Cultural burning, cultural misappropriation, over-simplification of land management complexity, and ecological illiteracy

Abstract

Recent catastrophic fire seasons, particularly the so-called “Black Summer” of 2019–2020, have led to widespread discussions about how land management in parts of Australia might more effectively reduce the risks of high severity and high-intensity wildfire. As part of these discussions, there have been demands for more prescribed burning as part of hazard reduction (see Binskin et al. 2020) and calls for greater use of cultural burning, the traditional burning practices employed by First Nations people (Mariani et al. 2022), that is, the use of fire to fight fire, with more burning reducing fuel loads and lowering the risk of more severe wildfires in some ecosystems. However, here we argue that more fire in the landscape will not necessarily be a positive step in some ecosystems and in others may exacerbate problems associated with elevated risks of higher fire severity (e.g. see Zylstra et al. 2022) as well as have negative impacts on biodiversity (e.g. Dixon et al. 2018). Context-specific and nuanced approaches are therefore required in the application of burning to prevent pervasive outcomes in some ecosystems.