Tag: neocolonialism

The Memory of Fire: Burning Backwards into the Future

Fire breathes oxygen. Fire consumes organic material. Fire ages and dies. Fire runs, jumps, and simmers. Fire responds differentially to external irritants. Fire has moods. Among many of its seeming affinities with metabolizing life, fire also has an excellent, perhaps perfect, memory. As such, wildfires have one inviolable rule: never backtrack. Fire never goes backwards, never rewinds. Because of this stubborn refusal one of the most successful and widely practiced approaches to halting the progress of wildfires is to pre-burn swaths of land toward which a fire is raging. Once fire comes upon a burnt landscape it cannot proceed, it starves to death. When employed indirectly to create a control line, this strategy is called burnout. However, this strategy can also be employed to directly attack a fire by igniting a blaze and propelling it into the path of a wildfire. This is called backburning. Conclusively, you can fight fire with fire. (read more...)

Indigenous Women’s Engagements with Technology: From Anomaly to Autonomy

In 2013, Bolivia became the last of South America’s major nations to launch a telecommunications satellite. The government outsourced construction and the satellite’s launch to the People’s Republic of China for USD302 million. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, was present in Xichang for the launch while those in Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, watched on large screens erected in public squares. They cheered as the satellite, named after 18th century Indigenous leader Túpac Katari, started to climb. (read more...)