This response relates to the ongoing debate on ARR.News: Open for Debate – Bushfires, Logging, Burns & Forest Management

Einstein supposedly said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Australia’s current approach to forest management is insane.

We’ve wasted zillions of dollars on futile attempts to control firestorms using heavy bombers instead of using commonsense and matches to prevent their occurrence. Aboriginal people managed this, through tens of thousands of years of sometimes extreme climate change, with the firestick.  

Now the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee has published “Lessons to be learned in relation to the Australian bushfire season 2019-20”. It would be amusing if not for the ongoing dire consequences.

Recommendation 1 is “the establishment of a permanent, sovereign aerial firefighting fleet, which includes Large Air-Tankers and Very Large Air-Tankers”.

Fifteen of the 16 recommendations address emergency response and so-called recovery. Only the penultimate recommendation concerns land management. But it’s not to do it. It’s to review the “legislative framework and processes” for it.

I can inform them that sustainable fire management is illegal in NSW.

The Senate Committee’s first witness at their first public hearing was Mr. Greg Mullins, Convenor of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, a subsidiary of Professor Flannery’s Climate Council. So it’s a bit of a surprise that land management was even mentioned.

But the reason was clear in the 2^nd paragraph of the discordant 15^th recommendation. It seems that Wokeness is equally important as the Climate Cop-Out. Along with the academic experts and fire chiefs who are responsible for our modern holocausts, the committee wants us to take advice from “First Nations communities” on “cultural burning”.

Apparently, irony troubles the Woke not in the slightest.

The Aboriginal communities who retained their traditional knowledge of caring for country with gentle fire have maintained or reinstated it. Victor Steffensen, traditional burning expert from far north Queensland, has been re-educating others.

Victor tags the academic drivel coming from the universities and bureaucracies as “western science”. This is a large part of the problem. It ain’t science, and his comments are a sort of racism in reverse.

Real science and the knowledge of experienced pastoralists and foresters align perfectly with Aboriginal tradition. Steffensen talks of upside-down country – thin on top and thick underneath. Also – sick trees with lazy roots in damp soils.

Fairdinkum science confirms that frequent mild burning is essential to recycle dead grass, leaves, bark and twigs and maintain healthy soils and roots. When trees get sick, understorey booms as do pests, parasites and diseases. Dense scrub or thick mulch won’t burn in mild weather but explode in firestorms when inevitably ignited by lightning, arson or accident in extreme conditions.

Megafires are one side of the coin, loss of resilience and biodiversity the other. Academics, bureaucrats and fire chiefs apply the Climate Cop-Out to both.

We need a coalition of traditional knowledge; black, white and brindle, with fairdinkum science to restore sustainable management across the landscape. It would save heaps of money and reduce the massive emissions from megafires which aren’t brought to account because it doesn’t suit our Lock It Up and Let It Burn ‘conservation’ paradigm.

Instead, politicians representing all the colours of the rainbow from reds to greens to blues continue to throw our money at and pin medals on empire builders in academia and emergency services. Forestry Australia says we need a new vision of holistic forest management. I put this vision in a letter to Australian Forestry before Black Summer and a submission to their annual conference after the latest holocaust. They rejected both as politically incorrect. Good luck with their “New Shared Vision”.

Vic Jurskis has written two books published by Connor Court.