How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Elements) - Softcover

Timothy Neale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478038799 ISBN 13: 9781478038795

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2026

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478038799
• ISBN 13: 9781478038795
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272