Thankfully rains in the past few days extinguished many fires and assisted in extinguishing many more, but the rains came too late to save over 23 human lives, several hundred thousand acres of forested land, 500,000 animals, and many homes and structures. It also has had a crippling effect on tourism and air quality.
Now we don’t have the credentials of Greta Thunberg, but here is what David Packham, a brushfire scientist for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said back in 2015 as reported in an article in The Australian Age, from which we will quote extensively: “Victoria’s [a state in Australia] “failed fire management policy” is an increasing threat to human life, water supplies, property and the forest environment. And he argued that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur. The forest and alpine environment will decay and be damaged possibly beyond repair and homes and people [will be] incinerated.”
He said “forest fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous level in thousands of years. . . a comprehensive fuel reduction burning regime reduced fuel loads, and consequently reduced the intensity of bushfires, cutting the speed at which they spread. This gave people more time to find safety and fire services more time to respond.”
“The commission found that the rate of spread and size of the Beechworth-Mudgeegonga fire, which killed two people, “were significantly moderated by previous prescribed burning”. And it said that in some places the rate of spread of the Kilmore East fire, which killed 119 people, was “appreciably slowed by previous prescribed burning”. But the commission also heard that no large-scale fuel reduction burns had been conducted in areas where the two most deadly Black Saturday fires, the Kilmore East and Murrindindi bushfires, gathered force in the first hours after they ignited. Several weeks before Black Saturday, the Whittlesea fire captain noted excessive fuel loads and dryness around Strathewen (which was smashed by fire on Black Saturday) and Mount Disappointment. He attributed the “conditions to a lack of fuel reduction and drought”.
We could quote from dozens of similar articles and warnings from California and Australia in the ensuing years, but, sad to say, in the subsequent decade the Australian governments have continued to pay heed to the environmental zealots, who take it on faith that “the natural way” is better than allowing man to interfere. California has similar polices for similar reasons, but it strikes us as horribly selfish that people in power, who claim they want to preserve the forests, would choose to deny thinning the forests in certain areas, removing tons of highly flammable understory, dead trees, etc. for ideological reasons; preferring to have massive, truly massive, losses of forests, the resulting death of half a billion or more animals, millions of plants, not to say anything about the loss of human life, homes, and businesses. The death tolls are sharply lower this year, but still too high. This may have been caused from more timely evacuations and other measures, but the devastation from the fires continues to expand.
And yes, Australia, and California, have periods of extreme heat, drought, and high winds, and when these combine the outcome can be devastating. And that is all the more reason for the authorities to conduct prescribed burns, remove fuel loads, increase means of access for firefighters, restrict public use at certain times and in certain places, and take other steps to minimize the damage from fires, whether they are caused by arson, bad management, or climate change.
It seems to us that anyone who continues to champion policies of “hands off” for wise management and “no profit” for timber companies, farmers, or anyone else capable of conducting prudent removal of understory where necessary, should be held at least partially responsible when the fires (whatever their cause) explode into the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres, cause major evacuations, and tremendous loss of life, both human and animal, and serious air pollution.
The extreme environmentalists decry any human interference with nature. They believe in locking it up and letting nature take its course. But the only way to preserve these forest treasures is to manage them intelligently. Sure, nature adjusts and the forests will regenerate and regrow, but it is far better to allow a little human interference in the forests than to destroy the forests and all they contain.
Why would anyone think it is it better to “let them burn” than to preserve them?