And it's been used successfully for hundreds of thousands of years.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0707_050707_aussieextinct.html
Roughly 60 species of the continent's large mammals and some bird species became extinct around 45,000 to 50,000 years, as a result of a change in the ecosystem brought on by massive fires set by the early settlers.
The exact purpose of the fires is unclear; the settlers may have been clearing land, signaling other tribes, or hunting. What is clear is that the fires changed the landscape from a mosaic of forests and grasses to the fire-adapted shrubs and spinifix (a grass) found today.
Climate change is often thought to have caused extinctions in other parts of the world. The researchers were able to eliminate this possibility by studying the carbon isotopes of the eggshells of emus and the teeth of wombats going back 140,000 years. There were many large climate shifts during that period that did not induce a change in the ecosystem. In addition, evidence from dust in marine sediments off the coast of Australia suggests that the climate was relatively stable 45,000 to 50,000 years ago.
However, the evidence showed a clear shift in the diet of many animals 45,000 years ago.
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