Long a fire continent, Australia now finds itself at the leading edge of a fire epoch.Australia is one of the world’s fire powers. It not only has regular bushfires, but in no other country has fire made such an impact on the national culture. Over the past two decades, bushfires have reasserted themselves as an environmental, social, and political presence. And now they dominate the national conversation.The Still-Burning Bush traces the ecologica...

The wildfires that spread across Southern California in the fall of 2003 were devastating in their scale-twenty-two deaths, thousands of homes destroyed and many more threatened, hundreds of thousands of acres burned. What had gone wrong? And why, after years of discussion of fire policy, are some of America's most spectacular conflagrations arising now, and often not in a remote wilderness but close to large settlements?That is the opening to a brilliant discussion of the politics...