Playing with Fire: Three Stories of Burning the Forest
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Title
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Playing with Fire: Three Stories of Burning the Forest
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Description
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This thesis follows the language of fire between three characters and a forest in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. In this region, growing interest in the “good fire” of prescribed burning is routinely deployed in a non-human ecological silo, failing to embrace its histories -- and potentials -- as an agent of social and political transformation. This project invites that challenge, suggesting forms of communal burning that highlight fire’s potential as a catalyst of dialogue between each other, the stories we bring, and the forests we inhabit.
This reading of fire invites complexity, framing the site as at once an experimental forest operated by the U.S. Forest Service, a home for the town of Challenge, and the ancestral homeland of the Nisenan people. These stories guide us into a future of fire in three acts: as participation in the burn, as the cultivation of non-extractive forest-relationships, and as leverage for land access. Within each, spaces of design welcome us into the frictions of burning together -- in pursuit of fire as a collective and elemental force of human nature.
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Creator
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Godner-Abravanel, Alana Sahar
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Contributor
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Wettstein, Emily
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Date
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2021-05-21T13:49:13Z
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2021
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2021-05-17
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2021-05
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2021-05-21T13:49:13Z
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Type
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Thesis or Dissertation
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text
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Format
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application/pdf
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application/pdf
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Identifier
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Godner-Abravanel, Alana Sahar. 2021. Playing with Fire: Three Stories of Burning the Forest. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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28540588
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https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367630
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Language
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en