FollyOfFireFightingFromAbove

Quadrant Online
ROGER UNDERWOOD

Water Bombing and Magic Bullets

If press releases and photo ops could put out fires, no bush town would ever again need to fear the flames of summer. The sad and simple fact, however, is that they achieve little at enormous cost. Is it any wonder empire-building bureaucrats love them so?

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. – Mark Twain

____________________________

Back in the summer of 1960/61, when I was training to become a forestry officer, I was unlucky enough to be caught up as a firefighter in the great bushfires of that year.  In the Dwellingup Fire, three towns were burnt out; a further town was burned out at Karridale, and in the lower southwest a massive fire took out thousands of hectares of beautiful karri forest south of Pemberton. This last fire was only contained when it ran into the southern ocean near Windy Harbour.

It was in the wake of these fires that I first began to glimpse the depth of the ignorance about bushfires that was then, and is still today, evident in Australian society. This was demonstrated by a series of letters to the editor published in the wake of those fires in The West Australian newspaper. In these, well-meaning citizens proposed solutions to the bushfire problem in south-west forests. Many of these suggestions were so outlandish as to be laughable – for example, one writer urged the government to construct low stone walls all through the forest, modelled on the drystone walls he had seen on the moors of Scotland. Another advocated the installation of a reticulated sprinkler system over millions of acres of forest.  How construction and maintenance of this system was to be funded, and where the water was to come from, were not explained.  Yet another suggestion was to line up hundreds of 44-gallon barrels of gunpowder across the fire front, to be discharged just as the fire arrived, blowing it out.

More recently, a Perth environmentalist proposed that the government station an army of firefighters permanently in the forest throughout the fire season, day and night. They would be so numerous, and so well placed, that any fire that started could be attacked and suppressed within minutes of starting. There was no suggestion as to how this army was to be recruited, trained, sustained in the field and paid for. Given that a fire in heavy fuels in the jarrah forest, even under normal summer weather conditions, can escalate from a spot fire to a crown fire in about fifteen minutes, I estimate that the number of firefighters needed to cover the two million hectares of forest would need to be of the order of 4 million men.

And only the other day I read a proposal, from a learned professor at the Australian National University, that the entire Australian forest estate be crisscrossed with parallel roads, two hundred metres or so apart, allowing the intervening strip to be regularly subjected to controlled burning, thus enabling wildfires to be contained in the low-fuel strips. No thought was given to the cost of building and maintaining the roads, especially in mountain country, let alone the fact that it would not work. Fires in heavy fuels in eucalypt forest can throw spot fires for kilometres, making any network of narrow, fuel-reduced strips just as meaningless as a low stone wall.

The modern equivalent of these stories are the calls for the government to increase its fleet of aerial water bombers, specifically the gargantuan DC10, or Very Large Air Tanker (VLAT). There are letters to the editor nearly every day for more and larger aircraft from retired politicians, callers to talk-back radio, representatives of the aviation industry and journalists. Water bombing aircraft are also beloved of the uniformed firemen who dominate our emergency services, because they are the ultimate expression of “wet firefighting”. Wet firefighting is fighting fires with water; uniformed firemen everywhere have been trained to know it is the only approach.

Thus, the water bomber is seen as the magic bullet, the answer to the bushfire maiden’s prayer.

Interestingly, nothing along these lines is heard from the land management fraternity (of which I am one). We advocate fire prevention and damage mitigation, with firefighting as the last resort, only needed when an effective land management program has broken down. We understand that forest fires must be fought “dry” — with bulldozers constructing fire lines, along which crews can move to contain and mop-up the fire edge. In this approach water is used for mopping up the fire edge, but not for constructing the edge, which (in forest country) it cannot do. We regard the growing reliance on water bombing as futile, foolish and wasteful.

Here I need to pause briefly and remind myself of the cautionary words of my father (who was a scientist, a philosopher, a teacher and a man of great tolerance): “Roger,” he admonished me one day when I was sounding off about something, “there is a big difference between being a fool and being misinformed”.

This is all very well. But when it comes to bushfires, the misinformed are now in charge, or they are subject to political influence and manoeuvring by lobby groups who have no interest in effective bushfire management, such as the Australian Greens and the aviation industry.  Misinformation thus leads to foolish decisions, and these in turn to  bushfire disasters.

Indeed, the calls for investment in more and bigger aerial water bombers rather than in effective pre-emption of bushfire damage is the classic demonstration of misinformed people making foolish proposals. Every experienced fire fighter in Australia (and in the USA and Canada) knows that water bombers can never control an intense forest wildfire.

Consider these factors:

• Firstly, because of atmospheric turbulence and smoke, water bombing aircraft cannot get at the seat of a rampaging forest fire;  they must stand off from the head, and then the drop is evaporated by radiant heat well before the flames arrive;
• Secondly, in tall, dense forest, the water drop often cannot penetrate the canopy in sufficient volume to make a difference – it is intercepted by the tree crowns. This occurred over and again in the recent fire in ash forest in the Otway Ranges in Victoria. The delivered water simply did not get to the ground.
• Thirdly, water bombers cannot (or do not) operate at night and under high winds, the very conditions when the most damaging forest fires occur.  Three of the last four towns to burn in WA, and both towns that burned in Victoria in 2009, burned at night.
• Fourth, water bombing is extremely dangerous for aircrew, as the aircraft are operating at low altitude, in uncontrolled airspace with poor visibility.  It is only a matter of time before there is a shocking accident and an aircrew fatality.
• Water bombing can also be dangerous to people on the ground.  If the drop from a Very Large Air Tanker is made from only marginally too low, the huge tonnage of water is capable of smashing houses and vehicles and killing firefighters;
• Fifth, water bombers use vast quantities of fresh water, probably one of the most precious resources in Australia, especially in Western Australia where the current drought is over 30 years in duration and reservoirs and ground water aquifers are drying up. Sea water could be used, provided the tankers have access to it, but dropping salt water onto catchment areas or farms would only add to the problems caused by the fire.

Finally, the whole business is obscenely expensive. The merest little helicopter water bomber costs a dollar a second for every second it is in the air, while the “Elvis” firecrane hired from the USA is about ten times more expensive. The Very Large Air Tanker operating out of NSW this year is said to cost nearly $50,000 an hour for every hour it is in the air, and not much less when it is simply on standby on the ground. And to this must be added the cost of the smaller aeroplane that flies ahead of the VLAT to mark its dropping target.

I have no idea what the “carbon footprint” of a VLAT is, as it has never been mentioned, especially by the environmentalists who are so enamoured of it, but it must be significant.

I am not completely against water bombing. I am happy to see a small number of light water bombers stationed around the southwest, because they can do useful work assisting ground crews in the control of relatively mild-intensity bushfires, and under some circumstances can “hold” a fire in a remote spot until the ground crews arrive, or can drench a house threatened by a grass fire. What I oppose is the ramping-up of the business to the extent we are now seeing in Australia, along with all the publicity that suggests this is not just a good thing, but is the responsiblething to do (when the opposite is the case).  And I hate the sheer waste involved, not just of dollars, but the futile dropping of precious fresh water onto a raging forest fire, making not one iota of difference.

How well I recall the most recent bushfire in Kings Park in Perth. The air was thick with water bombing helicopters and fixed wing aeroplanes, dropping load after load of water, but the fire was only contained when it ran into the Swan River. Remembering this reminded me of the words of Stephen Pyne, the world’s foremost bushfire historian and commentator:

“Air tankers are primarily political theatre, and only secondarily part of fire control. They have their place.  But they dislodge attention from truly effective measures”. 

Jerry Williams, probably the most respected forest fire manager in the USA has also commented on this issue:

“The airtanker has become a symbol in the public’s (and politician’s) minds.  At a meeting two years ago, a former hotshot [bushfire] superintendent was asked, based on his long experience, what was the effectiveness of airtankers?  As I remember, he said, generously, less than 30%.  That fits with my experience”.

My frustration over all this is made more acute by re-reading the analysis of the trials of the DC10 VLAT by the CSIRO.  After a number of water dropping trials, the CSIRO concluded:

1.            Most of the drops featured a distinct pattern of break-up of the drop cloud in which a series of alternating thick and thin sections could be seen. The resulting drop footprints exhibited a corresponding pattern of heavy and light sections of coverage. Many of the light-coverage sections within the footprints were observed to allow the fire to pass across them with minimal slowing of spread rates.

2.            Two drops delivered in open woodlands (as opposed to heavy forest) penetrated through the canopy and provided a good coverage of surface fuels. One of these drops rained gently through the canopy under the influence of a headwind. Another drop caused severe damage, snapping off trees …This drop could have potentially injured people or damaged buildings …

The CSIRO scientists also looked at the effectiveness of the DC10 dropping fire-retardant chemicals in the forest across the path of the headfire, a technique frequently recommended by supporters of aerial tankers. They concluded that this approach would only succeed for very low intensity fires, due to the ease with which a more intense fire would “spot” over the retardant line.

Overall, the CSIRO’s conclusion of this study was that:

…on the evidence collected, this aircraft is not suitable for achieving effective [bushfire] suppression under most Australian conditions.

Unfortunately, the CSIRO did not look at the Western Australian situation, where there are significant operational constraints. As far as I know we have only two airfields in the south-west that the DC10 can use: Perth Airport, where it would compete for airspace with passenger jumbo jets, and the military airfield at Pearce, which is well north of the south-west forest zone, giving long ferry times between drops.  Furthermore, the operation of the DC10 requires a staff of over thirty, most of whom are doing nothing for most of the time.

During a fire attack, the VLAT is led in by a second aircraft, whose job is to mark the drop zone. This is further crowding the air space over the fire. Turn-around re-fuelling and water or retardant reloading of the VLAT between drops takes up to an hour on the ground … by which time the fire could already have outflanked the initial drop.

Despite all this, calls for the acquisition of a DC10 water bomber continue to come in thick and fast.

The explanation for this popularity was given to me by a chief in the Californian Fire Service with whom I became friends at an international conference on bushfires in Washington in 2011. There was not a single bushfire professional in the USA who supported the massive investment in aerial water bombing that has occurred in recent years, he said.  In the first place it was known that they were ineffective on anything but a relatively mild forest fire, and even then only operated as support to firefighters on the ground. In the second place, their cost was so great that every other part of the fire and forest management system had to be sacrificed to fund them.

On the other hand, my friend explained, the whole shebang had taken on a political and media life of its own. Nobody cared whether or not it was cost-effective; the important thing was that it made fantastic television and the politicians and emergency service chiefs who ordered them could bask in a glow of popular acclaim and adulation in the media. City people, with no bushfire experience or any understanding of the effectiveness of the water bombers, are seduced by their glamour and drama. Water bombing, as a friend remarked, is not firefighting but “theatre for the masses”.

As I write, the media support for water bombers in Australia is becoming almost hysterical. The Gold Medal goes to radio compere Ian McNamara of “Macca on a Sunday Morning” fame. He said it is a “no brainer” to have multiple air forces of water bombers stationed all over the country, the more the better.  Macca, of course, knows nothing about bushfire management, but he is influenced by the chattering classes, especially the Greens, who see the water bomber as a substitute for fuel reduction burning, which they hate.

Without doubt, the most insidious contribution to the water bombing issue comes from an alliance between the Australian aviation industry and journalists. The aviation industry sees the ramping-up of aerial firefighting as good business. They have no interest in its effectiveness; their game is to sell or hire more aircraft — the bigger and more expensive those aircraft, the better.  And they need no advertising program! This is provided for free by the Australian media.

There is also the question of political lobbying. In the US, the water bombing industry has become massively lucrative to the aviation firms who operate the aircraft. This puts the industry in a strong position to influence political decision-makers.  The aviation industry in Australia is not yet politically active (as far as I know), but it will not be long before they are blatantly buying political support. They will also be the first to oppose a proper cost/benefit study, especially one that looks at the effectiveness of water bombers in the fires that matter, i.e., those that kill people and destroy towns, and which burn at night or under the influence of strong winds.

The approach of the aviation industry is reprehensible, but understandable, because it is the way salesmen and business lobbyists always operate. What is not acceptable is the way the love affair between journalists and aerial water bombers is leading to terrible investment decisions by politician. Cost/effectiveness is never discussed. It is enough that water bombers make grand television and dramatic pictures.  Our local newspaper  in Western Australia rarely has a photograph of a firefighter these days.  Every fire story is accompanied by a picture of a water bomber, sweeping in overhead and ejecting its load of water. The West Australian newspaper also has aviation correspondent Geoffrey “Biggles” Thomas, who writes a regular column.  He is an unabashed supporter of the aviation industry, and blatantly promotes investment in more and bigger water bombers without a molecule of analysis of their effectiveness or costs.

I realise I am wasting my breath. With the adulation of the media, the lobbying of gullible politicians by the aviation industry, the support from populists like “Macca”, and the influence of the Greens and the uniformed firemen, the outcome is foregone. By next summer, Western Australia will be mimicking the basket-case jurisdictions in Victoria and NSW, and will be acquiring more helicopters, perhaps even the proven-to-be-useless and obscenely expensive DC10 hired in from America. All of this will be funded by a multi-million dollar budget. At the same time, resourcing of fuel reduction burning and other programs for improving bushfire prevention, damage mitigation and townsite protection, will languish.

I do remember my father’s words – you cannot call someone foolish who is merely misinformed. But in the bushfire world I have seen, too many times, the dangerous outcomes that flow when the misinformed make foolish decisions.

As I wrote elsewhere a year or so ago:

… the most fundamental tool of the bushfire manager is not the fire tanker, the bulldozer, or even the water bomber. It is the match. The only way to minimise fire intensity and damage is by reducing the amount of fuel before a fire starts. Military people refer to this approach as the pre-emptive strike … we call it fuel reduction.  

I also remind myself of the words of the great Victorian forester and administrator Alf Leslie. He had a favourite saying: “When it comes to public policy, stupidity nearly always wins”.

Never is this better illustrated than in the way our bushfire authorities and the greater community have been seduced by the glamour of the water bomber. This is the ultimate in stupid policy: a publicly funded program that is, at the same time, expensive and useless.

Roger Underwood is a retired forester and chairman of The Bushfire Front, a volunteer organisation dedicated to getting bushfire management in WA back on the rails

WillTheLeftNeverLearn

Left needs a crash course in learning from its disasters

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• JANUARY 19, 2016 12:00AM

• Nick Cater

  Columnist

  Sydney

  https://plus.google.com/107028210610833732443

More than 22 months after the disappearance of flight MH370, the people at ABC Radio National are getting impatient.

“I know you’ll say you’ll find it by June, but if you don’t, is this a bad look for the aviation industry?” Sarah Dingle asked Australian Air Transport Safety Bureau commissioner Martin Dolan.

Dolan took a second or two to compose himself before replying: “Our aim is to find the aircraft so we can help solve the mystery.”

Far from being a bad look, the methodical determination to find the missing Boeing 777 is a credit to an industry that has a rare capacity to learn from its mistakes.

In 1985 there were roughly 12 million commercial flights and 19 crashes. In 2014, the year MH370 disappeared, there were 32 million flights and eight ­crashes.

Aviation’s capacity for self-­improvement stems from a culture that Matthew Syed calls “black box thinking”.

“It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisations to learn from errors rather than be threatened by them,” Syed writes.

“Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: it represents a violation of expectation. It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it.”

The ability to accept a world that is different from our expectations requires a degree of self-­reflection, which is possibly why black box thinking is seldom applied in public policy.

If only the political class was willing to comb through the wreckage of its disasters as assiduously as aircraft builders, operators and pilots do theirs. Oh that they would reflect on their flawed assumptions and resolve to never make the same mistakes again.

Instead they are locked in a closed loop in which evidence of failure is misconstrued or ignored. Closed loops lead to stagnancy; open loops drive progress.

Syed’s recent book, loquaciously titled Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success (and Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes), offers a perspective on innovation that the private sector will readily ­embrace.

Its subtle political message is likely to be lost, however, not least on the Left, where an inability to question its static world view has stunted its capacity for improvement.

In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, there seemed to be no arguments left for socialism. West Germans were driving Audis, BMWs and Mercedes; East Germans were driving Trabants. Americans pushed trolleys around Walmart while the Russians queued for toilet paper.

Yet since the 2008-09 financial crisis, socialism is back in fashion. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found 56 per cent of Democratic voters had a positive view of socialism. They have an avowedly socialist presidential candidate in Bernie Sanders who is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money. In Britain, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn wears socialism as a badge of honour.

While the Australian Left has been slower to embrace the label, its corollary — antagonism towards the free market — is deeply entrenched. So, too, is a preoccupation with equality as the defining political principle.

The words “growth” and “prosperity” are no longer used on the Left unless they are tempered by an adjective. Growth must be “inclusive” and prosperity “sustainable”.

Like the hipster beard and pork-pie hat, the retro fashion for socialism begs an explanation. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton throws some light on the matter in a recently released survey of postwar left-wing intellectualism, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.

With hindsight the market-centred economic policies that the Centre-Left embraced in the 80s and 90s turned out to be a brief flirtation with pragmatism. Today’s new Left may dress in different clothes from its 20th-century predecessors, but its philosophical basis remains remarkably unchanged.

Scruton’s patient critique of major left-wing intellectuals since the war — from Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault to Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said and Slavoj Zizek — helps explain the resilience of this barren thinking. Their postmodern, post-colonial, post-industrial philosophy dominates the curriculum in most faculties in the Western world.

It is little wonder that today’s cultural elite in politics and the media should emerge looking at the world through the same distorted prism.

“Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class,” writes Scruton. “They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.”

The restless causes of liberating victims and emancipation from the “structure” of an oppressive society are the abstract crusades that feed their sense of virtue. “The goal of ‘social justice’ is no longer equality before the law, or the equal claim to the rights of citizenship ... The goal is a comprehensive rearrangement of society, so that its privileges, hierarchies, and even the unequal distribution of goods are either overcome or challenged.”

A fear of heresy and aversion to scepticism shields the Left’s ­assumptions from challenge.

One of the most important lessons of the last century — that the pursuit of equality comes at the expense of liberty — is seldom ­considered.

“Why is it,” asks Scruton, “that after a century of socialist disasters and an intellectual legacy that has, time and again, been exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people automatically gravitate?”

The lessons of history, however, hardly matter to the philosophers of the Left such as Zizek who refuse to allow awkward facts to get in their way.

“I am a good Hegelian,” he boasts. “If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.”

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.

SexualHarrasment?

Flirting with confected outrage fails to impress women

• BETTINA ARNDT
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• JANUARY 7, 2016 12:00AM
• SAVE
• PRINT

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

What a joke. West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle laughingly makes a pass on national television during an interview with Network Ten reporter Mel McLaughlin.

Predictably, commentators line up to condemn the man’s offensive behaviour as yet another example of vulnerable women needing protection from predatory men.

But the real lesson from this latest media beat-up was a very positive one.

It was great seeing McLaughlin so clearly able to handle Gayle’s banter — it’s a fine example for younger women to see such a confident professional woman able to bat off this type of flirtatious nonsense.

Equally, last year many people enjoyed watching Maria Sharapova flirting with a male reporter, telling him: “I was just admiring your form.”

Such harmless flirtation is not sexual harassment and luckily there are many in our community who resent the constant intrusion into enjoyable male-female interaction by thought police determined to stamp out any hint of what Helen Garner famously described as “Eros — the spark that ignites and connects”.

There are plenty of women who bristle at the present male-bashing climate where men are forced into tiptoeing around their female colleagues for fear they will be accused of saying or doing the wrong thing.

There are women who regret efforts to brand all compliments about their appearance as inappropriate and who want to retain the right to make their own ­choices about whether they enjoy male-female sexual banter and what they choose to do if it becomes offensive.

That’s the essence of what has gone wrong in the Jamie Briggs affair. The young woman concerned didn’t mention harassment, nor did she seek to make a formal complaint.

Given the trivial behaviour under discussion it’s not surprising she chose simply to ask Briggs’s chief of staff to let him know he had been out of line.

That’s exactly the approach recommended in these circumstances. Back in the 1970s when sexual harassment policies were first being framed in Australia, the focus in more trivial matters was all about education — setting up mediation so victims could convey their concerns to the perpetrators and teach them why their behaviour was inappropriate.

The aim was to clearly differentiate minor matters from serious concerns that required a punitive approach involving adjudication and possible criminal sanctions.

How this line has now blurred. What’s shocking about the Briggs case was that the woman’s sensible desire for a low-key approach was disregarded, with some politicians seeing the issue as a means of forcing Briggs out of the ministry.

This is what led to all the nonsense that has followed. Now we have Malcolm Turnbull jumping on board, bemoaning the impact of all this on the young woman concerned, when it was he and his colleagues who set the whole thing in play.

There’s a pattern emerging here as the Prime Minister seems determined to go overboard on such issues — stressing the seriousness of the “inappropriate behaviour” and making endless motherhood statements about “respect for women”.

He’s clearly convinced that playing the gender card wins votes from women.

He shouldn’t be so sure. He’s ignoring the lesson from recent political history where Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech ultimately failed to win votes from women who were unimpressed by her blatant effort to use gender politics to salvage her dwindling support.

Gender beat-ups may impress social commentators but leave many ordinary women unmoved.

Witness the reaction of many women to some of the high-profile sexual harassment cases that have played out in Australia, where women stand to gain so much by accusing men of unseemly behaviour. We’ve seen widespread public debate, led by female as well as male commentators, who are extremely cynical about the supposed innocence of many of the accusers.

Women know all too well that the truth in many of these situations is often a murky shade of grey.

There’s good reason female jurists make it harder to gain convictions in sexual consent cases. Notions of sisterhood often go out the window when it comes to making judgments about the behaviour of other women, precisely because we know that women are capable of matching any man when it comes to manipulative, duplicitous behaviour.

Many women were concerned by Turnbull’s first major policy announcement on domestic violence, which whitewashed this complex issue by presenting men as the only villains. When I wrote last year about research showing the prominent role women played in violence in the home, I received many supportive letters from women, including professionals working with families at risk from violent mothers and other women who had grown up in such homes, or had witnessed brothers, fathers, male friends experiencing violence at the hands of a woman.

Many commented how surprised they were that Turnbull made such an offensive, one-sided policy announcement.

Politicians who play gender politics risk antagonising not only men fed up with the constant male-bashing but also women determined not to live their lives as victims, women who want responsibility for aggressive, offensive behaviour to be sheeted home to the true perpetrators — male or female.

TheDisastrousGreenTakeoverOfEnvironment

RAY EVANS

Green, Burnt and Red All Over

How is it that that the bush is so mismanaged, that fire-fighting budgets grow ever larger even as bushfires do the same. In 2009, months after the Black Saturday fires, Ray Evans detailed how the practical management of our countryside was captured by the left. His analysis is worth re-visiting

The takeover by the socialist Left of the environmentalist movement in Australia can be dated from the early seventies, culminating in the 1973 AGM of the Australian Conservation Foundation, an organisation founded by Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Maurice Mawby, funded in part by the McMahon government, and which had as its aim increasing the public awareness of the importance of environmental matters.

By the late 1960s the communist Left was suffering from defections over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but more significantly from the brutal repression of the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968. The Communist Party of Australia and its fellow-travelling socialists in the ALP were having doctrinal and morale problems. In a brilliant strategic move, it was decided that the environmentalist movement was a new and promising vehicle for obtaining political influence and power.

The American sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote in a review article in the American Spectator in 1983:

As an historian, I am obliged by the record of the Western past to see Environmentalism—of the kind espoused by the [Barry] Commoners and the [Paul] Ehrlichs—as the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history; the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.

The appeal of Environmentalism, in its more extreme manifestations at least, becomes irresistible to that permanent cadre of political and social radicals Western society has nurtured ever since the French Revolution. This cadre has never been primarily interested in the protection of nature,but if such a movement carries with it even the possibility of political and social revolution, it is well that the cadre join it; which, starting with the late 1960s, it did.

So Greenpeace was taken over in Canada, its founder, Patrick Moore, was ousted, and in Australia, the Left, having enrolled into the ACF in considerable numbers, ousted the old guard in October 1973, and installed Geoff Mosley, hitherto a recent employee of the ACF, as its new Director. John Blanche, the former head of the organisation, resigned immediately, as did many members of the board.

An example of the attitude of the new regime to the role it envisaged for the ACF is found in 1983-84 Annual Report, written by Geoff Mosley:

Undoubtedly the main issue to attract the Foundation’s attention was peace and disarmament and the related topic of opposition to uranium mining and export.

The worsening arms situation not only threatens annihilation, but by absorbing resources and creating a feeling of doom is rapidly eroding the possibility of dealing with drastic social problems such as land degradation and deforestation.

It is, indeed, difficult to see the arms race and deterioration of the physical and social environment as being in any way separate matters. Any solution will require a global anti-nuclear movement.

The ACF has adhered to a hard Left position on every environmental issue ever since.

In 1982 the Cain Labor government won office in Victoria. Although Rod McKenzie was appointed Minister for Forests in 1982, Joan Kirner was in charge of the political agenda. Kirner was the leader of the Socialist Left faction in the ALP, in effect a medieval baron not beholden to the Premier for her office. In June 1983 Cain announced the creation of a new mega-department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, which subsumed existing departments of Forestry, Crown Lands and Surveying, the Department of Planning and the Department of Conservation. The Victorian Forests Commission was dissolved and the new department came into being in December 1983.

Joan Kirner was the first minister and early in 1985 she fired Ron Grose, a forester with an internationally distinguished reputation, who had been chief of the Forests Commission. She also fired or retrenched the people who had served in the top three layers of the Forests Commission. She appointed as head of the new department Tony Edison, an unknown figure from the UK, who was outspoken in his hostility to foresters and forestry, and he in turn appointed hardline greens as senior officials in the department. From that day to this the department, now officially the Department of Sustainability and Environment but known throughout rural Victoria as the Department of Scorched Earth, has been completely dysfunctional.

The Victorian Forests Commission had a history going back to its establishment in 1918, and had built up a culture of expertise in forest management which made it respected throughout the international forestry community. Its expertise and knowledge of local terrain and silviculture extended deep into the domain of Victoria’s forests. Some of that expertise and knowledge is still to be found in the people, mostly now retired, who once worked for the Forests Commission. Its dissolution at the hands of Joan Kirner was akin to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, but where Henry handed over the vast treasures of the monasteries to his favoured courtiers, Kirner handed over the treasure trove of Victoria’s forests to the Greens.

The cause of the dysfunctionality of the DSE is doctrinal. At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and that mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet. So the logging and timber industry has been targeted by the Greens for extinction, just as whaling was targeted for extinction in the 1970s. In fact the ban on logging in parts of Western Australia, and the closure of timber communities in those regions, for example, was specifically likened by West Australian Greens to the end of Albany as a whaling town. Trees and whales are either very tall or very large, and both are sacred.

Two characteristic examples of the articulation of Green doctrine, one from 1990 and one from 2007, illustrate this point. Ted Traynor, lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of New South Wales, gave a talk on Robyn Williams’s ABC radio program Ockham’s Razor in May 1990:

For a long time to come, our top national priority in countries like Australiashould be to reduce the GNP as fast as possible, because we are grossly over-developed and over-producing and over-consuming and there’s no possibility of all people ever rising to the per capita levels we now have, let alone those we’re determined to grow to.

Often it is obvious that developments that would do wonders for the GNP should be prohibited, such as devoting local land and water to export crops.

There would be far less trade and transporting of goods than there is now. There would have to be many co-operative arrangements; the sharing of tools, many community workshops, orchards, forests, ponds, gardens, and regular community meetings and working bees.

Applying the concept of appropriate development in the over-developed countries would make it possible for most people to live well on only one day’s work for cash per week, because many of the relatively few things they need would come from their own gardens, from barter, from gifts of surpluses and from the many free sources within the neighbourhood.[emphasis added]

Paul Watson, the anti-whaling activist who has been charged with piracy on the open seas, said in an editorial on May 4, 2007:

We are killing our host the planet Earth.

I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth”. I make no apologies for that statement.

No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.

We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should   be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.

Statements of this kind could be multiplied hundreds of times. They are representative of the core Green movement. Although most people who vote for the Green Party in Australia would be horrified if governments enacted legislation to bring about the reduction in population and living standards thought essential by Traynor and Watson, these are the doctrines which illuminate and influence Green decision-making, wherever the Greens have political or administrative power.

Now a department of state which has management responsibilities for forests on Crown land (an area in Victoria comprising one third of the state), but which is staffed at senior levels by officials who believe that trees are sacred, and are there to be worshipped rather than exploited for the use of mankind, cannot manage the forests. Because an explicit avowal of such beliefs would, at this stage of the Green Revolution, be premature, the sacred nature of forests is euphemised by words and phrases such as “old-growth forests”, the incommensurability of “wilderness”, and by appeals to the over-arching importance of biodiversity and the necessity, therefore, of leaving forests untouched and dead trees on the roadside undisturbed. Biodiversity is a magic word which is used to legitimise the expropriation of private property (amongst many other uses).

Green doctrine on trees and forests is pre-Christian and incompatible with Western civilisation. An important example of the clash between the pagan worship of trees, and Christian utilitarianism concerning the use of timber for structures and implements of all kinds, took place in Germany in the early eighth century.

An English boy called Winfrid was born in Devon about 675 AD. He showed great intellectual promise and wished to devote his life to the church. His parents objected but he eventually obtained their permission and was ordained as a priest in about 705. He became a Benedictine monk and eventually received the Pope’s permission to evangelise the German-speaking peoples to the east of the Rhine.

He was later appointed bishop, taking the name of Boniface. In one famous encounter with the environmentalists of his time, and to show the heathens how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence, Boniface felled the oak tree sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the Prince of the Apostles. The local tribesmen were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak tree marked the decline of pagan influence in that part of Germany.

Today St Boniface would be prosecuted for cutting down a tree without a permit, although since it was an oak tree he may have escaped the watchful eye of our own Green high-priests who, in a nice blend of paganism and xenophobia, are concerned with worshipping eucalypts and anathematising exotic deciduous trees. This may seem a trivial thing, but it is indicative of the power which the Green movement has seized. It is arguable that environmentalism has become the established religion of the Commonwealth of Australia, in contradiction of Section 116 of the Constitution which prohibits such establishment.

The firestorms of Black Saturday are a stark reminder of the incompatibility of pagan beliefs about trees and the demands of twenty-first-century life. As the Victorian parliament’s report of July 2008 demonstrated, any program of bushfire control in Victoria’s eucalypt forests which has any chance of success must rely upon continual and sustained fuel reduction as the basis of policy. In the absence of more radical changes to property rights in Victorian forests, this requires the end of Green hegemony within a restructured public service charged with responsibility for managing Crown forests.

The most illuminating recent defence of Green doctrines concerning forest management is found in an essay entitled “Thoughts on the Victorian Bushfires”, in February 2009, by Andrew Campbell, who claims to have been a Victorian forester; a bushfire researcher; the founder of the Potter Foundation’s whole-farm planning in early 1980s; one of the initiators of Landcare; CEO of Land & Water Australia until about three years ago; and is now a consultant living in Queanbeyan, close to the corridors of power in Canberra. This essay has not been published but is available on his website and has been widely circulated.

The essential points he makes are as follows:

Claims that more broadscale fuel reduction burning in Victoria’s forests would have prevented these fires … are nonsense … [Extreme weather conditions following] lots of late spring-early summer growth, after a decade of drought, made for an explosive tinderbox …

The crucial point that must be underlined is that under very extreme conditions (Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) above 50—see below), fuel loads are no longer the key driver of fire behaviour, compared with weather (some of which is fire-induced) and topography (especially slope) …

Prof Ross Bradstock … from the University of Wollongong and the Bushfires CRC, has pointed out that the Fire Danger Index (FDI) was over 150 in Melbourne on February 7. The FDI incorporates temperature, wind speed, humidity and a measure of fuel dryness. It was developed in the 1960s and calibrated on a scale from zero (no fire danger) to 100 (“Black Friday” 1939) for both forests and grasslands. Fuel reduction research has mostly involved small-scale experiments at FDIs between 10 and 20. A forest FDI (FFDI) above 50 indicates that, due to fire crowning and spotting behaviour, weather becomes the dominant indicator of fire behaviour, and it becomes impossible to fight a running forest fire front. When eucalypt forests are crowning, fuel reduction at ground level is academic. Recent research suggests that with a drying warming climate we are now seeing unprecedented FDIs, and need to introduce a new fire danger rating above “extreme” called “catastrophic” to more realistically present the   dangers associated with days like 7 February …

The whole planning system should be overhauled, way beyond just building codes and vegetation management. Premier Brumby and his cabinet—and I suspect now Kevin Rudd—appear to understand that business as usual will not do. They also seem to understand the link to climate change in making events such as these (and worse) more likely in future. But they have yet to make the logical jump to the urgency of mitigating climate change, which means setting ambitious targets, and retooling the economy from top to bottom to achieve them. [emphasis added]

I have quoted from this essay at length to illustrate the current state of the Green justification of their stewardship of the forests, and also to illustrate the revolutionary ambitions of the Greens in combining the bushfire tragedies with their faith in anthropogenic global warming, in order to justify “retooling the economy from top to bottom.”

Nevertheless Campbell has made an important point about fires in the crowns of eucalypts. The reason why we have had so many bushfires in south-eastern Australia is because eucalypts, after long periods of hot, dry conditions, become equivalent to large fire bombs, containing highly flammable hydro-carbons which are released into the air above the trees as vapours, where they form a fireball when ignited. When our forests are composed entirely of eucalypts, the outbreak of bushfires cannot be prevented, although their severity can be greatly reduced by ensuring the fuel content of the floor of the forest is as close to zero as possible. We know that the eucalypts were not always dominant in Australia; some time in the past eucalypts were restricted to the outskirts of rainforests and various native beech trees (which can still be found in sheltered gullies) were the dominant species.

It is impossible, therefore, to escape the conclusion that if we are to make Victoria free of bushfires, we need to reduce substantially the density of eucalypts in our forests and replace them with other species. On Black Saturday exotic deciduous trees, poplars, elms, oaks and plane trees were in large measure untouched by the fires, particularly if they were at some distance from eucalyptus trees. The Gould Memorial Drive on the Buxton Road approaching Marysville, two glorious rows of Lombardy poplars, provides such testimony; as does the Fernshaw Park Reserve, a haven of elms, plane trees and oaks, halfway up the Black Spur Road from Healesville.

The argument that Victoria has to replace a major portion of its eucalypt forests with exotic trees such as English oaks, poplars, plane trees, and other non-flammable exotic species will be seen as sacrilege of the most egregious kind by the Greens who have ruled the DSE and other departments since the 1980s. But since it is they who must now give an account of how their stewardship of Victoria’s forests resulted in the deaths of more that 170 people on Black Saturday, and the loss of billions of dollars worth of property, they first have to acknowledge that what has been done since the 1980s has been a terrible mistake. If that does not happen then there has to be a reversal of the Kirner revolution of 1983 and new people, untainted by Green pagan doctrine concerning the sacred nature of indigenous trees, have to be appointed to senior positions. More of the same will not survive a serious political backlash.

The greater part by far of Victoria’s forests are never seen by the public except from the air. Whether they comprise eucalypts or other species is a matter only of symbolic value. From a social point of view, the squeeze that has been placed on the logging and timber industries by the Green bureaucracy—a squeeze designed to kill the industry within a politically acceptable framework and timetable—has significantly reduced the number of people living and working in the bush (people with a knowledge of bushfires and firefighting); has reduced road access into the forests; and has exacerbated greatly the damage done in the recent disaster.

The deliberate and systematic throttling of the timber industry has been manifest in the establishment of the Great Otway National Park and the shutting down of the timber industry in the Otway Ranges; the reduction of timber harvesting in the box-ironbark forests to a minimum level; the ending of timber harvesting in the Wombat Forest; and the establishment of new or expanded national and state parks totalling over 100,000 hectares.

These vast areas of forests become wilderness, symbols of Green religious power, in which man is a hostile and unwelcome intruder. They also become sanctuaries where feral animals and noxious plants of all kinds flourish and can spread into neighbouring farms and properties. Above all they become huge reservoirs of stored energy, awaiting the next dry spell and hot weather before turning into raging infernos.

From an economic point of view the closing down of that substantial portion of the timber industry based on Crown forests has resulted in timber shortages, increasing dependence on imported timber, and above all, the substitution of steel for timber in the domestic building industry. If steel were to replace timber as the consequence of competition between alternative materials on a level playing field, which culminated in a cheaper product of equal or superior quality, that would be one thing. But when an industry is deliberately choked to death by government fiat, that is another.

In order to protect Victoria from a repeat of the tragedy of Black Saturday, the logging industry must be given a new charter which will provide confidence for revival, growth, new investment and the development of new technologies and processes which will restore timber’s competitiveness with steel. Such a charter requires the transformation of the Crown forests, however they are designated, into ninety-nine-year leaseholds which can be auctioned in appropriate sizes together with covenants requiring the replacement of eucalypts with exotic non-flammable trees (excluding pine trees, which burn readily), up to a certain proportion, within a reasonable period.

Once secure property rights were established for the forests, investors and entrepreneurs would not only see opportunities in developing the logging and timber industry but also in investing in eco-tourism and recreation. Above all, these proprietors would have an overwhelming interest in securing their assets from the destruction of bushfires, and in ensuring they were not liable for damages to neighbouring property caused by their own negligence. The government could then withdraw from the business of forest management, confident that the interests of proprietors and the public alike were in alignment.

We know from the Soviet tragedy that communal farming and the absence of property rights in the farming industry produced chronic famine and shortages. The absence of property rights in the Victorian forests sector has produced the same sort of result. It is no coincidence that the radical students of today proclaim themselves as activists in the green-red coalition.

Many of the deaths on Black Saturday were caused by the transformation of roads under firestorm conditions into “channels of death”. Roger Underwood, an experienced forester from Western Australia, came to Victoria after Black Saturday and was taken through many of the regions devastated by fire. He subsequently wrote:

I was shocked to observe kilometres of long-unburnt road reserves running through semi-cleared and agricultural landscapes. These are more like tunnels than roads, with a narrow strip of bitumen winding between overhanging trees and bush right at the road edge which had clearly not been burned for over 20 years and carried a fuel load of about 35 tonnes to the hectare. These roads are potential death traps, not escape routes.

Currently the clearing of fallen logs and other debris from roadsides is prohibited. This prohibition is another example of Green Power in action. People should not only be allowed, but should be encouraged, to obtain firewood from the roadside and to keep the road verges clear of debris.

The capture by the Greens of a number of shire councils and the regulations such councils imposed on new housing certainly aggravated the damage and arguably caused increased loss of life on Black Saturday. This issue has received considerable attention in the media but there has been no comment on how a small group of people, admittedly passionate in the religion which gives meaning and purpose to their lives, can capture a council and impose regulations which are not only dreadful in their consequences but are also regarded as lunatic by most people living in the shire.

Following the changes made to local government by the Kennett government, in which a large number of small shires were amalgamated into fewer, much larger entities, local government became too big to be responsive to local opinion and knowledge, and too small to be taken seriously by most people. This enabled small groups of zealots, through commitment and political skill, to capture these bodies. They had the advantage that a high proportion of Greens are childless (most Greens are against children) and many are well off in secure jobs. They therefore had the time, energy and resources to devote to political activity. The Nillumbik Shire Council on the north-eastern edge of Melbourne is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon, but other rural shires on the outskirts of the metropolis have the same problem in varying degrees.

The answer to this serious problem is a return to local government. In other words, shire councils should represent real communities, not conglomerations of towns and hamlets extending over hundreds of square kilometres. If, for example, Marysville had its own shire council, then local government would be representative of Marysville and its immediate surrounding district, and local knowledge of the district would be brought to bear in every discussion on council. The argument that there are economies of scale in local government, and that amalgamations would lead to reduced costs, is belied by the substantial increases in rates that have occurred since the Kennett “reforms”.

The same arguments apply with equal force to Kinglake and Flowerdale, two other towns destroyed on Black Saturday.

It may be said that the Greens are too entrenched both politically and in the bureaucracy for any arguments made here to gain any support. However, the next Victorian government will find, as in 1992, that Victoria is deep in debt and radical measures are necessary to restore the financial viability of the state. Turning the Crown forests into private leaseholds would bring in a very large sum of money, and it would demonstrate to everyone that the new government is prepared to take desperate measures in desperate times and, in particular, is resolved to ensure that bushfires of the kind we have experienced so often in recent years become a thing of the past.

This article is based on the Ray Evans’s submission to the Royal Commission. His request to appear before the commission was declined. Evans passed away in June, 2014. This article is an excerpt from his 2009 essay “The Lessons of Black Saturday“

Fire reduction burning

Academia’s Flaming Nincompoops

Bushfires must seem very different from atop the ivory tower. The layman easily grasps that more fuel means bigger fires, and bigger fires inflict greater damage on the biota. To grant-nurtured professors and researchers in step with the Green Establishment, there is no co-relation whatsoever

A unique feature of the bushfire scene in Australia (as compared with other countries I have examined) is the extent of the opposition within Australian universities to fuel reduction burning in Australian forests. This oppposition is a source of discontent among firefighters, foresters, bushfire scientists and land managers. They find themselves assailed by self-confident academics who publish their thoughts on internet sites like “The Conversation”, invariably promoting bushfire policies that are doomed to fail, and discounting policies that are known to succeed. It is not just that the hard-won practical experience of bushfire practitioners in the field is rejected. The real tragedy is that opposition to burning:

• undermines the work of the men and women trying to minimise bushfire damage to Australian communities and forests;
• confuses the public who can’t work out who to believe; and
• leads directly to more and worse bushfire disasters.

It almost seems as if there are two parallel worlds.

In the first world, typified by  the Fenner School at the ANU, the Centre for Risk Management at the University of Wollongong and the School of Environment and Conservation at Murdoch University, bushfire ‘research’ is conducted by computer simulation, or in poorly designed short-term experiments on a single species. Occasionally a selective literature review also masquerades as “research”.

In the virtual world of simulation, the harsh realities of real bushfires and the lessons from bushfire history count for nothing. The firmly-held belief of those who oppose fuel reduction is that (i) it destroys biodiversity and (ii) it has little or no value in bushfire control. The modus operandi of the adacemics is to design models that invariably prove both of their beliefs to hold true.

Land managers, fire scientists and firefighters occupy a parallel world, the real world. In it, they study, light prescribed fires and fight bushfires. Their views are continually being tested by events in the bush during real fire events. They respect historical scholarship, personal experience, field observations, empirical measurement of fire behaviour and impacts, and the corporate knowledge passed down from one generation to the next. Computer models are used, for example in forecasting the weather and in planning a prescribed burn or a firefighting operation, but not for ‘research’ that involves contrived inputs aimed at proving a predetermined positon. The firmly-held belief in the real world is that (1) the Australian biota is superbly well-adapted to frequent, mild fire; (2) if fuels are allowed to accumulate, the inevitable result is massive and destructive bushfires; and (3) that the cheapest and most ecologically-friendly way of preventing massive and destructive bushfires is to immunise the bush with low-intensity fire in conditions of your own choosing well before a potentially destructive bushfire starts.

Geoff Walker: An Old Firefighter’s Sorry Saga

Those who occupy the real world have seen no evidence that the biodiversity crumbles (as foretold in the computer models of academia) under a program of relatively frequent, mild-intensity prescribed burning.  Indeed, the reverse is the case: Australian forest ecosystems are seen to benefit from frequent mild fire. Bushland regularly burned by mild intensity fire is healthy, beautiful and biologically diverse. This compares with the devastating impact of landscape-level crown fires that leave behind a  smoking ruin in which the biodiversity has been drastically reduced if not completely eliminated.

Real-world bushfire managers are well-aware of the lessons of history, for example the scholarship by Bill Gammage, Sylvia Hallam and others on burning over millennia by Aborigines[i], to which Australian ecosystems were adapted or else they would not be here. And they accept the validity of the work of bushfire scientists, such as those described by Adams and Attiwill[ii], coupling the science to the accumulated thousands of years of hard-won experience and wisdom by land managers and firefighters.

An example of the sort of thing that emanates from academia is an article by University of Wollongong academic Owen Price[iii]. Price asserts that the secret to successful bushfire protection in Australia is simply for land owners to clean up around their houses. Beyond the backyard, the bush can be left to do its own thing. To justify this view he states:  “…most planned burning patches never encounter a bushfire during their effective lifetime [and] in any case, bushfires can burn even through one-year-old patches”. This is equivalent to saying that there is no need for hospitals because most people are not sick.

I took exception to Price’s proposals for bushfire management and wrote to him about his article. My experience is that reducing fuels only in a narrow strip around the asset (the so-called “Colgate Ring of Confidence” approach) always fails when confronted by an incoming crown fire. The fire simply goes over the fuel-reduced strip or around it. The challenge is not to design a system to protect houses from low intensity fires burning under mild weather conditons. My Aunt Dolly can put out this sort of fire with her garden hose. The real job is to protect assets from crown fires, burning on hot days under high winds, and threatening both the built and bushland assets. This challenge can only be met by pre-empting crown fires through mosaic broadscale fuel reduction right across the landscape.

As for Price’s throw-away line about fires burning even in one-year old fuels, I differ from Professor Price in that I have actually faced this situation in the field. On both occasions I observed a raging crown fire run into a patch of one-year old fuel and watched as the fire dropped to the ground, allowing firefighters to walk around and kick it in with their boots. Needless to say, my experience cut no ice with Professor Price.

Anti-burning academics always reject this sort of experience. It is described as an “anecdote”, the implication being that it is made-up, a bush yarn, or is somehow untrustworthy, especially compared with the glossy output from a computer model. Price has recently published yet another paper which says exactly the same thing as the first[iv], indicating that he is incapable of learning from the experience of others.

I would have thought Price’s statement untoppable in the Idiotic Bushfire Statement Olympics, but Murdoch University academics Neal Enright and Joseph Fontaine have taken out the Gold Medal. In a paper published in an international journal[v] they unequivocally assert that “there is no evidence that fuel reduction burning has any benefit in wildfire control”.  Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Wollongong, achieving the Silver Medal, write (of a proposal for more fuel reduction burning in the USA): “However, [the prediction] that the extent and severity of wildfires can be substantially reduced by introducing managed fires is not well supported by the evidence.”

No evidence! Not supported! The observations of firefighters, the results of long-term research studies such as Project Vesta, the scholarship of Adams and Attiwill and the experiences of generations of foresters are contemptuously cast out the window. As is so often the case when academics like Enright and Fontaine discuss fire in the Australian bush, their belief in their intellectual superiority allows them effortlessly to trump real-world experience with theoretical ideology. This elitism would be laughable if it was not so dangerous.

As an alternative to the Enright and Fontaine nonsense, consider this little memoir sent to me by Russ Ritchie, a retired Victorian forester:

While stationed in Trentham Forest District in 1963, I carried out a MacArthur Grid type fuel reduction burn of approx 500 acres along Domino Rd. This road ran parallel with the Dalesford/Trentham railway line and was approx 1 km. to the south of the railway line.

The burning operation extended north from Domino Rd until it reached the forested Private Property/State Forest boundary, which in turn was  about mid- way to the railway line.  From this point to the railway line, the Private Property was composed of a Messmate /Gum forest type (similar to the State Forest itself) with the balance of the area  parallel to the railway easement being very dry grass.  For whatever reason, this section of railway line had been responsible for several fires in the past, hence my decision to carry out the fuel reduction burn, in anticipation of a fire problem sometime in the future.

Some months later, early in 1964, on a Total Fire Ban Day with a severe northerly wind, the Trentham fire tower on Blue Mountain reported a fire a little west of Trentham adjacent to the railway line.  A fire crew was despatched from Trentham. They found a crown fire heading south in the Private Property forest.  There was nothing that the crew could do to tackle this fire as it was a full crown fire.  However, as soon as the head of the fire reached the fuel reduced area north of Domino Rd. it immediately dropped to a ground fire. This the crew was easily able to control with hand tools. The fire was  completely contained within the fuel reduction burn I had conducted a few months previously. [vi]

Why are voices like this never heard, but the ramblings of the half-baked are published in international journals, and believed by uncritical bureaucrats and the uniformed bushfire generals?

But without doubt the nadir in this genre is a paper by Dr Donald Driscoll of the ANU’s Fenner School and published in the journal Conservation Letters[vii]. The paper (which, astoundingly, has 15 co-authors!) is profoundly anti-fuel reduction burning. The grounds for this stance is that burning is deleterious to biodiversity. The authors ‘prove’ this assertion using a made-up algebraic formula and a statistical approach called ‘decision theory’. Data from the field involving actual fire regimes and measured impacts on biodiversity do not come into it at all.

The unreality of the whole exercise is exposed by a review of the inputs to Driscoll’s algebraic model. This reveals that the ‘deleterious’ impacts of burning on biodiversity are based on the assumption that prescribed fire will totally consume every element of the biota, re-setting the entire ecosystem back to age zero. However, mild fires in light fuels do not kill mature woody plants and do not impinge on physical refugia, where fire sensitive plants and animals lived for the forty thousand years during which Aboriginal people constantly burned the bush.

Typically Driscoll et al cite none of the literature from Western Australia (for example, Abbott and Burrows[viii]) have shown, based not on a mathematical equation but on actual measured post-fire outcomes, that prescribed burning has had no deleterious impact on biodiversity. Consequently the paper does not come across as a reasoned argument, but as a one-sided polemic, the sort of work more likely to flow from the pen of an environmental activist than that of a scientist. The philosopher Robert Thouless would be turning in his grave.[ix]

There is, of course, nothing wrong with burning at short intervals of less than five or six years in most Australian eucalypt forests. In fact, many contemporary bushfire scientists, and ‘firestick ecologists’ like Vic Jurskis[x], have demonstrated that this is the best way of optimising biodiversity and forest health while at the same time minimising ‘megafires’ and fire suppression costs. That prescribed burning is not done more frequently (or not done at all) in most Australian forests these days is almost entirely due to the malevolent influence of academics promoting the idea that it is destroying biodiversity, apart from having no practical value.

I have to admit I was amused by one aspect of the paper by Driscoll et al. The authors do not totally condemn fuel reduction burning. Moving effortlessly from a single algebraic equation to a prescription for whole-of-forest management, they come up with a solution to the bushfire problem right across the forests of Australia. This is to install a system of ‘strategic’ buffer strips 150 metres in width winding through the forest. In these strips, which they refer to as ‘sacrificial’ areas, fuel reduction burning can be done. They do not explain how these buffers are to be burned, as they will be up against heavy fuels on both sides and have a very high perimeter/area ratio, nor where the resources would come from to do the work, which would be labour-intensive and highly risky. Nor do they consider the cost of installing and maintaining the hundreds of thousands of kilometers of trafficable firebreaks along both edges of the fuel-reduced strips throughout the nation’s forests, including those in mountainous regions.

Had Driscoll et al looked to the lessons of history, they would have discovered that a similar approach was adopted in the jarrah forest in the 1920s, based on a strategy developed in India in the 1860s[xi]. It was abandoned in both India (in 1926) and WA (in 1954) when it became blindingly obvious that it was dangerous, expensive, and useless as a measure for stopping high-intensity fires. No fire on a hot, windy day in mid-summer had any difficulty in spotting over a 150-metre wide strip and then tearing the guts out of the long-unburnt forest beyond. It is not the fuel reduced strips which are sacrificed under this regime, but the forest as a whole.

I suppose I should not have been surprised about the amateurishness of this paper. ANU “scientist” Donald Driscoll is well known in fire circles in Western Australia, where I reside. Here his ecological research is often cited as an example of what not to do. He was involved in a celebrated case when he published a paper in the Australian Journal of Ecology[xii] which purported to demonstrate that fuel reduction burning would lead to the extinction of a species of frog (Geocrinia lutea) that lives in swamps in the karri forest. To reach this conclusion, Driscoll conducted a single, brief experiment in which a frog-bearing swamp was burned. Immediately after the burn he counted residual frogs and compared the numbers in the burned area with those in “unburnt control areas” nearby.  Fewer frogs were found in the burned area than in the areas that had not been burned. From this data he went on to assert that future fuel reduction burning would cause G. lutea to become extinct. Extrapolating from frogs, he concluded that the entire Western Australian forest biota would soon become extinct, thanks to the burning program.

The Geocrinia study was celebrated because Driscoll arranged for the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) to do the work for him, and thus CALM officers were well aware of his experimental design and methodology. Driscoll wrote a letter to CALM and requested that the burn be “as hot as possible”, and asked that he be advised as soon as the burn was completed  so that he “could come down and count the fried frogs”. When I last heard of it, this letter still has a revered spot in departmental correspondence files.

I was not an officer of CALM in 1997, but I knew about the Driscoll incident because I had maintained my interest in fire and had a good relationship with CALM field staff.  They let me know about the Driscoll research, and eventually I was sent a copy of his paper. It was a classic in the genre of what I would describe as “junk science”.  For example, he did not mention that the experimental fire was of wildfire intensity, inferring that it was a prescribed burn. Moreover, his impact assessment was confined to a period of two years after the fire, whereas the normal time between burns in the karri forest in 1997 was about 8 years. Experienced fire ecologists are cautious about drawing conclusions on fire impacts based on the the immediate effects of a single fire, because impacts vary according to fire intensity, season and to the prior history of fires, as do changes with time after each fire.

Worse still, the “long-unburnt” control sites against which the impacts of the Driscoll burn were assessed, were not long-unburnt at all. Each had a history of being burnt at intervals of less than 10 years, going back over 30 years. One  “control” site had experienced six fires in the 30 year period before nomination by Driscoll as an unburnt control. This information was available from CALM records and from local CALM staff, but was not reported. In other words, what the data from the “control” sites demonstrated was not the benefit to frogs of absence of fire, but the capacity of the frogs to survive fire. The real conclusion that emerged from Driscoll’s experiment was that a well-planned program of mild fuel reduction burning (in spring) will protect the swamps (and their frogs), whilst high-intensity summer wildfires will burn  them.

I suppose none of this would matter, but for the fact that the G. lutea study quickly became one of the first papers quoted as “proof” of the deleterious impacts of fuel reduction burning on biodiversity, and it still crops up in pseudoscientific literature today.

Important questions are raised by this discussion. For example,

1/         First, how does junk science like this get published? Both the Geocrinia and the Conservation Letters papers were refereed, and you would have thought that the most superficial examination would have rung alarm bells with the referees and journal editors. But, of course, this depends upon who the editors and referees are.  I corresponded with the editor of the paper in Conservation Letters. He was a mathematician from Scandinavia, who told me he knew nothing about bushfires or, for that matter, Australian forest ecosytems. I also corresponded with the editor ofConservation Letters  (Professor Hugh Possingham, an academic from Queensland University), but he turned out to be one of the manifold co-authors of the Driscoll paper. The paper’s referees (as is usually the case) maintained a careful anonymity, but it is hard not to think that they had been selected by Possingham in his role and both editor of the journal and author of the paper.

2/         Second, how is this sort of research funded, and to what purpose? The ANU has admitted that it has received funding from the Wilderness Society, an organisation of environmental activists opposed to responsible bushfire management. For me this rings an alarm bell the size of Big Ben. However, I suspect this was an aberration; most academics are funded out of the public purse. This is the closed world of the “government research grant” from which all outsiders and independent thinkers are ruthlessly excluded.

My greatest concern, however, is that undergraduates in Australian universities are being subjected to green propaganda against burning. I have reviewed the fire management syllabus taught at ANU and found that it does not promote fuel reduction burning as a means of reducing the threat of large, high intensity wildfires. Indeed, the Professor of Forestry at ANU, Peter Kanowski, remarked at a conference of Australian and New Zealand Institute of Foresters that “the jury was still out” on the benefits of prescribed burning. He had previously collaborated in the Council of Australian Governments Inquiry, whose chairman, Professor Robert Whelan of Wollongong University actually published a paper in Nature urging Australian land managers not to “fight fire with fire”. The COAG report under Whelan’s leadership not surprisingly shifted the focus of bushfire management from fire prevention and damage mitigation to community education and evacuation. This was after the Nairn Inquiry found that the 2003 megafires had “left a nation charred to its physical and spiritual core” and were a consequence of “grossly inadequate hazard reduction burning on public lands for far too long”.

I would not like it thought that I am an all-embracing critic of academia. I know and admire many good scientists in universities, people like Professors Mark Adams of Sydney University, and Peter Attiwill of Melbourne University. My beef is with the ideologists, the “green academics” whose aim, it seems to me, is not to help Australian firefighters and forest managers, but to make their jobs and their lives more difficult.

Most amazing to me is their readiness to sacrifice the forest beyond the Ring of Confidence to high intensity fire. This abandonment of forest ecosystems is especially ironic as it comes from people and organisations who regard themselves as “conservationists”.

I have come to despair over the bushfire situation in Australia. It has gone from bad to worse over the last 25 years, with our bushfire authorities increasingly opting to reject “the Australian Approach” (built upon pre-emptive fuel reduction) in favour of “the American Approach” (using expensive technology to fight fires after they start). In adopting this futile approach, bushfire authorites have aligned themselves with the green academics who oppose fuel reduction. The result is more and worse bushfire damage to the detriment of Australians and our environment, including its biodiversity.

Beyond despair, I note that after each successive bushfire disaster the green academics and bushfire authorities are rewarded for their failures with increased funding for research and for suppression, at the expense of sensible land management with a focus on preparedness and damage mitigation. It is a situation out of a fantasy world like that of Alice in Wonderland.