the tall, spindly pine trees has been burnt away, the residue found in the scorched timber on the ground.

The image, Aftermath of the Kenow Fire, Waterton Lakes National Park (fire occurred in 2017, photographed in 2018), is part of Okanagan-based photographer Andreas Rutkauskas’s After the Fire (2017-). The series surveys forests damaged by fire, documenting their recovery and regeneration. Rutkauskas’ fieldwork-based practice is rooted in careful visual observation and sustained engagement, bridging the space between scientist and artist. The intimacy of the photographs reflects a profound familiarity with, and knowledge of, the particular landscape photographed.

Here, we see the landscape one year after the Kenow Fire. Sparked by lightning and escalated by heat and strong winds, the wildfire started in British Columbia before moving into Alberta, burning approximately 35,000 hectares, including 19,303 hectares in Waterton Lakes National Park. The photograph’s title gives us critical information about the landscape and the temporalities of fire: the artist cues two distinct moments in time, the fire and the photograph. However, the emphasis is on regrowth, which gestures towards the future, introducing a third temporality. Rutkauskas explores the extended timelines of disaster and regeneration, expanding the singular moment documented in the photo to consider the broader “ecology of the picture.”1

I became familiar with After the Fire in 2019 while living in northern California. My stay coincided with wildfire season; the ubiquitous toxic smoke and ashy skies were disquieting and grim. Along the Pacific Northwest, changing weather patterns fueled by climate breakdown have escalated the risk of catastrophic wildfires. West coast fires have become notorious as an inescapable symptom of climate change. The increase in extreme and unprecedented forest fires renders many types of landscapes vulnerable, including the mountain-prairie landscapes captured in the Kenow fire image. But Rutkauskas invites us to look beyond our visceral fear of fire to consider fire-based ecosystems and the possibilities of recovery. Landscapes evolve with fire. So do humans. The interactions between land, people, and fire are profoundly relational.

With public discourse increasingly centered on climate breakdown, photographs of wildfires have become a standard visual symbol for the catastrophic convergences of the present. Most of these images emphasize the spectacular and surreal nature of fire. There is no guarantee, however, that these environmentally

activist photographs will result in greater empathy or action. Indeed, in many cases, they aestheticize or anesthetize. Sublime images of disaster sensationalize crisis. The repetition of these visual forms serves to normalize catastrophe.

Rutkauskas’s series directs our attention to something much different. Visually, the images are quotidian, still, and contemplative. They resist the spectacular. A meditative framing characterizes After the Fire. Only one image in the exhibition shows us actual fire as opposed to its aftermath, Mount Christie Wildfire (2020); this too is soft, slow. Hazy. Critically, however, the images are not about the destructive nature of fire but rather what comes in the aftermath. Regeneration, not destruction. For example, in Fireweed, Rock Creek Fire (2018), the eye is directed to the lush, explosive growth of vibrant fireweed coating the ground. This shows us how particular ecosystems, such as boreal forests and grasslands, have evolved with fire. For instance, the lodgepole pine shown in Aftermath of the Kenow Fire is serotinous species; the heat from fire allows the cones to release their seeds while producing favorable conditions for germination. Fire reseeds and renews. Rutkauskas’s work situates fire within nature’s complex, entangled cycles.

But not all fires are created equally. In his book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, the environmental historian Stephen Pyne has suggested that we live in the Pyroscene, the Age of Fire. Pyne distinguishes between three types of fire: nature’s fire, typically started by lightning; the Promethean fire of humanity; and finally, and most significantly, fires resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. This last type is bound up with the current cultural discussion of wildfires. Scottish inventor James Watt patented the steam engine (1784), connecting coal fire to the continuous motion of the wheel, transforming heat into energy, and enabling the massive changes of the industrial revolution. The rise of fossil fuels initiated a shift in our relationship with fire, facilitating industrial and economic growth and fundamentally altering how much humans could impact the environment.

Since the inception of the twenty-first century, the acreage of wildfires has more than doubled. The smoke and emissions resulting from the combustion2 of fossil fuel fires create the conditions for more damaging burns. The intensity of fires is related to the Greenhouse effect, as CO2 emissions from fire are trapped in the atmosphere, causing rising temperatures, which creates a feedback loop: weather causes more fire, and fire causes more extreme weather. More extreme weather is also intensifying lightning, nature’s firestarter.

The risk of more catastrophic fires is also tied to changes in fire suppression policies. Western environmental discourse around these policies has often focused on preservation and conservation, rooted in managerial frameworks born out of a binary that views people as outside of nature – nature becomes something that can be controlled and managed, often for profit. Fire suppression policies are a tangible example of how

preservation often ends up harming that which we seek to protect. Conservation and protection deny the possibility of a relational encounter. It fails to understand the complex networks that bind human society with natural systems like weather, forests, and the elements.

Failure to allow these natural systems to occur has resulted in forests that are full of fuel, deadwood, and accumulated duff: factors that transform forests into tinderboxes. Forest management scientists, however, are beginning to appreciate the importance of integrating controlled burning, as practiced historically by Indigenous people, as a more thoughtful and benign approach for managing fire-based ecosystems. Across the Americas, Indigenous nations used fire as a tool to keep ecosystems healthy. The practice of setting low–severity, early-season fires is a form of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Indigenous peoples, through generations of observation and knowledge-keeping, understand how to work with the forces of nature. Lighting smaller fires in cooler seasons prevented larger, more destructive wildfires while enabling new growth. As a method, planned burning reflects a nuanced understanding of how regeneration functions in ecosystems.

Wildfires can be surface, crown, or ground. Planned burnings create surface fires, which do not remove the canopy, are the easiest to extinguish and cause the least damage. The Kenow Fire was a crown fire—the most destructive and dangerous. In the case of the Kenow Fire, the intensity of the blaze differed in scale and severity from a fire produced through a planned burn, creating more pronounced shifts in ecosystem structure and biodiversity, including reducing the diversity of native grass and altering the primary land cover from grass to mineral soil. Fortunately, despite the severity of the Kenow fire, scientists conclude that from “a plant-community perspective,” the fire cannot be described as catastrophic, as the plant ecosystem demonstrated strong resilience. Reflecting this reality, Rutkauskas’s science-informed artistic practice focuses on regeneration rather than spectacular destruction.

Fire can harm, but it also comforts and warms. It can cause death, but it also seeds new life. By recognizing the multivalent nature of fire, Rutkauskas models a practice of what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”: moving beyond either despair or hope in a process of “learning to be truly present” and in relation with ecosystems.3 Rutkauskas re-directs our attention from the scale of human-caused destruction to the enduring ability of nature to heal. The human figures in Aftermath of the Kenow Fire are positioned between the majesty of the distant mountains and the charred, skeletal trees behind them. They are small, trapped by the desolation behind them, and dwarfed by nature’s scale. The eye is drawn last to the foreground, where the ground explodes with lush, flourishing, explosive life. Plants are starting from the ground up, green and patient.

Endnotes 1 T.J. Demos, “The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics.” e-flux #98, February 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/98/256882/the- agency-of-fire-burning-aesthetics/ 2 Christina Eisenberg et al. “Out of the Ashes: Ecological Resilience to Extreme Wildfire, Prescribed Burns, and Indigenous Burning in Ecosystems.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 26 (2019): 10. 3 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016) 1.

Siobhan Angus is an art historian, curator, and organizer. Specializing in the history of photography and the environmental humanities, her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. She is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Carleton University and holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University where her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her research has been published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Radical History Review, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. Her book, Camera Geologica, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice.