Indigenous Fire Management Practices

Long before formal fire science existed, Indigenous peoples on multiple continents deliberately set frequent, low-intensity fires to manage vegetation, promote game and edible plants, reduce fuel accumulation, and maintain open, traversable landscapes. In Australia, this practice is often called "fire-stick farming," a term coined by the archaeologist Rhys Jones in a 1969 paper examining how Aboriginal Australians used patchwork, small-scale burning across the continent for tens of thousands of years, producing a mosaic of vegetation at different post-fire successional stages that supported both biodiversity and reliable food sources. This body of accumulated, place-specific knowledge falls under what anthropologists and ecologists now call "traditional ecological knowledge" (TEK), a term that gained wide currency in ecological literature from the 1980s onward to describe the practical, generationally transmitted environmental understanding of Indigenous communities.