Citation: Laming, A.; Fletcher, M.-S.; Romano, A.; Mullett, R., on behalf of Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Corporation; Connor, S.; Mariani, M.; Maezumi, S.Y.; Gadd, P.S. The Curse of Conservation: Empirical Evidence Demonstrating That Changes in Land-Use Legislation Drove Catastrophic Bushfires in Southeast Australia. Fire 2022, 5, 175. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire5060175 Academic Editors: Alistair M. S. Smith and Christine Eriksen Received: 29 August 2022 Accepted: 19 October 2022 Published: 26 October 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). fire Article The Curse of Conservation: Empirical Evidence Demonstrating That Changes in Land-Use Legislation Drove Catastrophic Bushfires in Southeast Australia Alice Laming 1 , Michael-Shawn Fletcher 1,2,3, * , Anthony Romano 1 , Russell Mullett 4 on behalf of Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Corporation, Simon Connor 3,5 , Michela Mariani 3,6 , S. Yoshi Maezumi 7 and Patricia S. Gadd 8 1 School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia 2 Indigenous Knowledge Institute, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia 3 Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong, Northfields Ave, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia 4 Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLAWAC), Kalimna West, VIC 3909, Australia 5 School of Culture, History and Language, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia 6 School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2QL, UK 7 Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 80539 Munich, Germany 8 Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Lucas Heights, NSW 2234, Australia * Correspondence: michael.fletcher@unimelb.edu.au Abstract: Protecting “wilderness” and removing human involvement in “nature” was a core pillar of the modern conservation movement through the 20th century. Conservation approaches and legislation informed by this narrative fail to recognise that Aboriginal people have long valued, used, and shaped most landscapes on Earth. Aboriginal people curated open and fire-safe Country for millennia with fire in what are now forested and fire-prone regions. Settler land holders recognised the importance of this and mimicked these practices. The Land Conservation Act of 1970 in Victoria, Australia, prohibited burning by settler land holders in an effort to protect natural landscapes. We present a 120-year record of vegetation and fire regime change from Gunaikurnai Country, southeast Australia. Our data demonstrate that catastrophic bushfires first impacted the local area immediately following the prohibition of settler burning in 1970, which allowed a rapid increase in flammable eucalypts that resulted in the onset of catastrophic bushfires. Our data corroborate local narratives on the root causes of the current bushfire crisis. Perpetuation of the wilderness myth in conservation may worsen this crisis, and it is time to listen to and learn from Indigenous and local people, and to empower these communities to drive research and management agendas. Keywords: south-east Australia; fire; indigenous land management; conservation; wilderness; fuel; cultural burning; British invasion; Anthropocene 1. Introduction Society is placing ever-increasing pressures on the Earth system. This has led to the recognition of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, to draw attention to the widespread impacts associated with post-industrial human activity [1–5]. The conserva- tion movement of the 1950–1970’s, is often heralded as an antidote to the detrimental environmental impacts of modernity [6–9]. This movement saw the establishment of the wilderness act in the USA in 1964, the first of a series of enacted pieces of legislation through the subsequent decades that sought to offer protection for the remaining wilderness areas across many parts of the Earth [10–12]. Wilderness-inspired conservation ideology is based on the notion that much of the Earth was free from human influence prior to the Indus- trial Revolution and the over-exploitation of our environment that was required to fuel it [13–16]. Despite a long history of critique-including empirical data demonstrating that little (<20%) of the Earth has avoided human influence for more than 12,000 years [17], the Fire 2022, 5, 175. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire5060175 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fire