Australia just endured the worst flooding it has seen in 60 years, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes in Sydney, New South Wales, and up the North Coast. For many, the experience was painfully familiar; these were the same communities impacted by Australia’s “Black Summer” wildfires of 2019 and 2020, which burned through 13.6 million acres, killed billions of animals, and released more carbon into the atmosphere than the continent does in a year.
If the two events seem like inverse phenomena, they were in fact brought on by the same stressors: misguided environmental policies and a dramatically changing climate. As temperatures rise, weather patterns can shift between intense dryness, sparking bushfires, and torrential rain, prompting floods. That it’s happening almost back-to-back is only more concerning; as New South Wales’s premier Gladys Berejiklian told Reuters: “I don’t know any time in state history where we have had these extreme weather conditions in such quick succession in the middle of a pandemic.” To make matters worse, the “burn scars” of the fires are extra vulnerable to rain and runoff, increasing the risk of landslides. (The cascading effects continue long after these “weather events” are covered on the news.)
What’s the solution to mitigating these disasters? More technology, more fire fighters, more flood-proofing? Those may sound like reasonable, modern fixes, but many believe the answer really lies in the past. Indigenous communities in Australia have dealt with wildfires for millennia using natural technology, namely fire itself. Through “cultural burning,” they intentionally set fire to dried-up brush, vegetation, and dead leaves, a process that regenerates the soil, supports a balanced ecosystem, and clears the scrub that would otherwise catch fire and fuel an unstoppable blaze. In parts of Australia where cultural burning is still carried out, the Black Summer fires actually bypassed the area or died completely. By lighting these small, slow, cooler fires—timed with the seasons and varying life cycles of plants in mind—these communities (and others around the world) have protected themselves from catastrophic fires and preserved their culture.
An Indigenous-led group called the Firesticks Alliance is advocating for a broad return to these practices in Australia. They’re uniting Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to conduct cultural burns across the country, an exercise that’s as much about nurturing the land and building resilience as it is reconnecting with their heritage. “We’re looking at the land like a mother or a family member,” Sian Hromek, a Firesticks director and descendent of the Budawang people of the Yuin Nation, explains via Zoom. “This is our life force. This is where we’ve come from and where we’re going back to, so we treat it like a relationship.”
Cultural burning is at odds with the modern Western view that fire should be aggressively suppressed. In California, a century of suppression has actually exacerbated the fires that do arise, like the ones we saw in 2020. “Unfortunately, a lot of people’s experience with fire is that it’s dangerous, so they’re naturally afraid of it,” Dr. Peta-Marie Standley, a Firesticks research and training manager, says. “But you can’t fight fire. You have to work with it.”
As the fires in Australia, the United States, and the Amazon spark a renewed interest in cultural burning as a model for land management, the challenge is to unlearn our fear of fire and leave behind outdated “modern” practices. “We’ve been getting a lot of questions from overseas like, ‘Is Indigenous fire management the way forward?’” Firesticks co-chairperson Jessica Wegener, a descendent of the Ngiyampaa people, says. “There’s a shift in mind-set happening, and little bits of Indigenous knowledge are being embedded in Western practice. But it has to be applied holistically, not just in part.”
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Western “hazard reduction burning” is often compared to cultural burning—it involves using fire to clear an area of forest—but the practices are hardly similar. Western hazard reduction burning is routinely done “without the nuance around biodiversity,” Standley says, and can ultimately do more harm than good. “Those burns have nothing to do with what’s flowering, what’s fruiting, what’s happening with the local species… They can be too hot, or they’re set at the wrong time, and they might use chemical accelerants. They’re forced, rather than seen as something that’s part of our survival,” she adds. “Without fire, we wouldn’t exist. It is a tool, and it’s something all of us need to learn to use wisely.”
Ultimately, governments will need to empower Indigenous people and groups like the Firesticks Alliance to bring cultural burning and traditional knowledge to the fore; “cherry-picking” their ideas or forcing them into a Western framework simply won’t work. “We’re the ones who need to lead this, and link arms with government,” Hromek says. “Often it’s the other way around, and the government wants to lead. But [as our co-founder] Victor Steffensen has said, ‘Let us drive for a while, and you guys can take the passenger seat and come along on this journey.’ If indigenous people aren’t leading, then you aren’t learning, and you aren’t growing as an individual either. The social implications are really important. We’re talking about the benefits for Indigenous people, but the social benefits for non-Indigenous people are just as huge.”
Beyond their on-the-ground work and cultural burning mentoring and training, Firesticks Alliance hosts workshops for farmers, corporations, and government agencies to further amplify indigenous voices and push for collaboration. “It’s their knowledge,” Standley says. “There’s an awareness around cultural burning now, but it can’t just be taken and published as Western knowledge. There should be employment outcomes for Indigenous people as well. There’s a huge benefit to society, and the way this forms these communities.”
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Visuals editor: Thomas Wolfe
