Fighting ‘bad’ fire with good: Australia revisits an Aboriginal tradition

Noel Webster pointed at a sinuous line where the forest floor turned from black to green, from dead to alive. Barren eucalyptus trees the color of coal stood to the north, scorched by a bushfire last month. To the south, beyond the line where the flames had stopped, tree leaves and tufts of grass shone green in the morning light.

The expanse of healthy land survived with the aid of a different kind of fire set 18 months earlier by Mr. Webster. A member of the Yuin Aboriginal group and a cultural fire practitioner, he had overseen a “cool burn” on this tract of private bushland outside Nowra, a tourist town in Australia’s South Coast region.

Mr. Webster and a team of fellow indigenous fire practitioners lit low-intensity fires in small sections of