How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Elements)

A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earth’s most fire-prone countries, Timothy Neale’s How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent critiques the colonial logics of control deployed to manage unruly environments and explores alternative forms of environmental stewardship.

Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and by the intense public disagreements about their political, cultural, and ecological causes. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities. Timothy Neale observes how two seemingly opposing forces—an entrenched sense of crisis and widespread normalization—combine to form an apparatus of institutional fire management that increasingly centers technical control and militarization. While sympathetic to the double binds many fire management professionals find themselves in, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty. Through dialogue and collaboration with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, Neale calls for a collective movement beyond control thinking by fostering new alliances and modes of coping with, rather than commanding, our flammable world.

Timothy Neale is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University and author of Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia.