FIREPROOFING OUR

our future

BLACK SUMMER The AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRE CRISIS

David believes we need a greater diversity of weapons in our arsenal to prepare for future fire seasons. “What frustrates me is just framing this as a debate about prescribed burning,” he says. “It’s a little bit simplistic and we’re dealing with a really complicated problem. Fuelreduction burning doesn’t stop fires, it changes their behaviour. It can reduce their intensity, which gives firefighters increased options.” But prescribed or hazard-reduction burning is only possible in certain landscapes and in very particular weather conditions. It is labour and equipment-intensive, so it’s expensive. And, David says, it has “a sliding scale of benefit”. So it’s been found to be a huge help in cooler weather and less intense fires but “when the weather’s crazy and catastrophic, there’s no benefit at all.” David’s fire prevention arsenal would include prescribed burning but it would also include better town planning and building design, “and retrofitting existing houses to withstand ember storms. We could also look at using water more wisely,” he says. “Towns have so much wastewater. We could recycle that to create green fire breaks and buffer zones with less flammable plants on the edges of cities and towns. We could plough out some areas before the fire season. In parks and bushland, it is important to thin the understorey. We could use brush cutters or animals like goats to eat down weeds and brambles. There are so many very practical things we could do.” David is also a proponent of Indigenous cultural burning. Two houses in the Hunter Valley were reported saved from the fierce Gospers Mountain fire this season by areas that had been culturally burned around them. In the devastating Tathra fire nearly two years earlier, the flames sidestepped the local Indigenous community, where cultural burning was as regular practice. Lauren Tynan is a Trawlwulwuy woman from Tebrakunna country in northeast Tasmania but she has lived most of her life in NSW. She has a PhD in the works that investigates cultural burnin g and she is a founding member of Koori Country Firesticks, the organisation responsible for the burning around those Hunter Valley homes. Cultural burning, she says, is cooler and slower than hazard-reduction burning. “The flames are lower and seem to trickle through the landscape like water. It starts from a single ignition point and moves out in a circle, giving animals and insects plenty of time to escape. We start small and we always burn at the right time, in the winter, when the conditions are right. “This has been done for many thousands of years and the Australian continent has adapted through a relationship with cultural burning. When we stop doing that burning, places are left with leaf litter, branches, dead trees. These have built up over hundreds of years and become like ticking time bombs. Any amount of fire near them and they just go up. “I think of it like, today, we’re all used to sweeping our floors and cleaning our house and it’s not a big deal. That’s exactly the same way our ancestors used fire. I hope cultural burning can be used more widely now as a regular practice , to keep county clean and healthy and growing.” David concedes that this fire season has been terrifying but he maintains that he is an optimist, and he has some big-picture ideas that he would like to propose to government. He would like to see Australia’s peak holiday season moved away from the height of summer to protect lives and the tourism economy. And he would like to see the creation of a Landcare-like community group with responsibility for grassroots action on fire protection. “It should be front and centre and really well resourced. It should be a network of local community groups. It should be fun, family-friendly and have Indigenous involvement. It should be concerned with protecting communities from fire but also with sustainability and the environment and biodiversity. “We need to work through this, not in haste, but we should be preparing to make our communities safe. I’m optimistic that we can solve our problems. This is what humans are good at. But it’s just like dealing with a group of children. First, stop quarrelling. Then focus on the task in hand. Then make some really practical decisions. There’s a really big challenge here to provide optimism and a pathway out of this mess, and I believe we can do that.” AWW