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Abstract: Private commercial landowners hold the majority of American timberlands. Government land managers, represented by various agencies, collectively control the second largest proportion of timberlands. Interactions between private and public landowners have changed dramatically over the past 120 years; the once-collaborative relationship is increasingly adversarial as the goals of adjacent landowners con?ict. This shift is especially evident in the norms followed, and practices used, to address wild?re. As public land management objectives changed in response to environmental pressures, the core competency of government land management agencies similarly shifted from forestry to ?re?ghting. Accordingly, government ?re?ghting agencies’ objectives for ?re?ghting are sharply divergent from— and sometimes directly opposed to— the interests of private landowners.
This chapter presents an ethnographic study of the extralegal norms governing ?re suppression among private landowners. The ethnographic component of this chapter is based upon a dozen interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010 with institutional private landowners, registered professional foresters, an attorney specializing in wild?re litigation, and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection employees. The norms revealed in the interviews are premised upon the closely knit nature of the group, which anticipates future ongoing interactions, as well as bene?ts from the reduced cost of extralegal dispute resolution. Historically, when the government acted primarily as a land manager, it shared in these norms. Collaborations between government ?re?ghting agencies and private landowners under exigent circumstances provided ef?ciencies in resource allocation and communication of institutional knowledge. But, as government agencies reduced their land management capacities, sharing norms with private land managers became less desirable; the groups were no longer composed of foresters with similar backgrounds; and the need for repeated interactions on day-to-day land management issues decreased, as did the related need for an inexpensive, relationship-preserving method of con?ict resolution. Without the backdrop relationship of cooperation in land management, the use of norms in wild?re suppression efforts similarly declined. Although restoration of shared norms is infeasible given the current policy objectives of government land management agencies, this chapter does propose that a more collaborative, less adversarial approach to ?re suppression is normatively desirable.
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