How colonial land management and climate denial fuel wildfires: tech as bandage, not cure
Original framing: “Tech Now” — BBC News - Technology
The BBC’s headline—‘Tech Now’—invokes a colonial trickster trope: the white savior narrative where innovation replaces justice. Coyote, the Indigenous trickster, would laugh at drones circling a forest while loggers clear-cut its edges for ‘green’ energy. Erasmus, the Renaissance trickster, might note how the same institutions funding wildfire tech also fund peatland destruction, exposing hypocrisy as the ultimate joke. The absurdity lies in treating symptoms (wildfires) while ignoring the system (extractivism) that creates them—a farce where the punchline is always deferred to ‘future tech.’ The real trick is making us believe this is progress.
The BBC’s tech-centric framing of wildfires in the Cairngorms obscures a 300-year-old colonial project where land was stripped of its Indigenous stewards and repurposed for industrial extraction—first for timber, now for ‘green’ energy.
While drones map fire scars, the same institutions funding surveillance also profit from peatland degradation, revealing a system where climate adaptation is outsourced to capital while ecological restoration remains an afterthought. Reintegrating Gaelic fire ethics and Yolŋu pyrodiversity isn’t just ‘traditional knowledge’; it’s a proven, scalable solution that could reduce wildfire risks by 70% while creating jobs and centering marginalized voices. The trickster here isn’t some rogue algorithm but the entire edifice of tech-as-savior narratives, which mask deeper contradictions: how can we ‘monitor’ wildfires while ignoring the policies that created them? The path forward demands dismantling extractivism, not just deploying more gadgets.