Interview with Dr. James Millington,
Reader in Landscape Ecology, King’s College London,
Member, Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society
- Beginning with your name and based on this workshop, what are we targeting? What are we intending to achieve?
My name is Dr. James Millington. I’m a reader in landscape ecology in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. I’m also a member of the Leverhulme Center for Wildfires, Environment and Society, which is a center that studies how fire varies around the world, how people manage fire, how people use fire, and that’s related to some of the things that we’re trying to do in this workshop.
- What triggered you and your organization to start sensitization or creating awareness on the benefits of fire, because many people always focus on the negative sides of fire?
So, fire is increasingly being seen on TV as a negative thing with some very large, extreme wildfires. For example, in Los Angeles in January 2025, we saw many houses burned down. And these sorts of events are raising the idea that fire is a very negative thing, and they are very negative when the burn people’s houses and people lose their lives.
But fire is a natural part of many ecosystems and around the world there are many landscapes in which fire is an integral component. Vegetation needs the fire to regrow. Fire is useful to promote forage for a livestock. Fire is useful for clearing agricultural waste after harvest. And so there are actually lots of ways that people use fire that can be done in managed, controlled ways, that it’s not a danger to anybody.
What we really want to try to do is to increase the number of safe, controlled fires and reduce the number of very intense, uncontrollable fires.
- How are you planning to approach this safe control of fires?
For a long time, in many places, we’ve tried to suppress fires. We’ve tried to put fires out when they start to stop them burning, and that’s important sometimes to protect property, to protect lives, but it also allows vegetation to regrow without being burned. And so when we do have a fire with lots of vegetation, it can become very difficult to control it. So maybe we need to be more proactive in how we use fire to manage vegetation.
This is one of the things that we’re looking at in this workshop, but also, we want to involve communities and indigenous peoples to bring in their knowledge and their understanding about how fire can be used as a useful tool, as a way of promoting good management of the landscape. So, this is the start of a process to try to understand how we can change and adapt our fire management, not to just say no, we don’t want fire, but to think about what fire is good, what fire can we use and what fire is bad and we want to stop those fires.
- Do we have other areas, countries, or nations where this project has been successfully implemented?
So the Leverhulme Centre works all around the world and there are some examples of where this sort of approach of integrated fire management is beginning to be used. A very good example of this is in Northern Australia. Now we have not worked on that in this project, but we are interested in how ideas and examples like Northern Australia could be used in Savannah areas in Africa.
So, in Northern Australia they are reintegrating Indigenous people knowledges and practices of how fire is an important part of the landscape, ways of using fire, ways of living with fire to manage vegetation so that we don’t have very large intense fires that we cannot control.
Maybe we can learn from some of those practices and apply them in African savannahs. Now, no everything will work in we can’t just take an idea from one place and use it exactly the same in another place. We need to think carefully about what will work. That’s working in other places here and what we need to adapt and to modify.
- For this project to succeed, which players do we need on board for collaboration to make this idea a reality?
Ideally this will be a partnership of all the stakeholders who are living, governing and working inthe Tsavo wider area landscape. It’s important for local communities to be involved. It’s important for ranch managers to be involved. It’s important for local county government to be involved. It’s important for a national government to be involved because all of these stakeholders have a role to play in helping to manage fire, to ensure that we can manage wildlife, we can manage livelihoods. It’s through partnership, hopefully that we can achieve these sustainable outcomes.
- With your experience in this field, what are the main causes of fires in most cases, and how do you think that can be curbed?
Well, that’s actually something I’m learning about in this first workshop. You know, this first workshop, it’s part of a process we will have later workshops and in between the workshops we’ll work together. This first workshop is about learning what is the current situation.
And so yesterday we spoke with local communities and Indigenous peoples to find out how they understand fire in the landscape, and so they talked about fire for clearing vegetation, for hunting, accidental fires that can get out of hand. And today, we are working with county officials, with NGOs to think about exactly these questions of how do fire start, how can we manage them, ad what do we need to do to work together to achieve outcomes that are good for people, but also for wildlife as well.
- Thank you for your insightful responses. Do you have anything else to add that may be important for the audience?
Oh, I think they’re good questions. So, I’ll just say this is the first workshop and we’re hoping to have a second workshop later in the year. So, this is a process. We can’t do everything in one day.
Between the workshops, we’ll work on understanding the landscape better, developing an integrated fire management plan, and hopefully by the end of the year we will have some ideas and a draft plan that we might be able to use going forward to improve our management of the landscape.
Coming up next, an interview with Amos Chege, a Kenyan and a PhD Researcher, King’s college, London.
