The pervasive thinking in Australia is that bush that looks like parkland is somehow better than a thicket, the problem being that there is both less biodiversity and less carbon storage. Apart from respiratory stress like asthma there is the new issue of litigation for burnoffs gone wrong. Til recently it has been a case of overgrown boys playing with matches thinking they are doing the community a favour. The prospect of involuntary manslaughter charges may soon stop that.

Perhaps we should adjust to infrequent but very hot fires using the precautions suggested. In any case as petrol prices increase the urban community may interact with the bush less and less.

I don’t think the fire-management regime is highly important amongst the enormous environmental changes that this continent has been subjected to over the last 200-odd years.

A very large amount of the country had been exposed to anthropogenic fire for tens of thousands of years and consequently was very different to how it would have been in the absence of humans. These fire practices were wiped out with the invasion of a new wave of humans. Massive changes occurred because of the reduction in fire – grassland turned into scrubland and woodland, rainforest and vine thicket replaced open forest and savannah woodlands thickened up greatly.

Contrary to the belief that the new burning practices have led to a drying out and increase in temperature, they have gone some small distance towards reducing or reversing the increased woody vegetation that grew due to a huge reduction in fire, and which would have had a net mitigating effect on temperature and an increase in moisture content and hydrological cycle.

While there are some negative factors associated with prescribed burning, they are tiny compared to the effects of massive land-clearing and grazing by cattle and rabbits.

continued

In most cases where fire management is conducted, it approaches to some extent the fire regime that existed for 40-odd thousand years. Even if it is a bit overdone in some places, it is still far less ecologically damaging than no fire management.

Of course there is another factor that necessitates fire management of bush areas – the proximity of human habitation, farmland, grazing land, etc. Quite apart from ecological or environment factors, we simply must undertake fire management to reduce the risk of the loss of life and property.

Most environments, if not subjected to prescribed fuel-reduction burning, will burn sooner or later. When this happens it can be enormously damaging both to human property and wildlife.

Prescribed burns enable a patchwork which accommodates high biodiversity. Hot burns sweep across huge tracts of country, rendering them uniform, thus greatly reducing biodiversity within those areas.

Bushfires, whether prescribed or not, are carbon-neutral in terms of greenhouse gasses.

So my conclusion Valerie is to not be negatively concerned about fire management, but rather to encourage it.

In many places it is not conducted to anywhere near a sufficient extent.

Ludwig says
<Most environments, if not subjected to prescribed fuel-reduction burning, will burn sooner or later. When this happens it can be enormously damaging both to human property and wildlife>
This is not true for most countries with similar climates to Australia. Think, why are they different?

Much of australia's land is covered by fire promoting plants; Especially the SE corner where most people live .

Sources of non-deliberate ignition are wide spread: dry lightning , power lines , and angle-grinder sparks are but a few examples. The possibility of fire in these areas can only be naturally stopped if fire is excluded long enough for ecosystems to become dominated by plants that do not need/create fire.

This would take several hundred years ,this is not a realistic hope.

Thus alternatives to fires be they deliberate or naturally started must be either modification of people i.e do not build houses in places like Mountain Ash forests and on NW facing slopes generally and/or artificial modification of ecosystems I.e replacing Sclerophyll vegetation with non fire promoting plants in areas close to habitation and/or largely removing vegetation from near areas of human habitation.

Oddly enough, though there is of course no evidence for anthropogenic climate change, I do believe that increased CO2 levels may be encouraging plant growth, in Australia as elsewhere. And although this is good news for farmers and wildlife it may not be so good for those of us who live in bushfire-prone areas. My own region is heavily overgrown compared to when I moved here twenty years ago. At some point all that extra growth is going to burn, and nothing on Heaven or Earth is going to stop it.

I would gladly vote for a yearly burn-off regime, but without support from the general population it's just not going to happen. Maybe after enough people die that support will appear. Meanwhile I plan to make sure I'm not here when the holocaust hits.