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AbstractMitigating climate change requires us to constrain combustion in a double sense: decreasing both the use of fossil fuels and the flammability of the biosphere. Fire management by Indigenous peoples in Australia's northern savannas has been presented as a solution to offset the former and assist with the latter, leading to the foundation of a regional economy of projects generating 'premium' carbon credits on Indigenous lands. This article attends to the translational zone – predominantly made up of non‐Indigenous white professionals – that functions to configure the 'right story' of these credits across diverse epistemes and contexts. Following such commodities' interscalar connections, I suggest, helps illustrate the contingencies and contradictions produced by tradeable carbon, as individuals and organizations seek to maintain a niche within a changing climate and shifting global atmospheric relations.

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a global environmental movement in response to rampant resource extraction. This moment gave rise to a celebrated 'green-black alliance' between environmentalists and Indigenous groups in Australia. However, in recent years, this relationship has come under increased critical scrutiny in Australia and elsewhere, spurred in part by the global mining boom and continuing concerns about the effects of climate change. As the relationship between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples is subjected to renewed public inquiry, this book undertakes the vital task of submitting Indigenous-environmentalist relations to detailed analysis rather than broad-based summary. Unstable Relations addresses the past and emerging political tensions that mark 'green-black' encounters; provides fine-grained ethnographic case studies of 'green-black' relations; and, analyses the economic futures of 'green-black' collaborations

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas "fracking" industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call "divisible governance." Divisible governance—enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation—not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is both facilitated and regulated. Such governance regimes, we suggest, create felicitous conditions for governments to defer, forestall, or eliminate their accountability while regulating their way further and further into catastrophic climate change. Countering divisible governance begins, we suggest, by mapping the connections that it fragments.