.jpg/2000px-Grass_tree_on_fire_during_controlled_burn_(cropped).jpg)
Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Fire-stick farming
Fire-stick farming, also known as cool burning, is a cultural burning practice whereby Aboriginal Australians regularly use fire to burn vegetation, a management technique which has been utilized for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type of controlled burning, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of biodiversity.
While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as the Noongar people's cold fire.
The term "fire-stick farming" was coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969. It has more recently been called cultural burning and cool burning.
Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the Australian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populated Pleistocene Australia. Palynologist A. P. Kershaw has argued that Aboriginal burning may have modified the vegetation to the extent that the food resources of the megafauna were diminished, and as a consequence the largely herbivorous megafauna became extinct. Kershaw also suggested that the arrival of Aboriginal people may have occurred more than 100,000 years ago, and that their burning caused the sequences of vegetation changes which he detects through the late Pleistocene. The first to propose such an early arrival for Aboriginal peoples was Gurdip Singh from the Australian National University, who found evidence in his pollen cores from Lake George indicating that Aboriginal people began burning in the lake catchment around 120,000 years ago.
Tim Flannery believes that the megafauna were hunted to extinction by Aboriginal people soon after they arrived. He argues that with the rapid extinction of the megafauna, virtually all of which were herbivorous, a great deal of vegetation was left uneaten, increasing the standing crop of fuel. As a consequence, fires became larger and hotter than before, causing the reduction of fire-sensitive plants to the advantage of those that were fire-resistant or fire-dependent. Flannery suggests that Aboriginal people then began to burn more frequently to maintain a high species diversity and to reduce the effect of high intensity fires on medium-sized animals and perhaps some plants. He argues that twentieth-century Australian mammal extinctions are largely the result of the cessation of Aboriginal "firestick farming".
Researcher David Horton from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, suggested in 1982, "Aboriginal use of fire had little impact on the environment and... the patterns of distribution of plants and animals which obtained 200 years ago would have been essentially the same whether or not Aborigines had previously been living here".
A 2010 study of charcoal records from more than 220 sites in Australasia dating back 70,000 years found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent (although this date is in question, with sources pointing to much earlier migrations). The study reported higher bushfire activity from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the last glacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire in Australasia predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterised by less and warmer intervals by more biomass burning.
Regular firing favoured not only fire-tolerant or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favoured by more open country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did affect the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximise productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aboriginal people. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone".
Hub AI
Fire-stick farming AI simulator
(@Fire-stick farming_simulator)
Fire-stick farming
Fire-stick farming, also known as cool burning, is a cultural burning practice whereby Aboriginal Australians regularly use fire to burn vegetation, a management technique which has been utilized for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type of controlled burning, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of biodiversity.
While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as the Noongar people's cold fire.
The term "fire-stick farming" was coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969. It has more recently been called cultural burning and cool burning.
Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the Australian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populated Pleistocene Australia. Palynologist A. P. Kershaw has argued that Aboriginal burning may have modified the vegetation to the extent that the food resources of the megafauna were diminished, and as a consequence the largely herbivorous megafauna became extinct. Kershaw also suggested that the arrival of Aboriginal people may have occurred more than 100,000 years ago, and that their burning caused the sequences of vegetation changes which he detects through the late Pleistocene. The first to propose such an early arrival for Aboriginal peoples was Gurdip Singh from the Australian National University, who found evidence in his pollen cores from Lake George indicating that Aboriginal people began burning in the lake catchment around 120,000 years ago.
Tim Flannery believes that the megafauna were hunted to extinction by Aboriginal people soon after they arrived. He argues that with the rapid extinction of the megafauna, virtually all of which were herbivorous, a great deal of vegetation was left uneaten, increasing the standing crop of fuel. As a consequence, fires became larger and hotter than before, causing the reduction of fire-sensitive plants to the advantage of those that were fire-resistant or fire-dependent. Flannery suggests that Aboriginal people then began to burn more frequently to maintain a high species diversity and to reduce the effect of high intensity fires on medium-sized animals and perhaps some plants. He argues that twentieth-century Australian mammal extinctions are largely the result of the cessation of Aboriginal "firestick farming".
Researcher David Horton from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, suggested in 1982, "Aboriginal use of fire had little impact on the environment and... the patterns of distribution of plants and animals which obtained 200 years ago would have been essentially the same whether or not Aborigines had previously been living here".
A 2010 study of charcoal records from more than 220 sites in Australasia dating back 70,000 years found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent (although this date is in question, with sources pointing to much earlier migrations). The study reported higher bushfire activity from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the last glacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire in Australasia predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterised by less and warmer intervals by more biomass burning.
Regular firing favoured not only fire-tolerant or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favoured by more open country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did affect the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximise productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aboriginal people. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone".