A scientific report commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society and the Victorian National Parks Association has found that prescribed fuel reduction burns did not significantly slow the spread of bushfire in the catastrophic conditions of Black Saturday.
This is a point which has been the subject of previous discussion at LP, most recently here. The following excerpt from the joint ACF/TWS/VNPA media release makes familiar reading, but is worth repeating:
“Conservation groups support the use of science based prescribed burns to help protect people, properties and the environment. We need to be strategic about fire management and ensure planned burns are done at the right time and in the right place,” VNPA spokesperson Megan Clinton said.
“However, the evidence in this report suggests prescribed burns are not a silver bullet solution to protecting human lives because the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning is significantly reduced on days of catastrophic fire weather such as those experienced on Black Saturday.
“To protect human lives this fire season, we need to focus on effective early warnings, clear community understanding of the stay or go policy and the 51 recommendations in the Royal Commission’s interim report.”
More reportage from the Age and the Opposition Organ.
This is basically a complete reiteration of the DSE position (except they’re not allowed to say anything that’s clearcut).
The sun rises, the sun sets.
The winter fades, the summer fades
The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out
Forests grow, forests burn hot.
They always have, and always will, burn hot,
When the sun is in the sky, it only leaves at sunset
When the snow is deep, only spring brings on the thaw
When forests burn hot three things alone will stop them
A wind change, a water body, or suburbia
Forests burn hot on hot windy days
Mongrel days, when they travel
South east,
It is on these mongrel days, and only on these mongrel days
That most of our forests burn
Every 40 years or so they burn
A cycle like the tide, that we cannot stop
Storms cause more damage, and more death
Perhaps we should start a heroic storm-fighter brigade
Go out and fight the wind, and stop the rain
Or maybe, just maybe, we had better learn to live with hot fires
If it hasn’t burnt hot for decades
and it doesn’t burn hot this year
it’ll burn hot next year, or the year after
Or sometime in the not too distant future.
I hear that a man, in the last week or so,
identified the place on earth, somewhere in Antarctica,
where there is no wind,
the still place that people have said must be
Maybe if I go there, and set the butterfly free
The butterfly’s wing flaps will create a little wind
And the still place will be no more
And all the weather patterns on earth will be changed
You can then blame me, who released the butterfly
for every storm that ever occurs
You can curse me and cuss me and sue me and blame me
And ignore the basic fact that a storm would happen anyway
And whenever it happens, if we haven’t fixed the hole in the roof
We’ll get wet
Some Fool
That’s great, Some fool!
Great work Some Fool!
Travelled through Kilmore and Marysville this week and some people are punishing trees, there are a lot of fresh stumps 2 foot or more in diameter. The mountain ash have been chopped down and left lying on the forest floor [won't that add to the forest litter?]
Have been told the Tasmanian Blue Gum plantations got comprehensively cooked – so they have to be replanted.
Great work Some Fool!
Travelled through Kilmore and Marysville this week and some people are punishing trees, there are a lot of fresh stumps 2 foot or more in diameter. The mountain ash have been chopped down and left lying on the forest floor [won't that add to the forest litter?]
Have been told the Tasmanian Blue Gum plantations got comprehensively cooked – so they have to be replanted.
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
good work, Fool.
The kind of Fool a King once hired to tell the truth to all courtiers and visitors.
I dips me lid.
Ah!Well!Must get a DEGREE IN ARSON AS A WAY TO PROVE THE GREENIE POSITION WRONG!Must always drive vehicles that will always use rocks and stones as a cigarette lighter.Must be envious of the Big Smoke and raise you once, twice three times and you are out.Must always panic if the cigs and the blood pressure problem cannot allow me to see the Greenies are right,and look to the left then to the right and back to the left in case a fire engine is going past.Above and beyond all this I will be like a sentry,avoiding climate change Mainstream Overhead electrical pylons and young men doing burn outs.Unless they have tried putting out fires with shaken beer in beer bottles.Mates!
Billie – I see you make the comment that ‘people are punishing the trees’ Unfortunately some trees can not be left standing, they have been weakened from the inside out – the base of the tree has been hollowed out by the fire and turned the tree into a ‘widow maker’ Those trees had to go.
Billie – leaving the trees on the forst floor, does need to be done sometimes, where are lizards, snakes and other little furry creatures meant to hide? – Some trees have to be left both standing and down.
Some fool – the last paragraph is so true – whether it be your words or not – the message has been stated “You can curse me and cuss me and sue me and blame me
And ignore the basic fact that a storm would happen anyway
And whenever it happens, if we haven’t fixed the hole in the roof
We’ll get wet.”
The fires will continue to occur- both man made and through nature. Do not expect people to come save you in the dead end street, on the over gorwn bloxk. Don’t be calling the insurance company as the fire approaches and you are on your roof, hosing it down (True Story) Be prepared OR get out
I was involved in both the Kilmore AND Marysville Fire – so I have seen it all
Being aware of the dangers of smokers I checked the stumps and was surprised at the number of stumps with sound hearts. I was surprised at the piles of mountain ash left on the forest floor – it looked far more than what’s required for small mammal and bird nests – especially in Acheron Way which didn’t look like it had burned.
There have protests by the Kinglake COmmunity over what they describe as ongoing and unnecessary tree and vegetation removal.
There was a peaceful community picket, where signs such as ’stop the chop’ were used.
The call out of the community states “we have lost so much already – please help us save the precious and remaining undamaged native trees and vegetation we have left. A healthy and regenerating environment provides us with hope.”
reasonably good article in saturday’s Age (which I can’t find online right now), quite rightly points out by Pat Baker that mountain ash forests are born in fire and will be consumed by fire.
The term point that needs to be made about fire management in the fire prone landscapes is that the problem primarily relates to inappropriate management since white settlement. What we have created (unwittingly due to our European fear of fire) are forests that will burn like hell itself through a lack of burning over a long period of time. The answer to a problem like this cannot be implemented in a short time frame. It takes a long time for the structural nature of the forest to change (whereby the density of the forest changes with grasses being replaced by trees) and it will take a long time to change it back. Added to this is the fact that it needs to be actively managed to restrucutre it over time. Simply leaving it to its own devices creates the conditions we find that allow fires like Black Saturday, and the Gipplsland fires of 2007(?) to occur. In fact after fires like this we have a chance to start to remake the forest strcuture, but alas the meme of “the forest has been destroyed” makes us think that we then need to keep exluding fire rather than embracing it as a tool.
Making it all difficult is that the forest that we think the forest we are used to seeing is the forest how it “should be”. If we dont know what we are trying to create (a more open grass dominated forest), what chance do we have to create it?
Hi dissenter/narcissist
good points! I read earlier this year a comment that the forest we see now is NOT the forest the indigenous folk were custodians of, before the settlers, graziers, farmers moved in and took over management of the land.
Formerly, much more open, grassed forest, fewer trees per hectare etc. So under infdigenous management, with more frequent (controlled) burning, quite a different forest than now.
There’s a tendency to think “the bush” as we see it now is eternal and unchanging. Bollocks.
A forest ecologist, after the Wilson’s Prom fires of 2 (?) years ago, said “We don’t fully understand the sequence of changes that occur after a major fire.”
Speaking as an someone who was raised in the suburbs of Sydney …
I’ve always wondered why areas where fire has been a problem haven’t had centrally located fire-safe refuges — maybe a large pavilion-like area well set back from fuel sources with ready and secure access to the surrounding built environment. There would be water, power, communication, enough space to safely land a chopper, park vehicles etc, a first aid area and maybe even scope for temporary accommodation with partitions, campbeds etc … (this could be stored in a secure area below in between fire emergencies)
It surely wouldn’t cost that much to set up and for those who had left it a little late to escape the area, it might well make the difference between life and death.
I understand that during some of the terrible fires of the 19th Century in Victoria, those that managed to take shelter in mine workings actually survived pretty well.
Am I overlooking some obvious reason why this wouldn’t work?
“reasonably good article in saturday’s Age (which I can’t find online right now), quite rightly points out by Pat Baker that mountain ash forests are born in fire and will be consumed by fire.”
True.
You can see evidence around Marysville of gullies full of dead Myrtle Beech and Sassafras – which stopped the fire but were killed by it. Leaves still on the tree, but dead – and nothing green in sight. They’re surrounded by ash which burnt through completely, but is now happily regenerating. Won’t be much left of the little remaining Myrtle forest in a few fire seasons’ time.
This is the legacy of Aboriginal fire regimes – a landscape dominated by fire-loving trees.
As to the more open grassy “forests” under their custody – wouldn’t these areas have logically have been simply stolen and cleared by Europeans on arrival? Seeing as the job was half-done and all.
So perhaps there are indeed (due to logging) fewer areas of dense flammable eucalypt forest remaining now than prior to colonisation and industrialisation – just as you would expect.
Sorry, but whenever I hear about the pixies, butterflies and rainbows that accompanied the shockingly lazy and shortsighted practice of deliberately burning forests for better hunting, I don my Dubious Hat. What, none of these fires ever got away and caused massive ecological damage? The fire-destruction-prone tree species preceding the practice were all quite happy to make way for the eucalypts, and all the understorey and fauna just adapted to their new menthol overlords?
Pfft.
Fair enough FDB,
my point (if there was one at all?) was that the (bush)land never taken up for farming, but then not deliberately burnt for decades, may NOW look quite different from its appearance (and ecolgy) in 1760, say.
That’s all.
But must be treated as “the one true bush, pristine, etc.”
There’s a lot of them thar pixies about.
Actually I disagree Ambigulous it is not fair enough FDB. If you didn’t have some set of blinkers on relating to the people who lived here prior to the advent of whitefellas you might be able to look at the available evidence with more thought. Anyhoo I am not interested in worrying about that, I am more interested in what all this means for the future of fire management in places like Victoria which is why the points “What, none of these fires ever got away and caused massive ecological damage? The fire-destruction-prone tree species preceding the practice were all quite happy to make way for the eucalypts, and all the understorey and fauna just adapted to their new menthol overlords” dont really make much sense in such a discussion. We should (I think) accept that the environment changes, and has a whole pile of things that happen to it that affect it. To call a change (such as that brought about by a fire) “massive ecological damage” merely presupposes that there is some pristine state which any change is a deviation from. This is, at least in part, the point I am trying to make: landscapes evolve and that we as humans have some role in managing them. All we can do is work with nature to try to ensure that those landscapes give us what we want (food etc) and don’t turn around and bite us. Indigenous people, through the use of fire created a landscape that suited their hunting needs. Grassy landscapes support more game than do wooded ones, and are easier to hunt it. As an aside they also cannot support the kinds of fires we see nowadays because there is not the fuel to support them. This happened to be an ongoing iterative management regime that created the conditions that kept fires smaller (though the goal was not small fires of course). If you add to this intimate local knowledge built up over years of personal knowledge combined with generations of handed down knowledge, then what to burn and when to burn can planned with the likely effects of this burning well predicted ( this does of course not rule out fires “getting out of control” if the weather changes etc, however the amount of fuel available is already moderated). All this means of course that the “massive ecologocal damage” line is a furphy that does not help us to manage our landscapes in the here and now.
At the end of it all the point is we need to know what we are managing our landscape for. If we are managing it to reduce the impacts of fire we cannot go back to some pre-lightning Utopia when rainforest plants ruled the roost. We have to work with what we got, therefore we should be directing our fire regimes to reduce the tree density over time so that we have forests that cannot support huge fires. At least that makes sense to me. What about you FDB?
I disagree completely.
I think we should avoid living in the middle of fire-prone forests, or find ways of dealing with the risk entailed other than chopping down trees.
Aborigines used open grassy woodland for hunting, and burned it from time to time to maintain it – we cleared that completely and now use it for agriculture.
This tells us exactly nothing about what we should do with dense forests, largely unaffected by human intervention. You say, but offer no evidence, that there are more of these today because we have abandoned Aboriginal style fire stewardship. I say there are less of them than ever (because “open, wooded grassland” is always and everywhere the first target for agricultural clearing, and meanwhile we’ve logged much of what was dense forest 200 years ago) and we should protect them for their intrinsic AND economic value.
Also, as you might be aware, fuel reduction burning and its role in ameliorating bushfire is a pretty contested doctrine to start with, and in the case of black Saturday, nobody credible is still saying it would have helped for more to have been done. You simply CANNOT look at the damage first hand without realising that.
FDB, perhaps we are misunderstanding each other a bit. I agree with you that the answer is just to go around chopping down trees, and in no way would I compare the outcomes of fire management with that of loggers (whether they “selectively log” or not). Where we do disagree is where you say there is less dense forest wheras I would content that there is now more. My point is that a lot of what is now dense forest used not to be dense forest and that is because of a lack of active management. Those parts that rarely had humans in them, or didn’t have active human management, and were therefore dense (according to my theory) are dangerous in times of extreme weather, as fires can start from lightning and off they go. For this reason I agree that there is an element of stupidity in living in amongst this type of forest.
My point about fire management is that if we want to make the forests around places like Kinglake, Marysville, Mansfield, Matlock, etc etc less likely to burn like hell we need to accept that minor fuel reduction buring does not make much difference in the short term (and therefore cannot make a difference for this or even quite a few fire seasons to come). The reason is that the lack of burning over a long period of time has changed the forest density. What fire does when used sensibly and regularly is “thin” (de-densify) the forest because it kills a lot of the small trees coming up. Those trees that are already big survive, meaning that over time as trees get old and die, or fall over in storms or whetever, along with other changes to the species mosaic that exists, the forest gets thinner. As you can appreciate the time over which forest density changes is a long one (its taken in most places 100-150 years to get to what we have now). This is a very different argument from the fuel reduction burning that a lot of people advocate, in my belief naively, as a solution to the fire risk posed by the dry sclerophyll forests of SE Australia. We cannot think that we will solve the problem by just burning a few sticks and leaves on the forest floor, the problem exists at the canopy level where density of trees is the issue. I think it goes back to the last point in my first post: people who advocate fuel reduction don’t really understand what they are managing the Australian bush for, nor do they realise that what they see now is not necessarily the bush as it “should be”, but a dynamic forest that has no “pristine” state (just an almost endless range of possible states). If we accept this then we can see that the current “state” happens to be real good at burning should fire get into it, therefore might not be the state that we wish to support over the long term.
“people who advocate fuel reduction don’t really understand what they are managing the Australian bush for”
Y’see, I’m not that sure that you have articulated what you’d be thinning the forest for. Living in?
Why?
yep.
Yes, living in or near, or just so that it is there to experience on a Sunday drive or a walk if it came to that (full with animals and insects and plants and fungi etc)
Oh and so that it didn’t burn like hell itself periodically.
Well I find it strange that you think open grassy woodland will provide anything like the natural amenity of a forest left to its own devices.
Each to their own, I suppose.
Must have been quite a few open-wooded-grassland controlled burns in the days before white settlers arrived, that spread out of the open grassy areas (later recognised as good agricultural terrain) into nearby steeper, more wooded forests.
Then the ecology of those forests altered by fire. This over tens of thousands of years in some areas.
Not a clear-cut dichotomy of open/dense (forests), is all.
No of course not Ambigulous.
I just think it’s implausible that there was less total area of dense forest prior to 1800-odd than today.
I’d think there would be less total area today of every landscape type bar desert (about the same) and land fucked up by agriculture (heaps more).
I could be wrong, but in any case… here we are now with a choice of what to do. Do we look at our landscape and ask “should we reduce the fire hazard by thinning the forest artificially?” or do we ask “is it a good idea to live here? Can’t we just come here for a holiday when the weather’s nice?”.
And lastly, and I repeat, thinning forest would have done NOTHING to help on Feb 7th. Please visit the area if you doubt it.
Sorry wrong FDB, thinner forests would have helped on Feb 7, that is why long term management of the forest is an issue. A thinner forest has less fuel in the canopy, meaning that it cannot be as big (if you think this is untrue go out the back and make a fire, put more wood on it and see if it gets hotter, then put even more, and keep doing it, analysing the results).
I know it might be hard to accept that there is more dense forest now than circa 1800, but there are good reasons to suspect this is the case. A study on VRD station in the NT (published somehwere as “slower than the eye can see”) shows how the exlusion of fire since the 1880’s has led to tree thickening. Given we know that Aboriginal people all over the continent used the landscape to give them food, and we know that grassy landscapes support more animals (like kangaroos etc), which is why fire was a management tool, can you supply me with any reason to think why fire wasn’t extensively used in SE Australia. And if this is the case (unless you can point to areas where no Aboriginal people lived or visited) why would we not suspect that the forests were thinner and grassier (and as an aside far less dangerous for all involved)?
nadnanb – I don’t think you’ve really been reading what I’ve been writing. I invite you to give it another crack – it’s all just up above.
But on just one of your points – no. Thinner forest would NOT have helped on Feb 7th.
NOTHING AT ALL stopped the fire, except wind direction changing. Enormous open fields (I have SEEN them, 200-300metres across) did not stop the fire. Embers were flying a kilometre or more ahead of the front.
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???
I think it is clear that we disagree. Perhaps you think that what I am saying is that a thinner forest would have meant that a large part of the devastation of Feb 7 would not have occurred. This is not what I am arguing. I did probably go a step too far and make it seem that what I was saying was that devastation would not have occurred- on this point I apologise. However the substantive point in terms of forests and fuel and fires. What I am arguing is that if you have less fuel, you have less heat. And to reinforce the point if you have less heat then you have less heat. This means that forests and the fires they can support are different if managed differently. What it does not mean is that devastating fires cannot or do not occur. However I think that we should not pretend that fuel loads (again in the canopy due to the denisty of forests, not the twigs and sticks and leaves on the forest floor that fuel reduction buringin targets) are not an issue. We cannot say that a thinner forest would have made NO difference. That may be the case, but also maybe not. My point is that a thinner forest is a safer forest- for humans animals plants etc- do you disagree that this may be the case after what you saw on/post Feb 7?
Sorry, I’m saying a whole bunch of things and haven’t been terribly clear about it. The main ones are:
Yes, of course the amount of fuel available to a fire is one of the main determinants of severity. Less important on Feb 7 than at any time since records have been kept though – the heat of the preceding week, strong variable winds, etc etc meant that the fire burned right through every kind of vegetation and density thereof. With the exception of a handful of non-eucalypt gullies.
Yes, woody grassland is a good kind of landscape – pretty, easy to move through, plenty of fauna and birds, good hunting, good for living in or near with the usual fire precautions. The problem I have is with the idea that we should “manage” what are currently tracts of relatively unspoilt forest teeming with biodiversity, in order to make them safer for grossly unsustainable semi-rural living.
Hi again FDB, in part I agree with you, the point of humans managing forests is because they are used by humans. If there are no humans then some of the imperative around fire management disappears. However I think that the notion of an “unspoilt” forest is a recent invention. This idea (which I am not saying you are saying) that the forests of SE Australia are pristine, particularly if fire is excluded is, I think, wrong, and leads us to manage them inappropriately, particualry with reference to biodiversity. You see although I disagree with sensationalist comments like “400,00 Hectares of forest have been destroyed” on the news surrounding bushfire events (they are not “destroyed” as will be apparent when one looks at the recovery even after a fire event like Feb 7), I do think that it is better to have less intense fires overall, and good fire management gives the animals and plants a better chance than if just left alone (because the forest will burn eventually if left alone, and more intensely the longer they are left (the old density argument again!), even if arsonists are excluded- which is also unlikely).
And to finish thanks FDB for your ongoing engagement on this one. I have come to appreciate things differently as a result of it.
Likewise nadnanb – I can get a little het up about this after discussing it with so many utter boneheads, in whose number I do not count you.
Unfortunately for biodiversity though, regeneration is not always a good thing – every time an area burns, fire-loving (read: really fucking flammable) species are encouraged. So we lose stuff like the gorgeous temperate rainforests of myrtle beech. Snow gums too – they do come back, but only from the base, so other trees and scrub species can get a jump on them.
The spookiest natural landscape I’ve ever seen was on Lake Mountain in the snow about a month ago. Completely burnt (zero green) snow gum forest and a foot of snow, in cloud. So, like, misty and completely monochrome. Felt like I was climbing up to some Transylvanian castle. Till my little brother nailed me in the back of the head with a snowball and the moment was ruined.
The spookiest natural landscape *I’ve* ever seen was… well, actually, let’s forget it. You really don’t want to know.
Interesting point FDB, in the northern parts of the NT the research shows that remnant rainforest patches (from a really long time ago) are actually maintained through the judicious and planned use of fire. The theory is that Aboriginal people burn early in the “dry season” when the tall grass that has grown up dried out a bit and fallen over is still a bit moist, with the intention of producing a green pick reshooting that the kangaroos etc come to feed on. With burning like this the fires are smaller and go out (generally) at night. What this means is that fires will burn up to the edge of monsoon vine thickets and rainforest patches (where there is water present post wet season) and go out. If burning is not done early then fires that burn later in the dry season can penetrate the rainforest and reduce its range (because they are hotter and the fuel is drier). If no burning takes place over a long period of time the edge between dry forest and rainforest gets “hazy”, grass starts to penetrate and the rainforest often extends outwards. This is all fine until the inevitable fire comes, with it reaching further into the rainforest than before, As you rightly point out the only thing that comes back after this is the fire tolerant species. So the thing is that fire (ironically?) maintains rainforest.
In the desert regions a similar thing occurs with Mulga (Acacia aneura) which does not survive fire but whose seeds sprout after fire. The story I have heard is that there are now very few patches of remnant Mulga (with multiple aged trees) as the changed fire regimes mean that the above scenario is repeated: long term fire exclusion leads to hazy edges, grass penetrates, fire eventualy comes along and gets into the Mulga patches killing them all, leaving only single generation regrowth.
The nature and role of fire in the Australian landscape is something that we really need to do more work on methinks…
“The spookiest natural landscape *I’ve* ever seen was… well, actually, let’s forget it. You really don’t want to know.”
I’ve got photos actually. I’ll upload them to my computer when the camera stops screaming.
Driving through Kinglake to St Andrews to visit someone in April last year was pretty spooky. Especially when we put old Sydney band Scary Mother on. Hairs on the back of the neck stuff.
nadnanb
Even the cow farmers fround here recognise the importance of cool burns at the right time of year, tho for different reasons, cooler burns don’t hurt the soil as much and pasture recovers quicker and stronger.