Fires are reshaping our planet. In 2024, over 85 million hectares burned across South America. Across Europe, more than 2,000 fires occurred in 2025, burning over one million hectares. The 2025 Los Angeles fires destroyed 23,000 hectares in a few weeks. And the
UK
had its worst year for wildfires in 2025, with 47,026 hectares burned. With accelerating
climate change
, increasingly unsustainable
land use
, and clashes at wildland-urban interfaces, fires are becoming more frequent, intense, and destructive.
In these changing
fire
regimes, the Smart Forests open-access collection, Ecologies of Fire / Ecologías del Fuego, explores how communities, researchers, artists, and Indigenous peoples are collectively rethinking and remaking their relationships with fire.
Developed in collaboration between Smart Forests and Fundación Mar Adentro and centred on La Araucanía in southern
Chile
, the collection documents material from an art-and-science residency at Bosque Pehuén, field schools, and interviews with fire researchers, policymakers, and community
networks
across Chile.
At the core of this collaboration was the art-and-science residency programme Bosque Pehuén - Ecologies of Fire held at Bosque Pehuén in La Araucanía in 2024, where five residents worked on topics related to fire in the Chilean
landscape
and beyond. Their projects investigated the biocultural dimensions of fire, visualised oxidation processes, documented the flammability of different tree species, and explored Indigenous approaches to fire and forest ecosystems. These transdisciplinary investigations created space for expanded conversations about the multiple dimensions of fire.
The collaboration also involved field schools, site visits, and interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, including researchers,
conservation
practitioners, policymakers, and community fire networks across La Araucanía, Los Ríos, Bío-Bío, Nuble, Valparaíso, and Metropolitana. These exchanges allowed us to engage with pluralistic fire practices, technologies, cultures, and relations, where fire can be understood as a territorial inheritance, ceremony, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer.
Ecologies of Fire / Ecologías del Fuego is written as collective conversations with participants and interviewees. Moving across fire ecologies and cosmologies, fire networks, fire technologies, and fire practices, it brings together contributions from Jennifer Gabrys, Maya Errázuriz, Tomás Altamirano, Felipe Guarda, Sebastián Carrasco, Simón Crisóstomo Loncopán, Pablo González Rivas, Paula Tiara Torres, Felipe Ortega, Andrés Fuentes Ramírez, Paola Arroyo Vargas, Fernanda Romero, and residents Bárbara Acevedo Strange, Fernanda López Quilodrán, Gianna Salamanca, Pamela Iglesias, and Valeria Palma.
The collection ends with eight proposals for learning to live with fire by pluralising social, cultural, ecological, and technological understandings, practices and infrastructures.
Ecologies of Fire / Ecologías del Fuego is available open access in English and Spanish.
Full credits are available in the book. You can also listen to audio versions of select interviews and find related materials from the collection here.