The burning fire of settler colonialism: Jack A Kredell, Apparatuses of Fire: Smokey Bear, Exception, and Wildfire Emotion, PhD dissertation, University of Idaho, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The burning fire of settler colonialism: Jack A Kredell, Apparatuses of Fire: Smokey Bear, Exception, and Wildfire Emotion, PhD dissertation, University of Idaho, 2026

31May26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the political, rhetorical, and affective dimensions of wildfire governance in the western United States through three interrelated studies that together constitute a critical account of what I call “apparatuses of fire”: the discursive, institutional, and logistical structures immanent to the material existence of landscape fire which have shaped relationships to landscape fire in the U.S. over the past century. Chapter One analyzes the visual rhetoric of the Smokey Bear fire prevention campaign, the longest-running public service advertising campaign in U.S. history, as a site where human-animal difference is systematically constructed and naturalized. Drawing on Heidegger’s distinction between human “world-forming” and animal “captivation,” the chapter argues that Smokey Bear posters position fire prevention not merely as a civic duty but as an ontological imperative grounded in the exclusive agential capacity of humans over captivated nonhuman animals. Through close visual analysis of nonhuman animals in Smokey Bear posters, the chapter traces how representations of animality evolve in response to shifting environmental policy while consistently maintaining the foundational structure of human exceptionalism that underwrites the campaign’s central message: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” because non-human animals cannot. Chapter Two offers a political-theoretical account of modern state fire governance as a biophysical state of exception constituted through the inclusive-exclusion of what I call “proscribed fire.” Adapting Giorgio Agamben’s theory of exception (1998) to the domain of environmental governance, and combining it with Paul Virilio’s (2006) dromological analysis of speed and logistics, the chapter argues that the U.S. Forest Service has governed fire-prone landscapes since the Great Fires of 1910 by simultaneously including fire as an exogenous limit-figure and deploying ever-greater logistical speeds to maintain territorial control. This framework illuminates both the fire exclusion era (1910–1970) and the subsequent turn toward ecosystem-based management as continuous expressions of settler continuance (Whyte, 2018) rather than genuine paradigm shifts. The chapter concludes by examining the emergence of AI-driven fire surveillance and autonomous management technologies as the latest iteration of a dromocratic logic that threatens to further marginalize Indigenous and community-based approaches to fire stewardship. Chapter Three turns from state institutions to ordinary people as decision-makers, drawing on twenty-three long-form narrative interviews with rural Inland Northwest residents personally affected by wildfire. Drawing on Lazarus’s principle (2016) of “people think,” the chapter argues that the emotions rural residents feel in response to wildfire — frustration, compassion, and gratitude — are not merely affective reactions to adverse circumstances but autonomous forms of pyropolitical thought capable of exposing, and operating beyond, the structural limits of normative governance and its forms of knowledge. Taken together, the three chapters advance a critical pyropolitics attentive to the ontological assumptions, logistical imperatives, and affective dimensions of U.S. wildfire governance, and call for alternative relationships to fire grounded in ecological reciprocity, Indigenous sovereignty, and genuine community autonomy.

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