Dear colleagues and friends,
some thoughts on the fire situation and the Australian landscape:
It does seem to be true that the Australian land is designed to burn, and that it "wants" to burn, for the sake of regeneration. As Germaine Greer has been saying recently, this has been the case for the last 50 or 60 thousand years. I don't know where David Attenborough gets his science from, claiming it is on a 300 year cycle (?). In my experience, the cycle is about every 30 years or so, or even less, 20 years. The land has to burn, to allow regeneration. If it does not burn, the forests get choked up with bark, leaves, branches, logs, and regeneration will not properly occur, and so we almost need to factor in burning as a "seasonal cycle", but not occurring within a 12 month cycle, but within a 20-30 year cycle.
Of course, it is easy to say it must burn, but how to allow this? Aboriginal cultures often worked around this by remaining nomadic, and when the fires started up, they moved to a different part of the country, and came back later, after the regeneration. If the land did not burn of natural causes, the indigenous people used to set fire to it deliberately, to bring on the regeneration. Yes, this is "fire-stick farming". Perhaps the much-hated "arsonists" who light fires today are acting on some ancient imperative, about which our modern mind knows nothing. It is true that the "stay and fight" option is a very Western idea: the heroic battle against the natural forces. This time, however, it has not been heroic but suicidal to stay and defend property against the raging fire storms. Greer is very right in saying that we have to learn how to use fire, else it will destroy us. Controlled burnings seem to be the way to go, however that might be implemented. Ironically, some "environmentalists" are opposed to controlled burnings, and yet to deny these is to risk everything going up in smoke.
Greer writes: "Fire plays an essential role in the cyclical life of Australian forests ... for 60,000 years, Aboriginal people used fire to manage the environment, she said. "Aboriginal people burned for a reason ... every season, sclerophyll [hard-leaved trees] build up and great amounts of detrius drop and collect and this must burn if there is to be new growth," she said.
"It's the same old story. We need to educate people, we need to find the courage and we need somebody to direct the operation ... we have to burn off during the cool time of the year so we can lessen the risks created by blazes in the summer."
It is almost as if the land has an archetypal memory of burning and fire, and white people have done much to wipe out this memory and conform the land to our heroic needs and wishes. But now the land has reasserted its ancient pattern, and we have to learn from indigenous people about how to live on and in the land.
best wishes,
David
some thoughts on the fire situation and the Australian landscape:
It does seem to be true that the Australian land is designed to burn, and that it "wants" to burn, for the sake of regeneration. As Germaine Greer has been saying recently, this has been the case for the last 50 or 60 thousand years. I don't know where David Attenborough gets his science from, claiming it is on a 300 year cycle (?). In my experience, the cycle is about every 30 years or so, or even less, 20 years. The land has to burn, to allow regeneration. If it does not burn, the forests get choked up with bark, leaves, branches, logs, and regeneration will not properly occur, and so we almost need to factor in burning as a "seasonal cycle", but not occurring within a 12 month cycle, but within a 20-30 year cycle.
Of course, it is easy to say it must burn, but how to allow this? Aboriginal cultures often worked around this by remaining nomadic, and when the fires started up, they moved to a different part of the country, and came back later, after the regeneration. If the land did not burn of natural causes, the indigenous people used to set fire to it deliberately, to bring on the regeneration. Yes, this is "fire-stick farming". Perhaps the much-hated "arsonists" who light fires today are acting on some ancient imperative, about which our modern mind knows nothing. It is true that the "stay and fight" option is a very Western idea: the heroic battle against the natural forces. This time, however, it has not been heroic but suicidal to stay and defend property against the raging fire storms. Greer is very right in saying that we have to learn how to use fire, else it will destroy us. Controlled burnings seem to be the way to go, however that might be implemented. Ironically, some "environmentalists" are opposed to controlled burnings, and yet to deny these is to risk everything going up in smoke.
Greer writes: "Fire plays an essential role in the cyclical life of Australian forests ... for 60,000 years, Aboriginal people used fire to manage the environment, she said. "Aboriginal people burned for a reason ... every season, sclerophyll [hard-leaved trees] build up and great amounts of detrius drop and collect and this must burn if there is to be new growth," she said.
"It's the same old story. We need to educate people, we need to find the courage and we need somebody to direct the operation ... we have to burn off during the cool time of the year so we can lessen the risks created by blazes in the summer."
It is almost as if the land has an archetypal memory of burning and fire, and white people have done much to wipe out this memory and conform the land to our heroic needs and wishes. But now the land has reasserted its ancient pattern, and we have to learn from indigenous people about how to live on and in the land.
best wishes,
David
3 comments:
The DSE has done a lot of GOOD work relating to working out the best time intervals for burning the bush - the program has the interesting name of Burning for Biodiversity. They have determined different types of bush require different burn periods and that it is definitely not as simple as say burning every 20-30 years - if we did that then we would never get the species that take a long time to grow - ie we would have NO mountain ash forests - google -DSE burning for biodiversity- for more info if interested.
It does seem that a re-evaluation of fire in Australian landscapes and human habitation here is overdue. The forests before any human habitation were not the eucalypts we automatically associate with Australia. They were podcarp forests, with species much more like forests in deeper areas of Western Tasmania, or New Zealand. The forests we see are technically fire weed forests, the result of 40,000 years of the fire stick. Our landscape has had two major destructions not one. One measure of the first destruction can be taken from the numbers of butterfly species here in Australia compared to the other two southern hemisphere land masses of southern America below the Amazon, and southern Africa. Autralia's area is between these two. The corresponding African region has 3500 butterfly species and counting, the south of South America 6500 plus. Australia has 350 and most of those are up north near New Guinea. Butterflies are very intimately associated with their host plants, and the marked absence of species suggests a massive impoverishment of the Australian landscape of the hosts.
Some decades ago I had occasion to read in the State Library the journals of some of the early explorers of Victoria . Some passages struck me very forcibly. As a keen bushwalker, I was familiar with much of Victoria's High Country and the forests of the top of the Snowy and other areas of the east of the state. The descriptions of the forests of eastern Australia as a like "a stately park" which these early Europeans rode though from the Sydney area to eastern Victoria then across to the Western district, without getting stuck in thick undergrowth, just didn't seem at all like what I knew. One piece of the jigsaw that helped make sense of this divergence were descriptions of massive use of the firestick by Aborigines that early Europeans described, and estimates of firesetting in the hundreds and thousands per year per group. Another, much later, was a visit to Warrawong Sanctuary in the Adelaide Hills and conversations there with John Wamsley, it's co-founder. Watching at dusk the activities of a range of native animals, potoroos, woylies, pademelons and others it just hit me that these small animals had been part of the clearing of the understorey "scrub" that we now associate with our forests.
I guess I'd like to see a policy of attempting to re-establish the podocarp species and forests, maybe replantings after the massive destruction we are increasingly seeing in bushfires. And the wholesale removal of the feral animals responsibe for the looming extinction of the small natives that played their part in preserving those forests.
I think though that to even contemplate such policy we need to rethink our current myths of the purity and sacredness of the fireweed forests we inherited. That will take a lot more soul-searching that I suspect we are capable of.
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