Burning the Land as a “Deep World” Ritual

In his essay “Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff fora Global Medicine Show” (2002) Ronald Grimes argues that too much environmentalism focuses on formulating ethical principles. Rather, as Grimes suggests, following poet Gary Snyder, “performance” is the currency we should be using to address our current environmental crises. We should be trying to figure out what actions, “rightly performed,” might save the planet. This argument was provocative to me and I began to wonder what “rightly performed” and “saving the planet” might mean in the context of ecological restoration practices, such as prescribed fire. In my current research, I draw on Grimes’ writing on ritual and the environment, using ritual as a lens through which to analyze cases where Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices around intentional fire converge on northern California’s wildfire-prone landscapes and burn scars. “Ecologically attuned rites,” to borrow Grimes’ phrase in “Ritual and the Environment” (2003), around intentional fire both express and constitute relationships with the more-than-human world. I explore the ways in which these attuned practices make, re-make, erode, transcend, and cross relational boundaries in both creative and destructive ways.