FOREST⇌FIRE
2017 - 2022
Bringing the forests of the Sierra Nevada mountains back into balance with fire.
FOREST⇌FIRE was an arts-based, cultural response to vital information forest stakeholders understood and wanted to share with the greater community, to safeguard both the forest and the community from catastrophic fire and the effects of climate change.
The project sprang from the Sagehen Forest Project, a fifteen year effort by a majority of forest stakeholders - scientific, environmental, forestry, timber, land trust, NGO, etc. - to come into consensus about how to prevent catastrophic fire in the mixed conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada.
Paradoxically, the heart of the solution is fire, not catastrophic fire, but prescribed, low-intensity fire, used as a tool to safely reduce fuel loads and renew biome, much as indigenous tribes had done for thousands of years throughout the West.
Working through the artist-in-residence program established by the University of California, Berkeley - Sagehen Creek Field Station in partnership with the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment, FOREST⇌FIRE gathered in the final, essential, stakeholders in the Tahoe - Truckee region, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, K-12 environmental educators, artists, and the public.
Through art, science and storytelling, FOREST⇌FIRE transformed the cultural history of the region from a little over a century-old economic perspective to a more comprehensive, multi-millennium, ecological perspective. It inspired community conversation, understanding, and consensus for the need to reduce fuel loads and introduce prescribed fire, as a way to support the overall forest biome, the region’s most powerful partner in safeguarding California’s precious watersheds and mitigating climate change.
Quote from Anna:
Participating artists: Christopher Baldwin, Sandow Birk, Tiffany Bozic, Sarah Coleman, Nina Elder, Todd Gilens, Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, Elisabett Gudmann, Paula Henson, Jonathon Keats, Judith Lowry, Nancy Mintz, Erika Osborne, Tahiti Pehrson, Elyse Pignolet, Sara L. Smith, Andy Thrams, and Cedra Wood.
