Indigenous Food: Fire-stick farming

"For over 50,000 years, Australia’s Indigenous community cared for country by using land management that worked with the environment. Using traditional burning, fishing traps, and sowing and storing plants, they were able to create a system that was sustainable and supplied them with the food they needed. When Europeans arrived, they brought farming practices suited to an environment very different to Australia, that in the long-term caused erosion and salinity." (Gillies, 2017)

The article discusses the topic of firestick farming in Australia. It states there are many theories speculating that it is a tradition of Australian farming as they used fire to cover tracks or term it as indigenous burning practices and other theories propound it as came from invaders. It mentions firestick burns are causing toxic levels of particulate pollution as per Department of Sustainability and Environment but firestick farming official policy supported by lobbies favours it. (Wilson, 2019)

"Australian Aborigines faced a resource management problem, which they addressed though burning regimes, referred to as fire-stick farming. While dynamic economic analysis is clearly applicable, to date there have been no attempts to use it to model burning regimes. This paper develops a delayed-response optimal-control model to describe Aboriginal fire-stick farming. The model explains a collective welfare maximizing burning regime that successfully controlled wildfires, protected the resources essential to survival, and, incidentally, produced a biodiverse landscape and limited greenhouse gas emissions. When the parameters of the model are changed to reflect the current institutional realities of reduced access to the land, and less direct dependence on it, traditional Aboriginal burning is prevented or delayed, fuel loads build up and uncontrolled fires are more likely to occur, damaging previously protected species. If Aboriginal burning is to be used to control fires successfully in a modern resource management context, it is necessary to adjust for changes in the institutional incentive structure. Payments for carbon offsets are an example of replacing lost incentives with new ones." (Wilman, 2015)

"As the term firestick farming suggests, the Aboriginal use of fire resembled agriculture in some ways: it yielded certain crops at certain times, suppressed weeds and was carefully controlled...Aboriginal people are fiercely protective of their clan lands, excluding outsiders or inviting them in as conditions warrant." (Pascoe, 2018, pp. 161-176)

"Due to the nature of the continent’s climate and topography, natural fires have had a major role with shaping plant and animal communities in Australia.1 Since their ancestors arrived many thousands of years ago, Aboriginal hunter- gatherers have further burnt the vegetation — a process that sculpted the landscape. A close association has developed between Aboriginal people and fire." Clarke, 2011, pp. 60-71)