re firestick: Europeans lost the technology. When they found the new world, they wiped out most of the people that had the technology, either deliberately or by spreading disease. It was mostly lost before whitefellas settled permanently. Aus is the only place where explorers and pioneers saw it working across the landscape and wrote about it, and some locals still retained it. Our environment is now stuffed by extinctions, pestilence and megafires because greens/ecologists deny it, and have the ear of government

Europeans lost the technology
Little,
I can't subscribe to that analogy. They didn't lose it ! Europeans have progressed technologically beyond the requirement of the fire stick. The Australian Aboriginals if left alone would eventually have gone a similar path. It's Nature's way. Nature is always the winner as the majority of modern humans are gradually succumbing to Nature's revenge due to their technology induced apathy.

not analogy, fact. I've been to Europe. they cant regenerate oak without raising seedlings to 4 year old and doing intensive site prep
conifers are taking over. just like booming scrub and dying eucalypts here. people, sacred fire, hardwoods and grass rule. technology and junk science gives us scrub, pestilence, megafires and misery

Little,
I see what you're getting, I misread you at first. What you're referring to is not technology though, it's sensible practice. It is always the same outcome once a society has reached a point of no longer having to literally fight for survival they become complacent & start going downhill, taking everything around them along.

My back boundary is a river. Across the river my neighbours 10,000 acre paddock is reverting to garbage scrub. 20 years ago it was a good, moderately wooded grazing paddock. It was ideal for us to train our eventers for cross country. Try galloping across it today, & you & your horse would be cut to pieces by the brambles.

He used to burn bits of it each year, on rotation. 3 years grazing, 1 year no grazing to let the grass build up, & the 5Th year the burn, with a year to recover. The burn got rid of woody weeds, & the saplings, allowing grass to grow.

Then nearby areas were subdivided by some landholders. People like me moved in on our little 20 acre & smaller blocks. Many of these were tree change people who complained about the smoke, & the blackened view. As he got older everything led to less strict rotation of burning.

Now the paddock is so overgrown it would be a major fire to burn it. It's productivity is halved or worse, & becoming useless to man or beast. Even the kangaroos don't go there much. It will burn one day, I hope my other neighbours on their 10 to 20 acre blocks have good fire protection, if not they may go with it.

Some are safe from fire, they live in a near dust bowl, from too many grass eaters on too little land. This year my 20 acres could not have fed more than 3 horses, & that may have been too many. My grazier neighbour never carried more than one cow, [& half a dozen kangaroos], to 15 acres, when the place was at it's best.

Unfortunately I see a lot of once productive country reverting to useless scrub, as the old hard working farmers age & die out. The advent of tree change movement is not good for this country, as most of the newcomers don't realise its limitations.

Hasbeen, it's happening in National Parks, State Forests and Private Lands across Australia. See Firestick Ecology: fairdinkum science in plain English