Chau Pham_"The Pyro Problem: an environmental history of fire in the deciduous dipterocarp savanna of Vietnam"

Historically, Indigenous communities like the Êđê and M'nông in the Central Highlands of Vietnam actively managed fire in the deciduous dipterocarp savanna. However, since 1992, Yok Đôn National Park, which covers 115,000 hectares, has taken over fire management. The park's current policy of spatially extensive and annual prescribed burning has resulted in the topkill of seedlings and hindered sapling recruitment, suggesting that the savanna is not adapted to these conditions. What did the spatial and temporal patterns of fire at Yok Đôn use to look like, and what were the historical precedents that led to the park’s fire management policy? Using an interdisciplinary methodology that applies archival research to disturbance ecology theory, I demonstrate the key differences in the fire regimes adopted by Indigenous communities, colonial French foresters, and Vietnamese foresters. While fire was considered a life force by swidden-practicing Êđê and M’nông communities, it has been problematized in different ways by the exogenous administrators that have set foot on the Central Highlands throughout history. This problematization allows for the control of fire, in one way or another, as a tool of conquest, war, and suppression by the different political regimes, all of whom view Indigenous people and their lifeways as “dispensible”.

Chau (she/they) is a 5th-year PhD student in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior at the University of Minnesota. They study the history and ecology of fire in the deciduous dipterocarp savanna of Mainland Southeast Asia and - in particular - Vietnam, where they are from. Their research takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining methods from geochronology, population ecology, and environmental history to demonstrate the entanglement of fire history and human history on a natural landscape that has been shaped by Indigenous stewardship, colonialism, and war.