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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue xv
Introduction 1
1. Technical Control 25
Interlude 1: Sing-Along with David and Linda Hurley 59
2. Communicative Control 62
Interlude 2: Sensing with Fire Analysts 90
3. Epistemic Control 94
Interlude 3: Lunch with Phil Cheney 125
4. Moral Control 129
Interlude 4: Investigating with Bomber 134 155
5. Indigenous Control 159
Conclusion: After Control 184
Notes 195
References 209
Index 237

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

Review :
“How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent takes us on a fascinating journey of the worlds of fire control: emergency operations rooms, fire risk assessments, fire science, firefighters, and firefighting. Neale persuasively argues that in many cases climate crisis is being confronted not as a rupture that changes everything, but through reinvestment in the ‘impossible promise of environmental control.’”—Stephen Collier, Professor of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

“This book offers a much-needed account of the patchy, evolving grammars and logics of wildfire management amidst global climate disruption. Confronting the colonial instinct to control that often misdirects human efforts, Tim Neale offers an alternative that draws on Indigenous approaches to living with wildfires, with care and humility.”—Candis Callison, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Journalism, Media, and Public Discourse, University of British Columbia

“That there is a global wildfire crisis is beyond dispute. With intelligence and sensitivity, Timothy Neale’s unique ethnography discloses the limits of institutional authority and technological mastery in confronting this crisis, revealing the moral complexity and intellectual confusion of fire bureaucracies. This important book shows how through shared experience and respect for human and nonhuman life we might have a deeper relationship with wildfire and escape the seductive illusion of ‘control’.”—David MJS Bowman, ARC Laureate Professor, University of Tasmania