Bushfires or the biggest backburns in living memory?
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Summer has not started and already there have been dozens of fires across Victoria. These are not bushfires but part of a fire “preventative” industry that has developed since 2000 that uses fire to fight fire — fuel reduction burns, prescription burns, asset protection burns and ecological burns. The recently concluded Victorian Inquiry into the Impact Public Land Management was driven by “a popularist call” for increased “fuel reduction burning”. In was a “response” to the wild fires and the back burns used to “put them out” across one million hectares over two months in 2006/07. Many Gippsland locals were upset by another summer of fires — fires and back burns that saw lights turned on in the middle of the day in Bairnsdale as the sun was reduced to a red ball in a black sky. There was little critical analysis of these fires. Indeed this inquiry has recommended to tripling of “fuel reduction burning” to 385,000 hectares annually including National Parks and water supply catchments. A more accurate insight into the way the 2006/7 fires were “managed” may come from inquiry conducted by the Federal Government into bushfires after Canberra burnt in 2003. The Federal Inquiry was far more inquisitorial and gives a greater insight into how fires are managed in Victoria by the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Country Fire Authority and Parks Victoria. In evidence given at Omeo in July 2003 Charles Slade, a Channel Nine News Journalist, relates of speaking with a government worker during the fires:
Submissions to the 2003 inquiry detail aircraft being kept grounded when the weather was clear and letting small fires burn until they were major fires. There were few similar submissions to the Victorian inquiry this year. Many locals thought it was pointless given the determination of the DSE in particular to burn how, where, when and what they wanted to regardless of their opinion. Toward the end of Charles Slade’s evidence in 2003 he was asked by Mr David Hawker MP, the Member for Wannon, “So it could be that more than just a parliamentary inquiry is required; it could be that we need a judicial inquiry or a royal commission?” The results of the recent Victorian Inquiry seem to underline this point. |
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5 Comments
After the catastrophic 1967 bushfires in Hobart, forests and bushland around Hobart were managed under a fuel reduction regime, where burns were conducted at very short intervals (i.e. less than 5 years). This simple regime encouraged a more pyrogenic vegetation type (read - more flammable) - which is really a counter aim of such a regime. It also really encouraged weed growth.
Land managers saw the light about 15 years ago, and began to initiate a program of strategic fuel reduction, and ecological burns. Strategic fuel reduction was about maintaining appropriate buffers between bushland and houses, and encouraging residents to take more responsibility for defending their homes from fire. ‘Ecological burns’ are part of a landscape wide program to reduce fuel across the landscape, while conducting burns within the natural fire regime of native vegetation - most of Australia’s vegetation is adapted to some levele of fire incidence, and is well equipped to survive and even thrive after fire. By conducting burns within the natural fire regime of specific vegetation communities, authorities are able to reduce fuels on a landscape wide scale, without causing any erosion of biodiversity and other natural values.
I hope that the DSE have such a regimen in mind for Victoria’s bushland - rather than an indiscriminate program of fuel reduction.
I was told yesterday that if you have a fire in your kitchen, don’t call the bush fire brigade because they’ll back-burn your dining room.
I’ve been following this argument ever since the big 1994 fires in 1994 fronting tv cameras for The Wilderness Society, 2 killed in Como/Jannali at the suburban interface, and keeping a record as per link below. It comes down to weather (wind, ambient temperature, humidity) and fuel. And humidity is the forgotten gorilla in the room as below, though most do recognise the elephant these days - climate. Three taboo concepts in this policy area:
1. forest industry regeneration burns in post logging compartments that can smoulder on for weeks or months until the next extreme weather event,
2. ‘salvage logging’ racket in conservation buffer zones aka theft of public estate given most burned trees regenerate of their own accord … unless they are logged in the interim
3. Most profound and most tragic: The high humidity closed canopy of old forest, even in hot weather, is naturally fire resistant - but now we have literally decades of landscape change with high impact mechanised logging, removing closed canopy high humidity natural water cycling with barely 10% of the forest estate in this prime condition. It used to be the default situation of
- good flow of groundwater to understorey via vegetation, with
- high humidity blanketed in by a high closed tree canopy,
- fast natural composting of leaf litter.
As permaculture guru Bill Mollison would say, water limits everything. Go into a logged area 2 years later. It’s dry, dusty, hot. Multiply that by a million hectares. This is perhaps the greatest and worst cost of landscape wide woodchipping of native forests, literally grooming the countryside for megafires of the future. It also calls up the conflict of interest in Victoria of the govt’s DSE as logger and park manager, poacher and gamekeeper.
More on bushfire science/diagrams here: http://www.sydneyalternativemedia.com/id35.html
Fire in seasonally dry environments is the only way we have left Nature to cycle carbon. For a proven and alternative perspective please see http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/Info_07/in12_love_of_fire_07.html
Over the past year or so there have been fuel reduction burns in parts of Greater Bendigo National Park and more large burns are planned. Many of the areas burn, and planned to be burnt, are well away from buildings and away from the edges of the park. The vegetation is drought-affected and much of the under-storey has died. Yet the areas chosen for fuel-reduction burns appear to be those with the best under-storey, refuges in which many of the remaining bush birds now live. Burning a box-ironbark forest such as GBNP may promote the growth of more flammable bushes such as melaleuca scrub, resulting in more intensive wildfires down the track. There has been little consultation. Many bird observers are distressed because the best birding areas appear to be targeted. In many cases, forest areas surrounding burnt areas have little or no understorey and would be difficult to burn. The policy is akin to defacing the Mona Lisa to save the frame. The best assets of the forest are being degraded by fuel reduction burns.