The Bushfires in Victoria were a paradigm-shifting event – gripping, terrifying and devastating for dozens of communities and hundreds of families…The news was shocking in its magnitude and the disaster will have enormous consequences for land management and housing development across the nation. Professor Poongschtok is an alias for one of Real Dirt’s most informed readers. He knows what he is talking about so his piece may be long but every word is worth reading. It is the other side of the story.

It was inevitable. The search for someone to blame, for someone to be made responsible. Strangely, unlike all other natural disasters, this only seems to occur after bushfires – not cyclones, or tsunamis or earthquakes, just bushfires. Unfortunately, the arguments criticising the perceived lack of hazard reduction burning have all the credibility, substantiation and science of a lynch mob swinging a noose. And that’s because the arguments are entirely political not logical….

The claim is that the Victorian fires and others before them were so devastating because we’ve failed to heed the lessons of history about fire management, lessons which were taught to us by the Aboriginal people, information that is now part of so-called ‘local knowledge’ but ignored by fire management authorities. So it continues – Greenies are really to blame because they stop the ‘burning off’ that would reduce fuel making bushfires less intense and easier for fire fighters to put out. It’s a line of argument that is relentlessly propagated each fire season by a specific coalition of particular interest groups with an axe to grind or a grievance about land management in south eastern Australia. There’s a clear ulterior motive here which really relates to the management of public lands. It’s an argument that conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of the country’s fire prone forests are actually privately owned and where little or no fire management practise is implemented. It’s not really a debate either. It’s an accusation hurled by the ‘anti-conservationists’ with a specific desire to regain access to lands they once controlled for timber harvesting, grazing and exploitation. Environmentalists are not even really engaged in the debate because they have no disagreement at all with the idea of undertaking hazard reduction to protect property and assets. Never have, never will.

The claims of course, are absolute nonsense. They are frequently made by people who are clearly not authorities on the subject of fire science such as media commentators like the Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Duffy and Miranda Devine or 2GBs Alan Jones– who more often than not quote dubious sources – “a farmer I know or a bloke I spoke to”. Duffy’s most recent attack in the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 14) is based on the views of a single farmer living next to Kosciuszko National Park. The latest and more bizarre entry into the debate on behalf of the pro-burn lobby is none other than noted fire scientist, one Germain Greer, who, in the UK’s Telegraph, attacks government for lack of action and says we should manage the land the way Aboriginal people did. No sources of this wisdom are ever cited, it’s just common knowledge. Everyone knows what the Aboriginal people did with fire. And now this dangerous myth is gospel and deeply entrenched in the community’s belief that burning off will prevent what happened in Victoria.

The claims made by such people about the effectiveness of and need for more hazard reduction burning are dangerous, maybe as dangerous as the fires themselves because they have over the past 20 years only served to confirm in the minds of many that somehow hazard reduction burning is the silver bullet that would prevent such disasters as has just occurred. They might help on an average day – MIGHT! But they have no affect on restraining a flaming tornado influenced by temperatures in the mid 40s and powered by 100km per hour winds.

Hazard reduction burning, controlled burning, prescribed burning, fuel reduction burning are all terms used to describe the act of burning during cooler times of the year, usually spring and autumn. Its aim is to reduce fine fuels (leaves and twigs) from a selected area in the expectation that removal will reduce the intensity of a future wildfire under much warmer bushfire conducive conditions thereby making it easier for fire fighters to extinguish. (Back burning is something else altogether and when you hear someone use this term in relation to hazard reduction burning then you know they have no idea what they are talking about). Its effectiveness and value is constantly being debated by fire scientists. Professor Ross Bradstock of Wollongong University says in the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 18) that fuel reduction would only have prevented the Victorian tragedy if the forests had been removed and paved with concrete. There is not unanimity on this subject but there is some general agreement that under average bushfire conditions there may be some value in using this as a tool to reduce fuel loads in bushland immediately adjacent to assets such as homes although there are clearly risks associated with it. More than one house has been destroyed in the past due to hazard reduction burns which became uncontrolled bushfires. Four national parks firefighters perished in a supposedly simple and routine hazard reduction burn in 2000.

There are some fatal flaws in the assumption that hazard reduction burning is the answer to the prevention of catastrophes such as occurred in Victoria. Very simply, if bushfires are generally started by lightning strikes or arson it is obvious we have no idea where they are likely to start. And if you truly believe that fuel reduction burning will help you fight those fires by reducing their intensity and making them easier to extinguish then (because you’ve no idea where they will start) by rights you are probably best advised to regularly burn all of the country’s fire prone forests. If fuel reduction burning has an effective benefit for three to five years then you’d probably aim to burn between 33% and 20% of the forested landscape annually. And of course we are talking not just about the small area of fire prone forests in public ownership such as national parks and State forests but also the vast area of privately owned forests which is more than half the area at risk of serious bushfires. We are therefore talking about thousands upon thousands of hectares to be burnt annually from south-eastern Queensland, through NSW to Melbourne and Adelaide above and beyond what is already torched. It’s an enormous area to be burnt and all on the assumption that it ‘might’ help on an average bushfire day and will do nothing on a very extreme one. According to its annual reports, despite only a fraction of all bushfires beginning in national parks, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) in NSW has indicated it has burnt over 200,000 hectares over the past five years in fuel reduction burns, an average of 40,000 hectares for just the parks. Victoria has in the 2007-08 managed to burn a total of 156,000 hectares for all its public lands including State Forests and crown lands. The pro-burn lobby wants to burn much, much more than this! Start adding noughts and you’ll be on the money!

The nostalgic days of horsemen riding along dropping matches into the bush to promote grasses for grazing are long since gone. There’s too many homes and industrial infrastructure that has been built in and amongst the eucalypts of south eastern Australia for this practise to be vaguely safe. Today the act of executing a safe fuel reduction burn requires months of planning and is resource intensive aside from being potentially very dangerous. Some of the smallest burns, those generally conducted immediately adjacent to peoples’ homes, can be by far the most complex, challenging and resource hungry operations. The bigger burns in more remote locations are often conducted by a handful of staff because of their limited risk to people.

The nation simply does not have the resources to undertake fuel reduction burning on the scale the pro-burn lobby has proposed and we know already the public will get very sick of living within a thick and constant pall of smoke for weeks maybe months on end. Complaints come from all quarters and range from the tourism industry annoyed at the spoliation of holiday weather over Easter to wine growers complaining over the impacts of smoke on a grape harvest and then there’s Mum concerned about her asthmatic child. Just ask any of the country’s fire fighting agencies who calls during the hazard reduction burning season.

Another rarely considered point is that the scale of what’s being proposed presents some very significant health risks for the population. Just Google the words ‘mortality’ and ‘smoke haze’ and you will find a mountain of scientific literature on the health impacts of smoke from fires. Health authorities have known for some time that during intense pollution events such as hazard reduction burns and bushfires that there is a spike in mortality rates within the general population caused largely by the massive increase in particulate matter which is duly inhaled by all. It’s the elderly who suffer the most. People die during the peak of the hazard reduction burning season that would not if not for the intense smoke. There’s a significant likelihood that over the years fuel reduction burning kills more people than the fires they are meant to limit.

In this Greenhouse era one also wonders the wisdom of allowing such enormous amounts of previously locked up carbon to be released into the atmosphere each and every year as opposed to sporadic outbreaks of bushfires in intermittent years. We are going to have big bushfires whether we hazard reduce or not. Additional broadscale burning will simply add to the massive release of carbon we’d all prefer to remain locked up. If only for the reasons of limiting our contribution to Greenhouse gasses we must ensure that all hazard reduction burning is strategic and absolutely necessary.

The most frustrating aspect to hazard reduction burning for authorities is that the conditions for them to be conducted safely are quite specific. Not too hot, not too cold, not too windy and not to dry and of course rain will kill the best laid burning plan stone dead. Even light mist will. In the end there’s just a handful of days in the year when it can actually be done safely. If you do not get the right conditions the proposed burning can be a complete waste of time when nothing burns or just bloody dangerous. Frequently, despite the best laid plans burns have to be abandoned and rescheduled to the next season.

While the actual logistics, results and risks associated with fuel reduction burning as a legitimate fire management tool are collectively dubious the jury is still out on whether it actually works at all. Fire fighters will say that in average bushfire weather fuel reduction might help. In conditions experienced during the Canberra fires of 2003 or the recent Victorian tragedy where temperatures were hitting mid 40s amidst 120km per hour winds prayers might be just as effective. In reality nothing is going to stop a fire under such conditions. Fires are racing through canopies that can’t be effectively hazard reduced in autumn. The moist, towering 70 metre high Mountain ash forests of Victoria are virtually unburnable except at the hottest times of the year when it’s just too dangerous. It’s evolved to be this way. During Canberra 2003 bushfires flames tore from the Brindabella Ranges across 5-12km of drought affected, fodderless paddocks in sheets of flame to hammer Canberra’s western suburbs and there is nothing more fuel reduced than this except a concrete car park. There are numerous other examples of areas recently burnt during a fuel reduction burn supporting rampaging bushfires the next season. It’s just not worth relying on and to tell the community it is the answer is very dangerous.

Perhaps the single greatest myth upon which so many people rely to support their ardent views about the need for frequent broadscale burning is that the Aboriginal people burnt large areas of the bush all the time and if we just replicated this all would be fine and there’d be far fewer ferocious fires. The reality is that there is very little real understanding of just what the Aborigines did with fire before Europeans arrived partly because we weren’t here to record it. Even beyond this point after Europeans arrived much of our knowledge is based on observations by some fairly compromised observers with little understanding about what they were recording. The historic record about Aboriginal fire management is flimsy and full of assumption and guesses. Today our common knowledge of Aboriginal burning practises is a construct that is myth built upon myth. The oft quoted example from Captain Cook who observed considerable amounts of smoke has been extrapolated by many to simply mean the Aborigines were undertaking extensive hazard reduction burning. Were they really?? How do we arrive immediately at this conclusion? Could it have been something else, like the remains of a bushfire caused by lightning or multiple campfires? Just how much smoke did he see? Probably a lot more than an Englishman was used to. Such interpretations are certainly not something the nation’s future fire management strategy should be built upon and yet it is always pushed hard by those who think burning everything is a replication of Aboriginal practise. Yes the Aboriginal people of Australia used fire extensively but they certainly did not use it as a fuel reduction tool to protect property, assets and infrastructure. They used it for spiritual reasons, to clear paths along which they travelled and to encourage vegetation growth that would attract game for hunting. What they did 200 years ago in the eucalypt forests of south-eastern Australia is also considerably different to what happens today in the savannah grasslands of northern Australia where vegetation type and conditions are entirely different.

A very thorough study by fire scientist Phil Zylstra, A fire history of the Australian Alps, commissioned by the Australian Alps Liaison Committee following the 2003 fires, is one of the few studies which has considered scientifically at the use of fire by Aboriginal people. It offers some very enlightening figures and statistics about the actual history of fire through the ages in the areas recently savaged by fire between 2003 and 2009. It’s not been well read unfortunately but it has been publicly available and conveniently overlooked.

Zylstra went back 600 years and looked at both the scientific and historical record examining all the available information to establish a credible history of fire in the Alps. Significantly his study was able to draw on information obtained from methods as diverse as pollen and charcoal deposits as well as dendochronology (study of tree rings) and the historical references by various observers through time.

What he found is completely contrary to views being expressed by today’s pro-burn lobby which continually cites Aboriginal burning practises as good reason to burn and burn big.

What he discovered is that the Aboriginal people did not burn the Alps frequently, or across large areas. He proved that the arrival of Europeans however, resulted in a sudden and dramatic increase in fire frequency and today we have returned to a much lower frequency burning and bushfire regime, one that is a little closer to the period before European settlement.

Zylstra’s review looked at all 12 dendochronological studies of fire in the Alps. Of these, the site with the most frequent fire before the arrival of Europeans showed ten years between fires. The average across all sites was 41-55 years, while some areas of the subalpine country went without fire for over 100 years.

The evidence very clearly points to a sudden increase in fire frequency following the arrival of Europeans, with fires occurring on average every five years, which means Europeans were burning the landscape seven to eight times more often than Aboriginal people did.

Zylstra describes the view that, “the Aboriginal people simply burnt anything they could at any time they were able,” as “folklore” and nothing more.

In the historic literature Zylstra could only find five references to Aboriginal use of fire in the Australian Alps. None of these refer to actual observations of Aboriginal people burning the bush. Aboriginal involvement in the lighting of fire in the Alps was assumed in each case, and yet these references form the basis of a belief that Aboriginal people were burning the bush both frequently and without thoughtful planning.

Zylstra demonstrated that despite the frequency of burning during the period of European settlement, major bushfires became much more frequent than before, undermining significantly the theory that increased burning reduced the incidence of bushfires.

A second and constantly promoted lie over the past two decades is that “the greenies are to blame” because they have stopped fuel reduction burning. Not a single example of this has ever been offered or proved. No fuel reduction burn has been stopped because of the objections of environmentalists. It just does not happen. It’s an out and out lie. It’s just simply an argument that is wheeled out each fire season by people and groups who are unaccountable for what they say and who offer quotable quotes simply too colourful for the media to allow unreported. “It’s the greenies fault!!” But which greenies? Where? When exactly? How? Examples please? These are all facts that never appear when the allegation is raised and it is raised constantly by certain media commentators without a shred of evidence. Strangely the environment movement lives on the fringe of this debate. Few greenies are ever quoted as ever having raised objections to hazard reduction. No particular movement is ever identified. The various green groups stand on the sidelines of a brawl they are not actually invited to waving their hand desperately to point out that their websites and brochures all make clear statements about the need for strategic hazard reduction burning in places where it will actually offer some advantage over an advancing bushfire. And yet the conservation movement in general is broadly blamed for the lack of hazard reduction burning. It is simply nonsense.

Another line lovingly pushed by some media commentators and conservative rural politicians in particular is that authorities just don’t listen to ‘local knowledge’ and by this they generally mean the ‘salt of the earth’ volunteer fire fighting farmer who knows the land and the layout and the ways of the bush. The farmer is supposedly someone who is replicating the practise and knowledge of the Aboriginal people. But sadly ignored ‘local knowledge’ has been a major contributor to the failure of authorities to manage fire. There may well be examples of some local knowledge being ignored during the heat of major fire suppression operations but generally it is a truism that local fire authorities are in fact people who live within the local community and have done for decades. The ranks of the rural fire fighting agencies are in fact made up largely of local volunteers who are the backbone of local fire fighting efforts. Local fire fighters have a direct influence on how a fire is fought. The claims make little sense but hides what has been a growth in resentment towards a better organised and strategic but centralised approach to statewide fire management planning through the new rural fire fighting agencies in each State. History shows that local knowledge is not always best. The same sources of ‘local knowledge’ have also been in part responsible for leaving us with chronic soil salinity, erosion, rivers and streams which have become drains not to mention the worst rate of mammal extinctions for any part of the planet. This is what ‘local knowledge’ has contributed in other realms of land management. Such a record in land management undermines the credibility of supposed skills and knowledge on the land in relation to fire.

So why has the pro-burn lobby achieved so much traction? It’s interesting to see just who is critical of fire management practises in Australia and precisely who are the targets for the greatest criticism. It’s an argument that falls exclusively along party lines. It’s generally the rural conservatives versus the city greenies. Let’s be more specific. The National Party versus the Labor Party, the latte left from Glebe versus the rural right from Cooma. It’s some members of some park user groups aggrieved over management decisions that exclude their particular activities from certain parks and reserves. It’s farmers struggling to support families on postage stamp farms nostalgic for times when Grandad was on council (or in Parliament) and the farm was five times larger who resent the establishment of a national park over the back fence where they once could ride, shoot, burn and slash their way through the countryside with complete impunity. It’s a timber industry and loggers who’ve seen their power, influence and jobs evaporate beneath a groundswell of city concern about the need to halt extinctions and counter the Greenhouse effect and the departments who’ve received the benefits of increased numbers of national parks. Ultimately it’s an argument between those who’ve lost the previously unfettered access and use of certain publicly owned lands to those who have it now and the resulting deep resentment towards the environment movement that this has engendered. Arguments about fire management fall directly along these lines revealing the motives under the arguments. It’s not really about fire management. Those who argue about ‘management’ of our forests and continually criticise the way they are managed are really arguing for ‘no management’ so that they can have the access they used to have. Unfortunately the debate about fire management is tangled with access and use and the result is that myth and self interest has overwhelmed good sense.

Australia has a long history of vicious, catastrophic bushfires. We use what tools that are available such as hazard reduction, good planning, housing design and cooperative, coordinated fire management and suppression. Hazard reduction is generally done where it’s most likely to have the greatest benefit – directly next to assets and property at risk. There is no point simply burning all of the bush all of the time. It’s simply not feasible logistically, likely to be very dangerous, will kill more people than it will protect not to mention the impact it will have on water catchments and the environment. We’ve just witnessed what are undoubtedly the most ferocious and destructive fires in Australia’s modern history and to suggest that they could have been prevented by hazard reduction burning defies all logic and highlights the vindictiveness and self interest of those people who hurl this accusation. Fire management is an inexact science and it will always be thus but it needs communities to accept that efforts to mange for fire in the Australian landscape will never completely stop its destructive forces and that no one in particular is to blame for something that has always happened and always will.