Future Fire Free Association I
Tricking myself into reading and writing about work
Reading and writing. Two of my favourite activities. And I’m paid to do them. Yet each of these fundamental activities carry some kind of negative charge that ceaselessly repels them from the positively charged nucleus of my to do list. The closer they get, the faster they get flung off into the far reaches of the list. Instead I trawl emails, rearrange lists, have meetings and [slinks deep into my chair so that only my eyes and the top of my head are visible] look at LinkedIn and Mastodon for light relief. Why? Why!!
I ain’t gonna waste any time on that now, I’m just gonna get straight into a free association game with the papers I recently dug up. There won’t be any summary or sage critiques, just some bullet point records of the mental pathways each paper set off as I skim it. This could be a painful experience for you, dear reader, but if it forces me to spend more time reading and writing then it’ll be worth it (for me).
McFayden et al. 2023 A conceptual framework for knowledge exchange in a wildland fire research and practice context
Knowledge exchange between research and practice… This really is my bread and butter. This should be very interesting… Yep, recognise some of the authors, that lends it an air of (possibly justified) credibility…
Aha! This is a chapter. Not your usual journal article - although perhaps it’ll be written that way. The book is Applied Data Science. That one’ll be flying off the shelves come Christmas time.
Alrighty, we’ve hit our first TA (technical acronym). It’s KE, knowledge exchange, which is a conceptual framework that the authors will apply to the question of wildfire. Some good buzzwords too: barriers, facilitators, active learning and data translation. What I want to know is who is it that’s going around erecting all these barriers and locking up all this potential in the first place? What kind of a sicko does that?
Alright, nice opening - hits the key notes: fire is variable, complex, not always bad but sometimes very, very bad. Fire management is smack bang in the middle of it all, most famously trying to put out dangerous fires (‘suppression’) but also dabbling in prevention, mitigation and recovery.
Important point: the objectives of fire management typically (i.e. not necessarily always but often enough that it’s the norm) emphasise protection of people, property, infrastructure, forest resources and socio-economic activity. Notably absent here are environmental values, ecosystem services, community and social values, Indigenous heritage, to name a few. Although ‘socio-economic’ is broad and vague enough that it could hold some of these other things.
Fire management is expensive. I knew it! A cool $1B per year in Canada (equivalent to $1.13B AUD).
Ok, we’re entering footnote territory. This is a long one so I’ll paste it. A little definition, if you please:
Knowledge can be classified into explicit (for example codified) and tacit knowledge (for example has a personal quality). Knowledge and knowledge creation occur over a range of domains -
Let me stop there for a second. This entire excerpt makes perfect sense to me and would not stand out from my academic writing. But I’ll bet that to your average human, terms like ‘codified’, ‘tacit’, ‘knowledge creation’ and ‘range of domains’ induce a quizzical look and a burning desire to leave the conversation immediately. Ok, back to the footnote:
- from fundamental research to local communities. It is important to recognize that the knowledge systems described here are derived from Western perspectives. The authors acknowledge the value of Indigenous and traditional ways of knowing and of knowledge exchange that are not represented in this paper. Indigenous ways of knowing celebrate the intimate connections between humans and the biophysical world. Fire has been used as an important tool for Indigenous Peoples for a variety of reasons, including in hunting and gathering activities, to regenerate land and safeguard resources, for cooking, heating, and ceremony, and for communication. Indigenous Peopls hold important place-based knowledge about fire and fire management and have played a key role in wildland fire management through time.
Ahh - so the footnote is really about acknowledging Indigenous knowledge and knowledge systems. Nice to see that included here. I’m very curious to see how academia and fire management go about relating with other knowledge systems. Is there some fancy framework we need in order to update our research, teaching and management to reflect information coming from profoundly different knowledge systems, or is it as simple as just adding a few more things to the list?
Dammit, I’ve hit a reference that is interesting enough to make me put the paper down for a minute and go and look it up. Sankey’s blueprint for wildland fire science in Canada. I love a good policy document. It is jarring seeing the copyright to Her Majesty the Queen. I don’t remember seeing that on any Australian policy documents.
Sankey has a vision: Canada is resilient to wildland fire.
Sankey has a mission: to transform fire management and strengthen Canadian resilience to wildland fire through research, development and innovation.
Sankey’s themes and recommendations all seem reasonable: understand fire, recognise Indigenous knowledge, resilient communities and infrastructure, healthy ecosystems, good fire management, reduced negative impacts of fire on people, build research capacity, partnerships and knowledge exchange, do good governance and knowledge exchange. Which brings us back to McFayden et al.
“An increasingly important area for fire science knowledge is wildland fire and climate change interactions.” You’re damn right.
Nice acknowledgement of limitations of the loading dock model. It is at our peril that we ignore factors like relevance, credibility, accessibility, collaboration, bi-directionality and iteration.
“There is no universal framework for KE.” That’s a pity. Ah, to be a physicist, where all can agree on the universal framework….
Menagerie of KE terms: knowledge translation, knowledge mobilisation, knowledge to action, knowledge transfer. I’m currently workshopping my own one: “wisdom donation”. Too condescending?
Woah Nelly! Check out Figure 1. Much though I love concept figures, I have mixed feelings about figures where the caption is so long it must be stretched across four tweets (or eight if you go by the original 140-character limit*). This reminds me of the models of atomic structure that were being proposed by experimental physicists in the early twentieth century.
Dammit I really need to get a hurry on, this is taking longer than I planned and I have a meeting coming up. Now I remember why I never read anything.
The highest concentration of knowledge brokers is found at the interface between knowledge transfer and technical transfer. The authors say this is where ‘the water hits the fire’ and I can’t get enough of authors coining their own phrases.
The authors refer to “a cadre” of fire behaviour analysts, as an example of practitioners. Now that’s a collective noun in search of a neologism.
How does knowledge exchange happen?, the authors ask. “It starts with having the right people…” Once again, we can lay the blame for everything at the foot of Human Resources.
If you thought Figure 1 was funky, wait til you see Figure 3. A funnel and its varying width play a prominent role. Along the funnel you can find inquiry, synthesis and application. I have to say that even though I’ve worked in inquiry and application (i.e. academia and government), I’m most drawn to the synthesis phase. I think it’s because I feel confused about 93% of the time and synthesis is my attempt to self-medicate.
I promised myself I would only include one figure, but Figure 4: you had me at hello. This must have been a pain to prepare. Note the use of bold to refer to the most frequently identified barriers and facilitators in the literature.
I found myself wondering what the next steps are, now that we have this fulsome list of barriers and facilitators. But of course every paper has to stop somewhere.
The final part of the paper talks about teaching this material using the ‘active learning’ framework, which is a more participatory approach compared with traditional lecturing.
Overall this is a nice overview of a complex area. There’s a lot in here, and anyone using this as a guide to improving interactions between wildfire practitioners and researchers will do well.
I’m still left with the nagging feeling that the transformative change Sankey calls for has somehow fallen between the cracks. Will transformative change come from applying this framework, working through the funnel and the various barriers and facilitators? Or is there more required; a missing ingredient? Perhaps I’m foolishly looking for the box marked ‘transformational change’, like a naive consciousness researcher looking for the neuron (or cluster thereof) labelled consciousness. Maybe it all emerges from the system, perhaps with a helping hand from parallel processes occurring way outside the wildfire knowledge exchange ‘domain’.
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*Xitter sucks