The politics of bushfires

Whether or not you agree with harvesting timber from a proportion of our native forests, it is indisputable that it generates revenue and provides an economic imperative to maintain roads, tracks and bridges throughout the forest, and to protect the future timber resource. It also entails the presence of experienced industry personnel and their equipment scattered through the forest and able to be quickly drawn upon when needed. In particular, it engages government personnel in a self-funding activity and so provides more resources for land management activities, including fuel reduction burning.

Since 2001, these benefits have been either lost or considerably diluted as the Victorian government has unnecessarily removed small-scale timber production from the state forests of the Otways, Portland, central Victoria, the Murray valley, and significant parts of East Gippsland. This has been facilitated by re-badging substantial areas of state forest as national parks and conservation reserves which have now grown to occupy about 55 per cent of Victoria’s public lands.

Managing forests primarily for conservation is a worthy aim that was already being met in the vast majority of state forests. Unfortunately, re-badging state forests as parks and reserves has typically been accompanied by a significantly changed land management culture. Whereas state forests are managed according to a multiple-use doctrine with a landscape-scale focus, the management of national parks and reserves largely conforms to a narrower focus on tourism, visitor infrastructure, and people control that is generally restricted to only minor portions of the landscape.

Experienced foresters were integral to the former land management culture in which fire was for generations regarded as the core business. They have now to a large extent been superseded by park managers comparatively lacking in landscape-scale vision and with a demonstrably more idealistic and cautious approach to land management. This is exemplified by a lower enthusiasm for the use of fire as a broad-scale management tool.

Arguably, this changed culture is evident in the refusal of Parks Victoria to regenerate an estimated 10,000 hectares of alpine ash (E.delegatensis) forest which was killed in Victorian national parks and conservation reserves during the 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires. For various reasons these areas were incapable of naturally regenerating and so have been left to regenerate to scrub according to a philosophical “nature-looks after-itself” ideal. In contrast to this, similarly affected areas on adjacent state forests were re-sown by the Department of Sustainability & Environment using seed collected from nearby unburnt stands. Rather than regenerating as scrub, these areas will regrow into biodiversity-rich tall forests - surely a far superior conservation outcome.

With so much Victorian public land now contained in tenures which generate little or no revenue, land management is now more reliant on government budget appropriations which must compete for priority against far more pressing social needs such as health, education, and justice. While money is always found to deal with the immediacy of summer fire emergencies, critical off-season preventative and damage mitigation activities such as strategic fuel reduction burning and the maintenance of access, are under-resourced. This is particularly so given that changing rural demographics and the emerging NIMBY phenomena have made it far more difficult and costly to implement fire management plans than in the past.

While the “green” lobby’s role in forcing the expansion of national parks has been integral to declining levels of active land management, it must be acknowledged that mainstream activist groups have not directly campaigned against the practice of fuel reduction burning in the manner with which they oppose logging.

Nevertheless, it is disingenuous for them to claim that no “green” group has ever opposed fuel reduction burning. Generally, their attitudes to the practice are quite variable but fall well short of an endorsement. While some forest activists acknowledge its ecological value, most dismiss its worth as a tool for helping to manage the summer fire threat - “there is no evidence that just burning larger areas of forest will help protect forests or human assets” (Jill Redwood, Environment East Gippsland). Statements such as this fly in the face of decades of research and the personal experience of practically every Australian forest fire-fighter.

The major “green” groups are more circumspect, but at best display only conditional support for the practice. This view was articulated by Tasmanian forests activist, Vica Bayley, who asserted that “all conservationists are not opposed to all deliberate burning and indeed the Wilderness Society supports ecologically-based prescription burning”. However he considered this to be “a very different concept to landscape-scale fuel reduction burns … with no consideration of ecological principles and biodiversity values”.

From this it seems that most environmental activists fail to appreciate that broadscale prescribed burning is strategically planned for use in conditions designed to ensure that fuels are reduced (preferably in a mosaic pattern) rather than obliterated from every hectare. Although there is clearly an important place for their preferred very small, meticulously planned "ecological burns", they will not reduce fuels over broad areas to anywhere near the extent needed to significantly lessen the intensity and damage of large summer conflagrations.

The “green” lobby has strongly asserted that fuel reduction burning is of little value in preventing human life and property loss under exceptionally extreme conditions such as those on Black Saturday ("Fuel reduction burns made no difference on Black Saturday", by Simon Birrell, Crikey, March 10, 2009). They have missed the point that the presence of lower fuel loads is a huge advantage in assisting to quickly control the 99 per cent of fires which occur under far less extreme conditions, and which may otherwise remain going for long enough to develop into uncontrollable firestorms when conditions deteriorate.

Part of the problem surrounding attitudes to fuel reduction burning is that despite a large body of existing research, there will always be more to learn about the potential long term impacts to biodiversity stemming from frequent cool fire - there is also much to learn about the ecological impact of the long-term exclusion of fire and about Black Saturday-type holocausts. The community must decide whether it is better to risk the potential for subtle, but often reversible changes, by expanding fuel reduction burning while we continue to learn; or to limit its use and so accept more frequent episodes of massive damage to biodiversity, soil and water values (as well as life and property) such as we have just witnessed. That, essentially, is the burning question.