Fire & Carbon: Caring For Native Grasslands

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First Nations Australians have practiced an economy of fire for millennia. Dynamics between animals, plants (including native grasses) and people on the continent were shaped for thousands of years by a cosmo-ecological framework in which an ethics of care was fundamental¹. This system involved a combination of complex land practices and social systems. Before colonisation, Australia was in effect a single ‘estate’, with many caretakers and with fire regimes adapted to distinct ecosystems. Each of these interacted and co-existed to ensure that food (much of it stemming from native grasses) was abundant, convenient and predictable across the continent. This common management system can be recognised in ‘enough dispersed places across Australia to say that the system was universal^2.’ Environmental historian Bill Gammage, has detailed this system based on early colonial observations in his revisionist analysis, The Biggest Estate on Earth; and in a recent text co-authored with Bruce Pascoe, Country: Future Fire, Future Farming).

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Burning Country with the right fire supports healthy ecosystems. Because ancient fire practices have been widely suppressed since colonisation, our landscapes are now highly bushfire-prone and there is still a general ignorance of fire as a key force that can be used to shape and cultivate the land in positive ways. The regular use of fire would have created landscapes that look markedly different to the agriculturally-dominant wide open vistas that exist today. According to early colonial records, such landscapes often resembled cultivated English estates, with wide avenues of native grasses interspersed with groves of trees. However the aesthetic of Australian landscapes informed by settler farming practices have produced ways of seeing the land that make it hard to re-imagine such a unified estate cultivated by fire, pre-colonisation. Such landscapes are perhaps hard to imagine because ‘we wear the blinkers agriculture imposes³’. Philosopher, Timothy Morton suggests that contemporary ways of reading the land based upon agricultural productivity has led us to an impoverished vision that needs to be expanded - to push beyond what he calls “agri-logistics”, in order to imagine both the past and future more vividly.

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First Nations’ fire advocate and custodian Victor Steffensen speaks eloquently about the many ways that fire has played a central role in cultivating, maintaining and caring for native Australian grasslands over vast periods of time. During the Carbon Dating Yarning Circle event in Dec 2022, Leeton Lee also stated,

What's really, really important when we're having a look at things like our grasses, is the cultural landscape, and the cultural lens to view that landscape, actually understanding what those places should look like. Because everywhere has a cultural identity⁴.

First Nations Australians consciously and deliberately use/d fire in ways that involve controlling its intensity and timing to generate a dynamic mosaic of ecosystems⁵. These practices are informed by a cultural understanding of fire as an ally and protector, and as a generative tool and medicine for Country.

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Reducing fuel build-up through low intensity, smaller-scale ‘cool burns’ causes less ecological impact, with lower human risk than the higher intensity and large-scale hazard reduction techniques mostly employed in Australia’s bushfire risk mitigation strategy⁶. Cultural burning is premeditated, conscious and intentional; and is used in ways that sustain, cultivate and promote the health of the land. Unlike so called ‘hazard-reduction burns’ where lines of fire can create giant walls of flame, cultural burning typically uses spot ignitions to create a mosaic of slowly moving cool fires. through which wildlife can escape. Protecting the canopy is paramount and the low-intensity of the fire protects the seeds and nutrients beneath the soil.

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Since colonisation, fire suppression across the country may have at times created a perception of safety, but desired healthy ecosystem states have not been achieved, and have, paradoxically, increased fire risk. During the catastrophic 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ fire season, mainstream bushfire management practices were called into question across the media, via social networks and in academia⁷. Since then, growing support for the widespread implementation of traditional Indigenous fire practices has been prompting a rewriting of the narrative of fire in Australia⁸. Arguably there is a shift underway, as deep knowledge embedded in practices of Caring for Country are re-evaluated by mainstream Australia. Many voices, like that of Victor Steffenson and members of the organisation Firesticks that he leads like Leeton Lee (Firesticks Coordinator SEQ) are now actively challenging dominant understandings of fire in the public imagination.

In the context of fire, when we're talking about fire, most of what we hear is about risk and hazard, and danger, and all of these sorts of things, but we're using the wrong language. It's like with our children, if we talk with a negative tone all the time, they're gonna pick that up, they feel that - our sound and our words are very, very powerful. Whereas when we walk through a Country, and we're talking about it, ah thank you for these gifts. Country has so many gifts for us. When we're talking about it, you know, I'm gonna burn you now and you know, and clean you up⁹.

Maybe then such powerful voices, and the catastrophic bushfires may become key drivers to enable the wider Australian population to collectively re-imagine our relationships with the environment, with fire, and with the future itself.

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Change is occurring as communities actively confront the damaging impacts of colonisation and grapple with the pressure of a changing climate. Many people are working to decolonise their thinking; debating how this continent will look in 50 years, and how critical ecologies and fragile ecosystems such as grasslands may be protected and restored. Many damaging practices since colonisation have left the country diminished and past decisions need to be reckoned with. The cessation of widespread cultural burning practices and the policy-driven plant-introduction programs that were set up to settle parts of Australia (on land which was often considered by colonial authorities empty and devoid of value), are two such examples.

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Thousands of non-native species were introduced to increase pasture and make the country more productive. These deliberate strategies have clearly not always worked, with negative consequences for soils, culture and ecosystems¹⁰. Regenerative agriculture is an alternative model of land stewardship that is offering new forms of eco-social hope, along with redefining the role of fire in the Australian landscape. There is a growing interest in what productive landscapes in Australia could look like if we worked with Indigenous principles of caring for Country. Native grasslands depend on such re-imaginings for their very survival and there is a plethora of good science to support the integration of native grasses back into landscapes. Native grasses are adapted to local conditions and help to maintain local ecosystems, and they form the cornerstone of our original grassy ecosystem habitats. Native grasses also bring carbon back into soil, supporting soil carbon sequestration. However regionally these grassland habitats are now some of our most threatened.

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Soil’s capacity to store carbon, regenerate itself and breathe life into agriculture and landscapes is also an area of increasing interest in the context of regenerative agriculture. As a response to a combination of contemporary socio-political and environmental problems, soil now appears as a thing of both concern and hope, suggested by the declaration of 2015 as the International Year of Soils. Soil carbon sequestration has been heralded as one of a number of strategies for directly manipulating environmental and climatic systems in response to global heating; what Tim Flannery (2015) terms ‘third-way’ technologies designed to “recreate, enhance or restore the processes that created the balance of greenhouse gases which existed prior to human interference, with the aim to drawing carbon, at scale, out of the Earth’s atmosphere and/or ocean”.

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In the context of vast degradation, soil management is also being taken up in a range of humanitarian, political and environmental projects. The relationship between soils and climate change featured prominently in 2015 Paris COP21 climate meetings. In the weeks leading up to the Paris talks a host of US and international environmental groups and NGOs ie the Centre for Food Safety, Regeneration International and ‘Soil4Climate’ collaborated in the release of the 4per1000 Initiative by the French Ministry of Agriculture - a programme designed to “demonstrate that agriculture, and agricultural soils in particular, can play a crucial role where food security and climate change are concerned” through a commitment to a “4% annual growth rate of the soil carbon stocks”. Furthermore, the potential co-benefits of carbon farming are increasingly positioned alongside the re-introduction of Indigenous land-management practices, particularly through the use of traditional cultural burning and savanna burning methods.

At the Carbon Dating Yarning Circle at HOTA, Gold Coast in Dec 2022, Leeton Lee and Delissa Walker Ngadijina¹² spoke to these ideas of the creative processes that underpin caring for Country in Australia extensively at the Carbon Dating Yarning circle - reminding us that First Nations wisdom and the creative arts can have complementary, yet important  roles to play in this profound transformation of how we care for Country. Leeton noted,
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a lot of our solutions over the next 50 years or 100 years are going to come from traditional knowledge. And we need to really start moving in a direction that we're actually supporting and facilitating that process now, so we can move on and heal and start moving forward¹¹..

‍ to which Delissa replied

‍ I think that's a very good point. And I think that's what this Carbon Dating project is all about is getting all the resources and focusing on getting people like yourself, you know who have that knowledge?¹²

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Footnotes

_{[1] Walker, J. (2020). More Heat Than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics. Springer.}

_{[2] Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia. The Conversation.}

_{[3] Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia. The Conversation.}

_{[4] Leeton, Lee, Transcription, Yarning Circle: Living Ecology Event @ HOTA, 4/12.22}

_{[5] Steffenson, V. (2020). Fire Country: how Indigenous fire management could help save Australia. Hardie Grant Publishing.}

_{[6] Skiba, R. (2020). Usage of cool burning as a contributor to bushfire mitigation. Natural Resources, 11. 307-316. https://doi.org/10.4236//nr.2020.118018.}

_{[7] Leimbach, T. & Palmer, J. (2022). #AustraliaOnFire: hashtag activism and collective affect in the Black Summer fires. Journal of Australian Studies.}

_{[8] Eriksen, C. & Ballard, S. (2020). Alliances in the Anthropocene: fire, plants, and people. Palgrave Pivot.}

_{[9] Leeton, Lee, Transcription, Yarning Circle: Living Ecology Event @ HOTA, 4/12.22}

_{[10] Cook &Dias}

_{[11] Leeton, Lee, Transcription, Yarning Circle: Living Ecology Event @ HOTA, 4/12.22}

_{[12] Ngadijina, Walker, Delissa, Transcription, Yarning Circle: Living Ecology Event @ HOTA, 4/12.22}

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References

^{Douglas K. Bardsley, Thomas A.A. Prowse and Caren Siegfriedt, "Seeking knowledge of traditional Indigenous burning practices to inform regional bushfire management," Local Environment, 24, no. 8 (2019): 727-745;}

^{Eriksen, C. & Ballard, S. (2020). Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants, and People. Palgrave Pivot.}

^{David Bowman and Greg Lehman,"Australia, you have unfinished business. It’s time to let our ‘fire people’ care for this land," The Conversation, (2020), <https://theconversation.com/australia-you-have-unfinished-business-its-time-to-let-our-fire-people-care-for-this-land-135196>;}

^{Michelle McKemey et al.,"A review of contemporary Indigenous cultural fire management literature in southeast Australia," EcoEvoRxiv Preprints, (2020): 1-63, https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/4324/.}

^{Deborah Bird Rose, "Caring for Country," in Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, ed. Deborah Bird Rose (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996).}

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