Smokey Bear and the pyropolitics of United States forest governance
dc.contributor.author | Minor, Jesse | |
dc.contributor.author | Boyce, Geoffrey A. | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2018-06-11T18:33:26Z | |
dc.date.available | 2018-06-11T18:33:26Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2018-01 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Minor, J., & Boyce, G. A. (2018). Smokey Bear and the pyropolitics of United States forest governance. Political Geography, 62, 79-93. | en_US |
dc.identifier.issn | 09626298 | |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.005 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10150/627921 | |
dc.description.abstract | Wildfire prevention advertisements featuring Smokey Bear represent the longest-standing and most successful government advertising and branding campaign in U.S. history. As the public face of U.S. fire control policy, Smokey Bear uses mass media to influence the attitudes and behavior of U.S. citizenry in order to accomplish particular outcomes related to wildfire prevention and suppression, forest protection, and resource management. Smokey Bear can therefore be viewed as a governmental instrument that simultaneously targets the behavior of the U.S. public and the biophysical materiality of combustible forests. Examining the evolution of Smokey Bear and related wildfire prevention media, we explore connections between state management of people, territory, and flammable landscapes. Borrowing from Nigel Clark (2011), we use the term pyropolitics to describe the resulting more-than-human assemblage of citizenship, fire suppression and forest ecology. Importantly, this pyropolitical assemblage has substantive and recursive impacts on state practice. Through aggressive wildfire prevention and suppression that include and extend beyond Smokey Bear, the U.S. state has transformed fuel loads, species compositions, and ecosystem dynamics across North America. One result is a heightened propensity toward catastrophic wildfire, requiring additional and sustained state intervention to maintain an imposed and unstable equilibrium. Thus even as the economic, social and cultural realities of U.S. civic life have changed over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries and even as knowledge of the ecological benefits of fire to ecosystem health has developed over time the message of Smokey Bear has remained remarkably consistent, communicating an official imperative to prevent anthropogenic ignition. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.publisher | ELSEVIER SCI LTD | en_US |
dc.relation.url | http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0962629816301548 | en_US |
dc.rights | © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. | en_US |
dc.rights.uri | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ | |
dc.subject | Advertising | en_US |
dc.subject | Biopolitics | en_US |
dc.subject | Environmentality | en_US |
dc.subject | Governmentality | en_US |
dc.subject | Posthumanism | en_US |
dc.subject | State theory | en_US |
dc.subject | Wildfire | en_US |
dc.title | Smokey Bear and the pyropolitics of United States forest governance | en_US |
dc.type | Article | en_US |
dc.contributor.department | Univ Arizona, Sch Geog & Dev | en_US |
dc.identifier.journal | POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY | en_US |
dc.description.note | 24 month embargo; published online: 23 October 2017 | en_US |
dc.description.collectioninformation | This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu. | en_US |
dc.eprint.version | Final accepted manuscript | en_US |
dc.source.journaltitle | Political Geography | |
dc.source.volume | 62 | |
dc.source.beginpage | 79 | |
dc.source.endpage | 93 |