[Link to Speaker Bios](https://summerofprotocols.com/sop24-cohort#fire "Link to Speaker Bios")

**Project Summary:** Over a century of fire suppression has changed California from a fire-ecology to a fire-climate; meaning its continued suppression and the fear it generates makes up the atmosphere we live in, the air and smoke we breathe. The indigenous practice of low-intensity, seasonal burning has in the last five years become repopularized under the jurisdiction of Federal, State, and Local governments. These are inevitably the same institutions who once criminalized and achieved various levels of erasure of the cultural knowledge systems they now rely upon.

With this research, we seek to draw a base-map of the complex web of relations that make up the prescribed fire environment in Northern California, with a primary focus on Sonoma County — a leading region on the West Coast for the re-emergence of burn practices, and one that is dense with differing and often conflicting timescales and interests of its inhabitants.

Our goal is to propose enhancements and provide recommendations on how the public and varied stakeholders can conduct themselves in the social environment of fire with more clarity and better effect.

We also aim to express the volatile essence of protocols, embodying a state where physical properties and ancient meanings intertwine. Like seeds that lay dormant in a forest until fire sweeps through and activates them, we want protocols that crack open and allow for autopoietic growth.