An interesting article investigating the horrible dilemma we have in Australia with arsonists setting fire to our fragile landscape. The damage these "wildfires" are causing to the landscape is quite unbelievable, through the constant burning which is due mainly to arsonists we are experiencing changing habitats, with every burn the forest regrows with more fire tolerant species in turn promoting further and hotter more intense burning.
I have argued with people all my life about this myth that the indigenous set fire to the bush relentlessly. What they did was manage certain areas of the land to promote grasslands for hunting - however they did this using very mild, contained fires, not these crazy white man wild fires that literally destroy everything in their path. These fires have been described as such: a man could simply step over the coming fire unlike the above image of a standard bushfire these days. These wildfires will be responsible for extinctions of species, the changing of all forests into a more burnable arid bush and in turn affect the amount of rain falling and cycling through our catchments, thus the chain reaction goes on, symbiosis another words...
A step in the right direction would be to work more closely (or at all in some cases) with indigenous groups in the parks departments, Australia wide. This crew have a knowledge of this land we will never attain, and knowledge that cannot be grasped with the most "expensive" and "finest" university degree invented by us silly whities.
If interested the article can be found here.