Aboriginal Australian knowledge meets Western climate science
In the Australian summer of 2019–20, record‑breaking bushfires devastated forests, blanketed cities in smoke, and altered weather systems. These environmental impacts were accompanied by large-scale evacuations. Southern Australia experienced the worst bushfires in recorded history that summer, leaving 33 humans and an estimated 3 billion native animals dead. What if I told you this catastrophe could have been avoided?
Aboriginal communities managed the landscape with small, controlled “cool burns” that clear pathways, regenerate vegetation, and create habitat mosaics. European colonization outlawed these practices. Without regular burns, dry grasses fuel mega‑fires that burn hotter, cover more ground, and emit massive greenhouse gases. Colonization not only transformed land through deforestation and invasive species, but also disrupted the transmission of ecological knowledge.
Walter Mignolo calls this the coloniality of power: from the sixteenth century onward, Eurocentric rationality became the universal standard, dismissing Indigenous knowledges as “primitive.” Occidentalism thus ‘subalternized peripheral knowledge,’ making it unthinkable to regard Aboriginal people as a knowing subject beyond the narrow rationality of European modernity. When the coloniality of power subalternized Aboriginal fire knowledge, Mignolos Border Thinking can offer decolonial response. Border Thinking emerges from the margins—from those silenced by Western modernity—and performs a double critique of both Western epistemology and internalized colonial logics.
Border thinking insists that multiple rationalities exist beyond the Western canon. It is an ethical and epistemic stance: instead of claiming to “tell the truth” from a single center, it aims “to think otherwise,” changing the terms of the conversation rather than simply correcting Western lies. Crucially, this approach opens space for “silenced” or subaltern knowledges to be heard. Mignolo’s border thinking portrays knowledge as a site of colonial conflict but also of potential liberation, where alternative knowledge systems (including indigenous ones) can emerge once the hegemony of Eurocentric reason is challenged.
Let’s map those concepts onto our example
Coloniality of Knowledge / Eurocentrism
Decolonize Data: Treat Indigenous observations not as “anecdotes” but as valid theory, equal to Western climate science.
Occidentalism & Subalternization of Knowledge
Western science (Occidentalism) has historically labeled indigenous practices as “superstition” or “unscientific.” A border thinking approach would reverse this hierarchy: it calls climate scientists to critically examine the biases of their methods, and to recognize indigenous ecological knowledge.
Border Thinking / “An Other Logic”
Encourages climate science to think from the margins, incorporating local, place-based perspectives. For example, indigenous worldviews often see humans as part of a living ecosystem (kincentric ecology), not separate from nature. Embracing such “other logic” can inspire new models of sustainability and climate adaptation that Western models alone might miss.
Double Critique
Mutual Critique: Foster dialogue where scientists and communities each question assumptions (e.g., linear causality vs. relational land knowledge) in order to create hybrid solutions.
Language & Translation
Emphasizes translating concepts between cultures. For climate work, this means co‑producing knowledge: translating indigenous terms into scientific frameworks, and vice versa. It also means communicating climate science back to communities in their own languages and metaphors, valuing oral traditions and storytelling as valid forms of knowledge transmission.
Epistemological Pluralism
Pluriversal Methods: Combine quantitative metrics with qualitative indicators (animal behaviors, oral histories) for a more coherent climate picture.
Ethical Dimension / Sustainability
Ethical Justice: Embed Indigenous sovereignty in policy, include traditional land managers as equal partners and honor their protocols as ethical imperatives.
If modernity was built on coloniality, then our decolonial future must be built on border epistemologies—where science and tradition collaborate equitably. But Border Thinking alone is an epistemic strategy—it doesn’t dismantle the institutions that uphold Occidentalism. To truly decolonize and reshape futures, we must decenter Occidentalism itself: re‑architect curricula, funding, and governance so multiple epistemologies govern side by side with real power and resources.
Key takeaways:
Decolonize methods: Indigenous and Western knowledges as co‑equals.
This means treating Indigenous and Western knowledge systems as co‑equals. Rather than extracting Indigenous insights to ‘validate’ Western science, we must redesign research so both ways of knowing shape the questions, methods, and interpretations from the start.
Ethical reciprocity: land stewardship as both cultural practice and science.
Land stewardship isn’t just technical management—it’s a cultural and ethical relationship. Ethical reciprocity recognizes that Indigenous communities have cared for these lands for millennia, and that climate policy must respect this cultural practice as integral to science, not separate from it.
Pluriversality in action: integrate diverse evidence streams into robust climate solutions.
Instead of imposing one universal model, we integrate diverse evidence streams—satellite data, ecological measurements, oral histories, local seasonal calendars—into shared climate solutions. This plural approach makes science stronger, more just, and better suited to complex, local realities.
Only by pairing Border Thinking with structural change can we move from critical insight to lasting, equitable transformation.
Sources:
Mignolo, W. D. “Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism: Overcoming colonial/imperial differences.” In Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies 2nd Edition, 101–16, 2018.