A recent report from friends who suffered terrible losses of buildings, fences, pasture and cattle in the Coonabarabran fire commenced with the ominous and oft-repeated message: “a raging fire came out of the National Park straight for us”.
There is only one way to limit fire damage – reduce the fuel available.
Fuel load can be reduced in three ways – by grazing animals, by planned small “cool” fires, or by mechanical reduction with slashers, mulchers or dozers.
Australia’s grassland landscape was created and managed by generations of Aborigines who were masters at using man’s most useful tool – fire. Every explorer from Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) onwards noted the smoke in the sky and the burnt trees whenever they landed. This burning created the open grassland landscapes that dominated pre-European Australia. Aborigines lit fires continually, so their small patchwork fires caused no permanent damage to the environment and created and maintained the healthy grasslands on which many animals and Aborigines depended.
Misguided tree lovers and green politicians have locked the gates on ever-increasing areas of land for trees, parks, heritage, wilderness, habitat, weekend retreats, carbon sequestration etc. Never before on this ancient continent has anyone tried to ban land use or limit bush fires on certain land. The short-sighted policy of surrounding their massive land-banks with fences, locked gates and fire bans has created a new alien environment in Australia. They have created tinder boxes where the growth of woody weeds and the accumulation of dead vegetation in eucalypt re-growth create the perfect environment for fierce fires. Once ignited by lightning, carelessness or arson, the inevitable fire-storms incinerate the park trees and wildlife, and then invade the unfortunate neighbouring properties.
Many of today’s locked-up areas were created to sequester carbon to fulfil Kyoto obligations. Who pays the carbon tax on the carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by wild fires?
The green bureaucracies and politicians are clearly mis-managing their huge land-bank. Aborigines and graziers did a far better job. There should be a moratorium on locking up any more land and a return to sustainable management for existing land holdings.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
Related articles
- Bushfires rage on in Australia ‘helped’ by climate change (updatednews.ca)
- Bushfires rage on in Australia (bbc.co.uk)
Jeff Alberts says:
January 20, 2013 at 6:08 pm
In general, people now appreciate these mountains for their cleared tops and the views they offer. The damage isn’t permanent, at least not to a geologist. Lichen is breaking down granite and slowly scrub vegetation a bit of a foothold. However, I don’t expect trees to return before the end of the current interglacial. Maybe in 100,000 years when all these mountains will be newly scraped clean these burned mountains will again be peers with all the others trying to make a new forest.
This sort of erosion can occur naturally as well.
Australia has many tens of thousands of unnatural erosion gullies along the inland slopes the Great Dividing Range.
IMHO, it is the fault of the greens for stopping farmers from bulldozing erosion gully breaks, governments for putting regulations in place mandating the protection of all the native vegetation in the erosion gullies when generations of cattle farmers and sheep farmers have known all along how to stop the erosion gullies from starting in the first place, and then from growing deeper and deeper and longer and longer. Most of the gullies are still active.
The good thing about gullies is that if they are deep enough and wide enough they can serve as breaks from which to commence back-burning operations.
I imagine that the learned fire gurus amongst WUWT posters will be telling us that the only way to stop gullies is to get them down to bedrock as soon as possible because when there is nothing left to erode, they will not get any deeper in anything other than geological time.
The beauty of the erosion gullies is that they are part and parcel of Australia’s national dryland salinity problem. It is very well-known that the problem was caused by greenies, the government, national parks and the Kyoto protocol, BTW.
The real beauty of mobilized dryland salt is that it usually expresses itself in your neighbour’s place because it travels, usually along bedrock, until there is a break of slope, some way down the hill.
Plain Jane says:
January 20, 2013 at 8:38 pm
How can you ever have a civil dicussion with these people again?
Jeff Alberts says:
January 20, 2013 at 3:10 pm
“Aborigines lit fires continually, so their small patchwork fires caused no permanent damage to the environment and created and maintained the healthy grasslands on which many animals and Aborigines depended.”
Is there such a thing as a fire that causes permanent damage to the environment? I can’t think of one. Sure, they look like hell right after, but in a couple of years you can’t even tell it happened.
The answer to your question is an emphatic yes. For example, Australia’s rainforests are fire-sensitive. Fires tend to kill the vegetation in them and the result is that eucalypt forests tend to move in. This is reasonably well-documented for Queensland rainforests.
Vast tracts of Mulga in inland Australia are disappearing because of changes in fire regime. Regrowth Mulga, depending on rainfall, usually takes around 7 years before it sets seeds. If a fire goes through before the seven years is over, the Mulga shrubland is turned into grassland. Specific eucalypt forests such as Mountain Ash forest which are fire-sensitive will disappear if the wrong fire-regime is applied.
If Mountain Ash forests of a certain age class disappear, so will the animals that depend on the age class, etc, etc, etc.
Repeated cool burn fires will remove some species altogether. They also act to depauperate the soil of nutrients over time.
Big wildfires in catchments followed by flooding rains can cause massive stripping of soil and nutrients from forests. The resulting ash can be so toxic that water catchment dams may be too toxic to drink out of for many years.
Allen B. Eltor says:
January 20, 2013 at 4:38 pm
I think the Malethusians Greens really do want to kill us….
<<<<<<<<<
You don't have to.
You can know it.
Go to any website where they advertize the destruction of civilization: people being in the world are the main problem the world has, and less people is less problems. Period.
I am with the BAU boosters on this one and not that dreadful Malthus. Economic growth is infinite, we can take whatever we want from the environment, pump whatever rubbish we want into the environment, render extinct whatever we want, and the more people the better.
Come one, come all.
I confidently predict that two or three billion more people in the world will be good for everyone and everything.
Climate Ace says: January 20, 2013 at 9:36 pm
Rather than simply blame national parks and governments for what is often personal negligence we should take a much more systematic approach:
(1) we should ban people from building homes among eucalyptus gas bombs – for their safety and for our insurance premiums.
(2) we should encourage fuel reduction burns consisten with maintaining the suite of plants and animals in national parks – bearing in mind that many plants and animals have quite specific fire regime requirements.
(3) where farmers abut parks, the government should assist farmers with active and passive fire measures. This is in the interests of farmers and of national parks – I imagine that more fires start on private property than in national parks and it is the latter which need to be protected from farmers more often than the other way around
(4) the introduction of mandatory active and passive fire proofing of new houses
Well said, Ace … for once we are in agreement.
I think you are also in agreement with Viv Forbes.
What puzzles me is how with fires on that scale they can state the temperatures to within ten degrees let alone to a fraction of one.
But the damage isn’t permanent. Things grow back. Just because you don’t think the “right” things are growing back is irrelevant. Sounds like you’re saying fire isn’t natural.
Ric Werme says:
January 20, 2013 at 10:01 pm
Plain Jane says:
January 20, 2013 at 8:38 pm
The fire started about a week before and was small but the local council and Rural fire service did not bother putting it out when it was small, arguing about who paid costs, despite catastrophic weather conditions being predicted.
How can you ever have a civil dicussion with these people again?
The question I would like answered is this, ‘Did the Coonabarabran fire start on private property, public property other than a national park, or in a national park?’
Statistically, despite all the bs we have been hearing on WUWT, national parks form a much smaller part of the landscape in Australian than farmland, production forests and other forms of public land, despite all the language here about things being ‘locked up’.
Since lightning starts most fires, and most land is not national parks, more fires are going to burn into national parks than out of them.
A couple of years ago there were some ill-informed calls by farming organisations to sue governments for fires starting in national parks and then burning into farmland.
This has gone very, very quiet recently because the penny has dropped.
Farmers now stand to lose their farms by being sued for negligence for allowing fires to escape their properties.
There is no original or pristine Australia. What we’ve inherited from aboriginal and European predecessors will be new and bewildering whether we do this or do that. Let’s shape Australia for today’s humans while being deadly serious about Conservation. No more gesturing or playing at Conservation. No more Bob Carrism. Without living in an energy rich country where power is cheap and available to all we will not have money for real Conservation. Energy and wealth Conservation are essential to nature Conservation. I have a certain sympathy with National Parks and such organisations because they never really have the funds or resources. We don’t have too many bureaucratic crazies around here. Money and resources are lacking more than freedom to take action. People are prepared to look the other way on regulation. They’d probably like to do some fire maintenance and vermin reduction around here – but who’s got the money?
It starts with money, and with wealth. If Abbott can roll McTernan in this year’s election we have to insist on new, cheap, efficient, reliable coal power as a first thing. Abbott could hire McTernan to spin it for international consumption. (Really, we should hire the best. I’m serious.) Dams, which are always too hard if you talk to the too-hard people, have to come back in a big way. All green fetishism is to be scrapped, because it is anti-Conservation. Australia, through the genius of Liz Macarthur and those assisting her, had its first million pound industry within a few years of the First Fleet. Wealth has to come first. And it has to be invested in making more wealth, not handed over to finger-waggers and trough-swillers like the UN, GIM and Goldman Sachs. Poor countries don’t conserve. You don’t get to quantify their carbon because they are burning dung and twigs.
Mosomoso
To think the authorities knew about it when it was small and in a National Park!
Thus are myths born. Do you know for a fact where the fire started?
this case is extremely important as CAGW alarmism was behind the decision to allow Wivenhoe Dam to be misused:
21 Jan: Courier Mail, Brisbane, Australia: Mark Solomons: Maurice Blackburn’s maps show properties that would have been spared “if dams were properly managed” in 2011 floods
He (Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale) blamed a “drought mentality” for poor decision-making.
“We went from a drought mentality to a flood mentality and we couldn’t make the switch,” Cr Pisasale said.
“Wivenhoe Dam was being used for water storage instead of flood mitigation.”…
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/maurice-blackburns-maps-show-properties-that-would-have-been-spared-if-dams-were-properly-managed-in-2011-floods/story-e6freoof-1226557993142
Please explain the dichotomy of your statement – in one case you refer to miners who clear land, in the other case you refer to a farmer who did the same thing but you seem to suggest his family should have fled the advancing green wave. Do you propose people should do that and move back after the trees burn down? Can you afford that cycle or do you live in an underground house?
Miners clear brush because they have health and safety legal obligations to do so. Plus it’s good business. They are not there for the view.
Cutting down trees and burning or otherwise clearing brush in the cool season aint rocket science.
I didn’t realize how foolish people are until I drove my daughter and her friends to a house they had rented 200Ks south of Perth. There were tall trees and dense brush 2 meters from the house in the middle of a forest. I decided to check on other nearby houses and walked along the road. There was a house every 20 meters or so and every one had tall trees around. Some people had cleared low level brush but most hadn’t.
A bushfire will go through there and most if not all of those houses will burn. Which is neither here nor there to me, except the imposition on me as a taxpayer to control or fight bushfires, which is effectively a subsidy by me going towards a wealthy segment of society to support a lifestyle they have chosen.
FYI, 20 years ago I had a house that backed onto bushland and a bushfire did go through. Spectacular and somewhat scary, but my house was 30+ meters from the trees and at no risk.
Got some informal legal advice over dinner.
No probs about suing farmers for negligence if they let fires escape from their farms onto other farms or into national parks: ‘provided they or their insurers have money’.
Sadly, green idiocy still holds sway – just 10 years ago, almost to the day, Canberra lost over 500 homes – nice suburban Canberra, now who’d have thought it? Fortunately for Canberra, the year before another bushfire had cleared what amounted to a good firebreak when it burned out a good swathe of pine plantations leading up to the city, without that firebreak I hate to think what the final death and destruction toll would be – but have the loopy Greens permitted changes? Nope, they continue to be destructive dopes on a power trip.
Hi All
The real culprit here is the Eucalyptus trees. Every time the weather gets hot these things lose copious amounts of bark and leaves on the ground which burn like petrol if flame gets anywhere near them. It is damn scary to watch and even scarier when the temp gets over 38c and the hot north wind picks up. Its a great technique for the gum trees as they can withstand intense fires and survive fires that would kill other species.
We have only got about 5 per cent of the forests we once had so blaming greenies for the woes we have always had in this country is fallacious. The real problem is fools who want to live in the bush amongst the gum trees not knowing that the tress will do everything they can to ensure that fires will always sweep across the land. It a bit like building a house on a flood plain, not a real clever idea.
I’m a member of the Rural Fire Service in NSW and live and work near natural fire-prone (duh) national parks on the New England plateau. Climate Ace is part of the cultural cancer our society suffers.
The people(s) who walked most of the way to Australia during the glacial phases from Asia, perhaps as much as 100,000 years ago, came with fire-stick technology. Burning the rain forest and bush they found as a complete lifestyle for tens and tens of thousands of years through all sort of climate regimes supplied a constant natural selection forcing which carved the Holocene biota of modern Australia from the original Gondwanaland pre-human eco-system, much of which was fire-intolerant.
There is nothing shameful or unnatural about ancient Australians shaping their environment. Contrary to Green mythology, humanity is part of nature…Modern Australia is one of the more diverse, beautiful and utterly incredible environments on this blue planet. The unusually long human occupation of Australia is simply inseparable from the environment.
Viv Forbes’ wise observation is that should modern western civilisation wish to achieve harmony with the Australian bush it would be wise to manage the environment in roughly the same pattern as it has been managed by the ancients since The Dreamtime…with fire stick in hand during the cooler months in a rational patchwork pattern. The science is settled and the debate over.
The problem is in the last decade it has become increasingly difficult to do controlled burns because of the decaying legal situation. RFS volunteers are increasingly in danger of lawsuits against them and their local branches if a burn-off gets away, thus each year we decline more and more applications for burning off because the bar is being raised higher and higher. Cutting fire breaks, clearing bush and developing fire mitigation plans encounter more and more bureaucratic, “green” hurtles to jump each year. RFS volunteers work with no compensation. CYA rules. For each individual at some point the obstacles become too hard…the shyt too thick and they just give up and go home to defend their own patch of bush best they can.
The damage that the urbane willful ignorance of people like Climate Ace are doing to Australia’s ecology has never been calculated, but I reckon it ranks up there with the greatest crimes against the environment ever perpetuated upon this continent.
Ironically it was the recent heavy rains that produced so much of this tinder.
Below are just a few references concerning aborigines and their use of fire on the Australian landscape.
http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/abstracts/fire.bib.html
8 December 2011
“The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia”
http://theconversation.edu.au/the-biggest-estate-on-earth-how-aborigines-made-australia-3787
The big 2008/9 fires in NSW had their roots in councils refusing permission for labs owners to clear fell areas of land to reduce the risk of fire. Refusals from the councils directly lead to the scale of destruction we saw from those fires.
Sadly this was a pattern repeated during the great Gold Coast floods because the local government refused to allow fan levels to be lowered until it was too late.
Mailman
Tim Flannery should be in the dock:
21 Jan: ABC Australia: Josh Bavas: Thousands of Qld flood victims join possible lawsuit
Thousands of people have signed on to a possible class action against the Queensland Government for damages incurred in the 2011 floods.
Damian Scattini from Maurice Blackburn says a report by US hydrologists claims the operators of Wivenhoe Dam were negligent and caused unnecessary damage.
“They held too much water in the reservoir for too long, and then when they realised what they’d done, they panicked and released too much at once,” he said…
John Walker from IMF Australia says the case could be one of the biggest of its kind in Australia.
“We don’t know to a large extent what losses each of those people have had. We’ve worked it out in a broad sense,” he said.
“In the next two to three months we’ll be seeking to get a clear understanding of the losses associated with this flood that didn’t need to occur.”
The lawsuit has a budget of $10 million and if successful, the compensation could run into the billions of dollars.
Seqwater says it is confident the dam was properly managed during the flood crisis…
Lawyers say they will know within a couple of months whether they have enough support to continue with the action which could take up to four years.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-21/thousands-of-flood-victims-join-possible-law-suit/4474358?section=business
Robert A. Taylor says:
January 20, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Gail Combs says:
January 20, 2013 at 2:08 pm
“And that is the EXACT PLAN. SEE MAP”
The link doesn’t go to a map, nor is one available from there. I only point this out because your links have ALWAYS been good and on subject….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry the link should have been: http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/images/wildlands_map.jpg
(I thought I copied it direct but I have a lot of tabs up.)
Of course the fires burnt hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush and grass across many parts of Australia over the last few weeks and this is typical of every summer. the fires can be easily seen from space.
How much carbon is put into the atmosphere as soot and ash. surely this is a significant factor in local weather and perhaps climate? Where does the Australian government stand on this issue? They are keen to tax the energy industry for a trace gas/plant food but not so keen to spend money on fire mitigation. But gee, no votes there are there?
Climate Ace says:
January 21, 2013 at 1:18 am
Got some informal legal advice over dinner.
No probs about suing farmers for negligence if they let fires escape from their farms onto other farms or into national parks: ‘provided they or their insurers have money’.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So if Plain Jane is correct, and she was there, can she and everyone else sue the crap out of the dunderheads who did not put out the fire while it was in the National forest and small or is this only a one way street where Greenies and their lawyers can go after individuals but individuals can not get the SOB’s who burnt them out fired and put in jail?
Oh and Climate Ace, What about the farmer who just went to jail for six months for clearing a fire break between him and the national park on HIS LAND??
Jo Nova: In Australia If You Try to Clear a Firebreak On Your Land You Could Go to Jail: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/in-australia-if-you-try-to-clear-a-firebreak-on-your-land-you-could-go-to-gaol/
I live in Victoria Australia 70Km from Melbourne our major capital city over the last week we have had two or three fires in the district every day. Today one was threatening coming my way . It has been established that we have a local idiot lighting fires. This area was the start of fires that killed many people and destroyed entire towns only three years ago. I can only say I hope the police find this person first others may not be so gentle. The green problem in my area is not so severe and our local authorities tend to turn a blind eye to the death of the odd tree that may be a cause of concern. Others unfortunately have the 2 metre rule whereby a 30 metre eucalypt more than 2 metres from your house can not be cut down. Then they can not explain why people die, and for what reason a tree, a eucalypt that by all definitions is a noxious weed. I have been under fire balls of roaring and burning gas that travels miles at huge speeds that landed on houses and they just exploded. In these fires people have no chance unless they can clear the trees from a reasonable distance from their homes. It is the greens that are killing people in this nasty fire I lived in a clearing on the edge of a state forest. The house was old and clap board and was shaded by three very old and large ponderosa pines so the fire balls ignored them and went over my head. Mine was the only house to survive. The greens have many dead souls on their hands off innocent people forced to live in peril by their stupidity.
For you climate ace..so you don’t have to guess (and be wrong)any more.
http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/enrc/bushfire_inquiry/Final_Report/FINAL_for_web_v2.pdf