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The Forum > Article Comments > The forest worshippers and their failed mantras > Comments

The forest worshippers and their failed mantras : Comments

By John Cribbes, published 10/10/2007

The causes of the hyper bushfires of recent years have nothing to do with climate change but everything to do with the forest mismanagement.

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Steel, if all you can offer is a blatantly political personal attack on the Author then take your moronic baggage and crawl back under your rock. The slime mould is probably getting lonely.

David is right, the other part of effective fuel reduction is cattle grazing. This does not mean overgrazing, as the green movement has tried to pin on the mountain cattlemen. On many, if not most, farms in Australia, the most effective fire risk minimisation tool is the grazing rotation itself. Most farmers know perfectly well where the worst fires will come from and they know which paddock they must ensure has the least ground cover at the worst time of the year.

But I have lost count of the number of times I have heard self righteous departmental pups criticise a farmer for the supposed "crime" of overgrazing in a particular paddock when Blind Freddy could see that the heavily grazed section was across a critical fire corridor.

The problem for many farmers is that this critical fire corridor, these days, equates to every paddock that adjoins any type of national park, public land or land owned by absentee urban "prickle farmers" who have no idea of the impact of their neglected paddocks.

In any event, it works well because in 2003 when 700,000ha of NSW parks went up in smoke there was only 70,000ha of State Forest destroyed and only about 7,000ha of private forest and woodland. And rest assured, the wildlife know where to be. At least they can get a decent drink from sheep and cattle troughs.
Posted by Perseus, Wednesday, 10 October 2007 4:08:31 PM
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Perseus, thanks for your pertinent description of the carbon retention implications of cold vs. hot burns and of the relative invulnerability of well-maintained paddocks and forests to bushfires.

Application of charcoal to soils is an excellent way to improve them in almost any context. It is thought to be the way that the original inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest territory maintained agriculture on those notoriously poor soils, before introduced diseases depopulated the region:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

I do take exception, on behalf of ABC journalists and the Greens political party (though I speak for neither), to the snide language used to describe them by Perseus and the article author John Cribbes.

Poor forest fuel load management is not a policy of the Greens party, whatever Cribbes thinks on the matter, and belief in anthropogenic global warming is not something on which Greens and ABC journalists have a monopoly.

Steel, thanks for the poll statistics but no thanks for the escalation of ad hominems.

The Greens have a strong commitment to sustainable exploitation of forest resources, and a very strong opposition to clearfelling. Sustainable exploitation of healthy eucalypt forests most certainly includes fuel control and cold burning, and no Green will tell you otherwise. No environment advocacy group I'm aware of advocates a complete hands-off approach to dry eucalypt forests. Cold burns are, unfortunately, illegal in most areas with wildlife protection, but this is a consequence of long-standing government policies introduced and maintained by Labor and Liberal parties (against National/Country Party protests), in conjunction with underfunding of national park and forestry services.

The implication by reporters that climate change has some impact on fire intensity and frequency is not unfounded. Dry forests burn well; rainfall has declined in south-eastern Australia; and that rainfall decline is an expected consequence of long-term global temperature increase and can reasonably be expected to become worse.

That the rainfall decline is not intimately correlated with measured world temperature increases reflects merely the fact that rainfall has always been notoriously fickle in this country.

Alzo, CSIRO's climate reports are meticulous, impartial and conservative. And therefore reliable.
Posted by xoddam, Wednesday, 10 October 2007 6:50:06 PM
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In 1642 Abel Tasman, then 1773 Furneaux both described burning in Tasmania. Commented upon the trees that were "thinly scattered".
Captain Cook & Banks in 1770 described the place of his landing as covered with vast quantities of grass and later "trees stood seperate from each other without the least underwood".
The famous anthropologist Alfred Howitt in his 1890 essay regarding the Eucalypts of Gippsland stated that the Snowy River valley was grassy, very open "with but a few scattered trees". Similar comments on the Tambo Valley and around Omeo.
Angus Mcmillan was told to explore Gippsland to see if there is drought proof pasture there. McMillan started in 1831 and his writings confirm open grassy plains with trees interspersed.
The point of fuel reduction measures is to reduce the ferocity of these fires.
DSE people visited Western Australia to review their spring and autumn burning practices in 2005 and were impressed.
The author isn't looking for arguments but a practical way to manage native animal habitat to give them a chance of survival. Current situation doesn't achieve this.
Refer National Geographioc magazine September 1996 pages 122 & 123 to see an illustration of good fire management.
Esplin and the ACF TWS et.al would love to make a case where the cause of all this is global warming. Just not true.
Posted by phoenix94, Wednesday, 10 October 2007 9:57:24 PM
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You can not plant spuds and question why you are not harvesting Tomato's.
Yet we are doing so in forest management all over NSW.
Lady's who do not know a tree from a carrot are writing letters to the editor about the few winter burn offs we see.
Far too few burn offs, far too many uninformed.
This fire year in NSW will be a very bad one, maybe our worst yet, but it will not take long for a new record we are miss managing our bush.
Deaths will be worse loss, and the strangest thing, our forests will be the victims of too much love not enough understanding.
Posted by Belly, Thursday, 11 October 2007 5:33:09 AM
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"http://enrol.com.au/mumblestuff/images/federal/polls/nielsenoct08.gif
7% of the 2004 Election vote to Greens was from City areas.
9%..yes NINE PERCENT... of the vote was from RURAL areas."
I think you'll find these city/rural stats are the voter's intentions for the upcoming election not the 2004 election. Thankfully 7% of the primary vote for the Greens equates to zero seats in the house of reps.

"Ok but let me urge you to consider the reality for one second. It is not altogether untrue that old people are more conservative and let old views die hard."
Or maybe its the fact that older people have seen versions of the "emperor's new clothes" before and don't fall for it like gullible youths.

"No environment advocacy group I'm aware of advocates a complete hands-off approach to dry eucalypt forests."
How about The Wilderness Society and Cape York....just to name one.
http://capeyork.wilderness.org.au/world-heritage.shtml
"If the whole of Cape York Peninsula was listed as World Heritage, it would become the largest land-based World Heritage Area on the planet. "
Cape York is largely dry eucalypt forests. World Heritage status would forbid burning off. I think all green groups are not the same.

"Alzo, CSIRO's climate reports are meticulous, impartial and conservative. And therefore reliable."
They may be meticulous, but they are hardly impartial and are well within the realms of hysteria.

"Far too few burn offs, far too many uninformed."
Belly you have hit the nail on the head with this single sentence.
Posted by alzo, Thursday, 11 October 2007 8:54:46 AM
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May I remind bushfire commentators of some important fire dynamics?

The big one that hit Canberra on the afternoon of January 18th 2003 had just jumped the Murrumbidgee River with considerable areas of parched farmlands on both sides. That same fire roared through pine plantations and blackberry infestations like a horizontal furnace. It’s ground speed beyond the ranges astonished everyone.

Two factors must be understood about that firestorm, tinder dry debris and hot winds created that havoc, not the bush or the summer lightening strikes days before.

Natural low intensity burns, bushfires left wandering the hills etc. may be a thing of the past. This country is again too dry. The ACT has joined NSW in the total first fire ban of the season. IMO until we factor in global warming and climate change to bushfire behaviour we won’t deal with it as we once did in any part or S. E. Australia.

Crops, including grassland annuals, pine plantations and natural woodland regrowth quickly become the next hazard in drought conditions. Dense Cootamundra type scrub dominates recovery streamside and hillside. Only a daring technician touches it up today given the gaze of administrators. Crops left alone however are prone to rapid conversion.

Cinders elsewhere points to forestry research on coupe burning after logging.

http://www.warra.com/warra/pub_html/publications_Carbon__biomass_and_coarse_woody_debris.html

E obliqua is a familiar tree. Towards the Tasmanian coast a sea breeze will drive a cool burn out of bounds and kill a big tree in the updraft in minutes. Bracken fern in stringy bark forests can be fatal when everything is so touch and go. Perhaps that’s why plantation managers must poison the weeds. Either way something in the practice remains unsustainable in terms of forest diversity.

IMO it’s the evenness of our mono crops that becomes the new bushfire threat in a much dryer country.
Posted by Taz, Thursday, 11 October 2007 9:47:11 AM
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