Temporalities of fire management: Gardening with extractivist droughts in Huertos Familiares, Chile

This article examines the intersection of wildfire, drought and extractivism through the case study of the Jardín del Siglo XXI (JSXXI, the Garden of the Twenty-first Century), a garden-based research project in Huertos Familiares, a community in Tiltil, Chile, increasingly affected by fire. Situating shifting fire regimes within ‘extractivist droughts’—a term used by Valentina Acuña and Manuel Tironi to describe water dispossession caused by mining—the article explores how an extractive logic and neoliberal policies have laid the socioecological groundwork for Tiltil’s escalating wildfires. By using the techniques of gardening alongside Participatory Action Research, JSXXI explores how low-cost, soil-based land management practices respond to emergent conditions of fire and drought. Through the slowness, negotiation and messiness inherent in gardening, the project aims to challenge dominant extractive logics, modelling a landscape otherwise.