The Fire Commons: Cultural Burning as Multispecies Practice

By Marcus Baynes-Rock

This book explores the multispecies dimensions of First Nations burning practices and shows how these integrate with Aboriginal ontologies to resist the ideological and structural violence of colonisation.

Under the shadow of climate driven catastrophes, cultural burning is undergoing a resurgence as a tradition-based remedy to contemporary ecological breakdown. However, while colonial states offer support for cultural burning programs, they simultaneously threaten to undermine their ideological foundations. This book describes a world of relational, multispecies land management in which Indigenous relations with land challenge the colonial triumvirate of modernity, state and capitalism. By telling the stories of these human/animal entanglements it suggests pathways toward democratising fire so that land management can be truly decolonised.

Serving as an intervention in contemporary environmental discourse, advocating for a more holistic and relational understanding of fire in the Anthropocene, this book will appeal to policymakers, conservationists and researchers in the fields of Environmental Sciences, Ecology, Human Geography, Indigenous studies, and Posthumanism.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041163118
• ISBN13: 9781041163114
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 224 Pages