This response is part of the ongoing debate: Bushfires, Logging, Burns and Forest Management
Dear Editor,
It’s long past time for action, not discussion, on sustainable fire management, not climate change or logging. Your question how to achieve “the least adverse consequences” of forest management points to the problem of the wilderness mentality behind our Lock It Up and Let It Burn conservation paradigm.
You suggest “there is no simple answer to this question and there are deep divisions between commentators. The impact of climate change, the impact of logging, the impact and extent of FRBs appear to be key factors. Surely it’s not that much of a stretch to acknowledge that they all may have an effect on bushfire risk?”
There is a simple answer which was quite evident to early European explorers and scientists in Australia such as Sir Thomas Mitchell and Alfred Howitt CMG. They described the dramatic changes in fire regimes, vegetation and ecosystem processes after Aboriginal management was disrupted. For example, Mitchell wrote:
The omission of the annual periodical burning by natives, of the grass and young saplings, has already produced in the open forest lands nearest to Sydney, thick forests of young trees, where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment, and see whole miles before him. Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there; the grass is choked by underwood ; neither are there natives to burn the grass.
Howitt explained that dense scrub grew up and “tremendous fires raged” in South Gippsland where there had been “open forest” of “large old trees” maintained by Aboriginal burning.
There is a deep division between the people who understand and work with fire as a friend and those who don’t. Unfortunately, academics and fire chiefs who are ignorant of fire’s critical ecological role are in charge. They gave us our Black Summer, they used the Climate Cop-Out to excuse their failures and now they’re getting more money and medals to deliver increasing death and destruction at huge socioeconomic and environmental cost.
The alleged impacts of logging on fire risks are a dangerous distraction upon which academics on both sides of the chasm have recently wasted huge time and effort. Logging affects a miniscule proportion of the landscape, but it can reduce the local risk of wildfire if managed properly. Renowned CSIRO fire scientist Phil Cheney developed a practical guide for mild burning in young regrowth silvertop ash forests thirty years ago.
Use of the term ‘fuel reduction burning’ by those on both sides of the debate indicates a general blindness to the big picture. Frequent mild burning is critical to maintain ecosystem health, safety and biodiversity. It prevents the accumulation of fuels by recycling nutrients from dead material into healthy trees and herbs and groundcovers.
The whole landscape needs maintenance by mild fire. But academics and fire chiefs talk of asset protection zones, strategic zones and management zones with different fire regimes. They just don’t get it. Firebreaks don’t work in extreme weather. They can’t stop firestorms and long-distance ember showers. If you need to reduce accumulated fuel, you haven’t been maintaining the landscape properly.
All kinds of country need gentle fire as soon as soon as there are enough dry leaves to carry it. It doesn’t matter whether they’re mostly gum leaves, twigs and bark on the forest floor or cured grasses in woodlands. Aboriginal burning expert Victor Steffensen says that the right fire trickles across the landscape like water and generates white medicine smoke.
Forests need fire every three to six years, and woodlands need it every two or three years. But it’s illegal to burn frequently and gently in NSW. Furthermore, the bureaucrats in charge have never learnt how to do it properly. They light lines of fire around the perimeter of large blocks – across the wind, at the bottom of slopes, just wherever the track happens to be.
Hazard-reduction burn – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Their infrequent, poorly-executed prescribed burns are mostly hazard production burns because fuels accumulate very rapidly after hot fires. They can exceed the pre-burning level within two years.
Sixty years of empirical data from sustainable fire management in southwestern Australia show that an absolute minimum of 8 per cent of the landscape must be treated each year to prevent firestorms and megafires developing in extreme conditions. The benefits persist for six years. So, unless at least half the bush is properly cared for, it will explode in bad seasons, whether ignited by lightning, arson or accident.
But academic ‘fire experts’ made models to convince governments that burning mostly doesn’t work in southeastern Australia because the bush is different. They say it makes no difference in extreme seasons anyway. They don’t know, because they haven’t done it and they haven’t experienced the benefits to fire control operations. Adding insult to injury, they are now telling us how and when and where to burn.
There wasn’t nearly enough prescribed burning to prevent firestorms and megafires in any of the 30 regions of southeastern Australia over the 34 years included in the academics’ models. The average area treated each year was less than 1%. That’s why we had Black Saturday in 2009 and Black Summer in 2019/20.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you subscribe to the hypothesis of Industrial Warming. We have 70,000 years of climatic and fire records which show that people can maintain healthy and safe landscapes irrespective of climate change. Aborigines did so without boots or overalls, let alone fire engines, waterbombers and computer models.
The concentration of charcoal in sediment cores is a measure of the level of biomass burnt by high intensity fires in the landscape over time. Hot fires rose to a peak between about 50,000 and 40,000 years ago as people proliferated across Sahul (New Guinea, mainland Australia and Tasmania). They exterminated the megafauna by burning out their soft dark green browse and promoted smaller animals reliant on diverse open grassy vegetation.
Aborigines confined fire-sensitive vegetation in areas inaccessible to mild fires – rainforests, deep dark gullies, swamps and rocky outcrops. These areas were subsequently protected from fires by mild burning in the open landscape. The wet areas could only burn during millennial scale droughts. So charcoal deposition declined. It increased gradually again with global warming after the last ice age, as the wetter areas expanded.
Soon after Europeans sailed into Werong/Sydney and tied up in a former gorge drowned by massive rises in sea level, they experienced the worst drought in 500 years of palaeo-records. There were three extreme summers in succession, whilst Aboriginal fires were burning 24/7 to the northwest. In February 1791, masses of flying foxes and lorikeets dropped dead in Parramatta during three straight days of blistering northwesterly gales and mid-forties temperatures. There were no megafires.
These days, firestorms and megafires regularly explode from scrub-infested wilderness where Aborigines formerly maintained a healthy and safe landscape. No amount of fire engines and waterbombers can stop them, but spots of fire ignited from aircraft at the right time could bring the country back.
When Mitchell was surveying the Great Northern Road, he wrote:
on many a dark night … I have proceeded on horseback amongst these steep and rocky ranges, my path being guided by two young boys belonging to the tribe who ran cheerfully before my horse, alternately tearing off the stringy bark which served for torches, and setting fire to the grass trees (xanthorhaea) to light my way
Now it’s nearly impossible to walk through this country in broad daylight.
After European diseases and people disrupted Aboriginal burning, the whole face of the country changed. Firestorms and megafires arrived long before any industrial warming. For example, Black Thursday 1851 incinerated 5 million hectares of Victoria. There was a huge spike in charcoal, to levels unprecedented in 70,000 years.
When government agencies tried to suppress forest fires, things only got worse. In the 1940s and 50s, thousands of hectares of hydro catchments were sprayed by aircraft with deadly pesticides in diesel fuel to control insect plagues in the sick forests.
Foresters eventually realised that fire suppression causes holocaust and pestilence. They reinstated mild burning in the 1960s using aerial ignition. Forest health and safety temporarily improved. Charcoal deposition declined markedly against the trend of rising temperatures.
Then academics came up with a silly hypothesis that mild burning is an ecological disturbance which threatens the biodiversity maintained by Aboriginal firesticks for 40,000 years. Prescribed burning was reduced from the 1980s as public lands and natural resources were increasingly locked up in National Parks.
Never mind that our world-famous small mammal extinctions occurred not in forests, but in drier areas such as the mallee where there were no forests, no logging and no clearing. (Their habitat was choked out by scrub.) Never mind that no species are extinct through native forest management. Somehow, mild burning and harvesting of a renewable solar-powered resource became our major environmental ‘problems’.
After the 2003 fire disasters when people were killed and 500 homes were lost in our National Capital, a Parliamentary Inquiry found that there had been “grossly inadequate burning for far too long”. Bureaucracies in the southeast boycotted that inquiry and set up the 2004 Council of Australian Governments whitewash. An emergency chief and two academics gave us ‘education’, emergency response, evacuation and research instead of sustainable fire management.
Things inevitably got worse. After Black Saturday, the 2009 Victorian Royal Commission recommended prescribed burning of at least 5% of public land each year – nowhere near enough and it wasn’t achieved anyway.
After Black Summer, the 2020 Royal Commission was to have regard to findings of previous inquiries. Instead, they endorsed COAG 2004 and ignored the findings of the 2003 House of Representatives Inquiry into A Nation Charred. Thus, they accepted the advice of academics and fire chiefs in the southeast rather than the knowledge of experienced land managers across Australia. So there’s worse to come.
Our ‘lock it up and let it burn’ conservation paradigm causes chronic eucalypt decline and pestilence as well as megafires, death and destruction, erosion, pollution, siltation and massive greenhouse emissions. Those mega-emissions aren’t brought to account because the academics who control the fire regimes also control the carbon accounting.
Even without counting the inevitable fire disasters in unmanaged bush, sustainable timber production stores more carbon than locking up forests. Trees reach their maximum rate of carbon accumulation at a young age. Their growth rates decline before they reach a millable size. Harvesting native forest stores carbon in durable products off-site whilst maintaining maximum possible sequestration in the forest. Residues can be recycled as bioenergy.
Manufacturing alternative structural materials such as concrete, steel, aluminium or glass generates carbon emissions between 10 and 1,000 times greater per unit of volume than producing timber.
We can hugely reduce carbon emissions by reinstating sustainable fire management. The few remaining old-growth forests that haven’t been destroyed by megafires aren’t available for timber. Sustainable use of renewable resources in regrowth forests can greatly increase carbon sequestration. Regardless of whether there’s any effect on climate, there can be huge environmental and socioeconomic benefits.
Vic Jurskis has written two books published by Connor Court.
