How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Elements)

"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. Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and intense disagreements within public discourse about the political, cultural, and ecological causes of the fires.

For some, the fires signal a definitive tipping point within the global climate crisis while in more conservative sectors, the fires are naturalized as an inherent part of the Australian landscape.

Timothy Neale observes how these seemingly opposing forces-an entrenched sense of nested crises and widespread normalization-come together to form an apparatus of institutional fire management, one that increasingly centers governance and militarization.

Neale traces different configurations of control systems-technical, communicative, epistemic, and moral-across particular sites within Australian fire control and then points to alternative possibilities such as the revitalization of Indigenous environmental stewardship.

Through ethnographic work with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, this book provides a complex picture of what it would mean to think about climate collapse beyond a logic of crisis"-- Provided by publisher.