Grounding fire: from climate affect to imperfect alliance in La Chiquitania

The lowland Bolivian region of La Chiquitania, straddling the Amazon and La Plata River basins, has been severely impacted by recent wildfires. Wildfires increasingly act as an extractivist method for deforesting landscapes, facilitating the conversion of land into property and of subsoil, timber, meat, soy, and minerals into commodities slated for international markets. This article explores how wildfires render landscapes disposable not only for capital but also for a set of environmental mediations that can disempower those most afflicted by climate change. For those targeted by these interventions, wildfires and conservation responses reproduce aspects of earlier histories of territorial displacement by colonial Jesuits, Spanish plantation owners, white and mestizo agro-capitalists, and anti-Indigenous conservationists. Building from collaborative research in this region, I ask how these fires elicit new reflections upon a racialized history of land dispossession to which Indigenous people have been subjected. Against presumptions of a shared atmosphere of harm—the myth of universalism underlying what I call climate affect—the allied responses to wildfire in Chiquitos that I discuss foreground the unequal harms of an ongoing but not new climate apocalypse.