Bush fires a product of poor land management as shown by millenia of successful Aboriginal firestick farming

Dear ,

Our journal On Line Opinion has just published an open letter to all Australian leaders of government by Vic Jurskis which should leave no doubt that the main fire risk to Australia is not climate change, but land management.

People are losing their lives, and we are experiencing unprecedented environmental, social and economic destruction as a result of bad politics. It is entirely within [the] power [of Australian governments] to put an end to this abhorrent situation. Instead, Australians are being told that fires are uncontrollable in extreme weather, and there's nothing we can possibly do. However, Aborigines arrived about 65,000 years ago and established the world's most durable culture. They maintained healthy and safe landscapes (including the rich biodiversity that greeted Europeans) across Australia through 40,000 years of sometimes extreme climate change. They didn't need boots, overalls, hard hats, smoke goggles, fire engines, waterbombers, computers, incident controllers or emergency services.

Vic Jurskis is the author of Firestick Ecology: fairdinkum science in plain English. It was reviewed on the ABC website here alongside an interview with the author.

Mr Jurskis makes the points that:

Doubling fire loads leads to fires being four times hotter
Allowing underbrush to grow uncontrolled leads to spread of fires by spotting, making firebreaks ineffective
Despite the findings of royal commissions, modern strategies have relied on fire-fighting rather than fire-control, increasing the need for capital expenditure and putting fighters’ lives at risk while increasing the incidence of catastrophic fires, leading to calls for more expenditure, which are repeated with more urgency each year.

Vic believes that policy ought to be based on the history of what worked over 65,000 years and makes this stinging rebuke:

Instead, you – our elected representatives – pay lip service to Aboriginal elders past and present, whilst effectively denying their monumental work, across geological epochs, to maintain healthy and safe landscapes.

If this is not of interest to you, please pass on to a colleague to whom it might be of interest. Unproductive arguments about whether a global change in temperature of less than one degree has made fire more prevalent is a side issue, particularly while people’s lives are at risk from unnecessary fires.

For further information contact Graham Young 0411 104 801