Gillian Moore (MS ’22) came to the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) with a desire to combine her artistic background with her interest in conservation ecology, particularly the historic and contemporary use of prescribed burns in order to revitalize Michigan’s diminished prairie biome.

Moore, a recent SEAS graduate in Ecosystem Science and Management, held an art exhibition, “Carrying the Torch: Rekindling prescribed fire in Michigan’s prairie peninsula,” as part of her master’s thesis. 

Moore is a lifelong artist who has an undergraduate degree in visual arts and philosophy. She also drew from her experience as a wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service in Central Oregon, where she experienced firsthand the growing intensity of forest fires. “I learned from my work in the west and through my time at SEAS that fire has been used as an ecological management tool—within Michigan specifically by the Anishinaabe People—for thousands of years. I sought out to explore this perceived binary through my thesis.”

Moore's art show ran for two weeks at the Duderstadt Center Gallery in downtown Ann Arbor. The show consisted of 13 individual works: eight paintings, one print, one collage, one video, one sculpture, and one children’s book. 

Moore intended for the audience to experience the show in a carefully designed way. Audiences first entered the gallery and saw the show’s title installation, “Carrying the Torch.” The sculptural installation used drip torches among a large oak bough sourced locally from Bluffs Nature Area in Ann Arbor with a forest manager’s approval to tell a story about fire adaptation that tips the ecological scales in favor of some species and away from others. Pieces directly following the sculpture engaged with the destructive nature of forest fires. 

“Out west the view and experience of fire in a landscape is mainly fire as a destructive force, and that is increasing more and more as wildfire season intensifies” said Moore. “These pieces invoke familiar images of catastrophic fire: blazing, out of control, destructive, and intensified by climate change. But while the wildfire problem increases, it is with more fire, not less, that ecosystems can be restored to resilience, and this unidimensional view of fire as a destructive force is what this first series begins to query.” 

The next pieces in the show were intended to challenge the assumption of fire in nature as a purely destructive force by communicating the compelling scientific evidence to the contrary. These pieces contemplated the history and application of anthropogenic fire as a form of ecological management within Michigan’s prairie biome. A piece that particularly captured this effort to reframe our understanding of fire was a series of three paintings titled “Succession I, II, and III.” The paintings were meant to resemble a map through time, representing the use of prescribed burns before settler colonialism, after settler colonialism, and in the current era where fire-based practices are reemerging.

“These pieces represent the successional phases in vegetation and cultural succession through time. No matter how you look at it, an abrupt shift in anthropogenic burning practices has drastically changed the vegetative systems here in Michigan,” Moore said. “This is not incidental; it's a core feature of how this biome was managed with prescribed burns by Indigenous groups and the abrupt halt of this practice with the arrival of settler colonialism and how this led to a drastic change in the health of these prairie biomes that require fire in order to combat encroaching forests. Less than .01% of prairie savannah ecosystems currently remain in the United States. This is a drastic landscape change that is unprecedented. This series of succession paintings is my attempt at capturing what the science is telling us: that these fires that formed these once abundant prairies and incredible landscape diversity are no longer present.”

The next piece, a collage of fire prevention signs that were retired by the Forest Service, provided a contrast to the diversity in the prior paintings, confronting visitors with the unequivocal message of Smokey Bear’s “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,'' and encouraged them to think more deeply than Smokey allows about the nuances of the human relationship with fire.

The latter half of the show took on the mission of educating the public about ecologically important implementations of prescribed fires, specifically how vital they are to the unique species of plants and animals that thrive in prairies. “I wanted to take the public’s understanding of catastrophic fire in the west and then reorient them to teach about ecological practices prior to colonization,” said Moore. Another encapsulation of this education process occurs through a children’s book, “Mandy’s Prairie Home,” which was on display at the show. The book was a collaboration between Moore and U-M student Noah Clements that was originally created for a SEAS Restoration Ecology class. “Mandy’s Prairie Home” tells the story of Mandy, an “Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake and her friend, the Wise Old Oak, as they grapple with the loss of their prairie home in the face of fire exclusion and invasive species.”

To assess the effectiveness of the art exhibition, Moore used visitor surveys to see if the show had the impact that she intended. Her survey had three goals: to determine the ways in which the exhibition may have changed visitors' understanding of local fire ecology, modified their level of support for prescribed fire as a land management tool, or influenced their level of concern about the ecological effects of fire exclusion in Michigan ecosystems. Moore found that there was a net increase in the number of people who reported increases in their understanding of prescribed fire, as well as a small percent change in people who opposed prescribed burns before they went through the exhibition. “It is hard to change the minds of an audience in the 10 to 15 minutes they spend in this space," Moore said. "Views on fires in the landscape are predominantly negative, but the responsibility of art is to get people's feet in the door, get them inspired, and get them walking down the path toward a larger cultural change."

Moore said she intends to look for more exhibition spaces for her show in the future. After graduation, she has ambitions to continue making scientifically minded art by pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree. In the meantime, Moore will continue her work as a forestry apprentice and wildland firefighter on the Winema Interagency Hotshot Crew in Klamath Falls, Oregon. “My ultimate goal is to bring more thoughtfulness to the land management sphere," Moore said. "Many traditional management practices that worked for thousands of years have been historically overlooked, and there is a lot of space to diversify the way we think about lands and the way we think about our relationship to the land. Exhibitions should never be the be all end all for this kind of outreach; it should be the spark that leads towards further action.”