Rationality and the religion of environmentalism do not go hand. Human life is usually very low on the scale of Greens as seen last summer. You would think they would of been shamed in keeping their mouths shut but unfortunately the opposite takes place. Just look at the gw stories they make up and you will get the idea.

"gross vandalism on our natural heritage."
Hmm I wonder Alfred what is your view of our "original settlers'" practice of regular burning of grasslands and forests? Was that gross vandalism also?
".. Rhys Jones (1969),..recognised the problem almost a quarter of a century ago, when he said:
"What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788, or do we yearn for an environment without man, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago? If the former, then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions". Kohen (1993) http://asgap.org.au/APOL3/sep96-1.html.

MWPOYNTER,

Canberra had a strip 5-10 km wide of flogged-out, drought-stricken paddocks with not a blade of grass on them as a “fire break” to its west, but this did not prevent fires from reaching the pine plantations on its western edge. Once that happened, then of course high fuel loads so close to houses (noting that the plantations were there before the suburbs) led to houses in Duffy, Chapman and Holder being lost.
And
Professor Professor David Lindenmayer of the ANU points out that: “I worked out of Marysville for 25 years and every year for the past 5 years the outskirts of the town were fuel reduced.”

This shows how helpful FRB really is.
I think that the fuss about them is a way of attacking the green and environmental groups and blaming them for the fires.

Sarnian,

If more fuel reduction was done, then maybe even those houses would not have been lost. There no doubt that the FRB was curtailed due the influence of the greens.

Alfred would prefer to see corpses of citizens rather than a tiny fraction of the bush fuel reduced.

Shadow Minister.

The greens policy is for reasonable FRB. As with all info circulating about them, it is distorted and lied about by the GW deniers, forest companies with a huge vested interests and their paid (quite well) lackeys.
To take FRB to their ridiculous extreme would mean burning all forest every year. A disaster for the environment and also impossible to do.
The ideal would be more aggressive fuel management immediately around houses and fire survival bunkers for houses/communities in fire prone areas.
The suggestion that having had more fuel reduction burning over larger areas
More frequently during the drought of the last decade in Victoria would have prevented
These fires — and by extension that doing even more of it is essential in the hotter, drier
Climate we are moving into — is not backed up by the best available science. Fuel
Reduction burning doesn’t bring rain.
Whoever Alfred is? It is a deliberate effort to stir up hates to say that ANY one would prefer to see bodies.

A balanced contribution to the discussion on how to improve public land management in Victoria, well done. The government dominated parliamentary inquiry on bushfires reported to the Victorian parliament in June 2008 that the major contribution to fire prevention would be a trebling of prescribed burning to 385,000 hectares per year, which is only 5 per cent of the public land in Victoria i.e. a 20 year rotation. This is supported by over 50 years of bushfire research and the Victorian Fire Ecology Group [a partnership between DSE and Parks Victoria] who say on page 84 of the same inquiry report that biodiversity in Victoria is threatened by the current inadequate fire regime. Anyone who supports a better environmental outcome than what has been delivered by the four mega fires we have experienced in the last 6 years would endorse the volumes of research that support a minimum of 5 per cent burning per year. It is clear there are many areas of Victoria that have suffered intense damaging fire in the last 6 years that may have suffered less if we had a mosiac of cool burning generated by proper fire management regimes. BTW, the target of 5 per cent was derived from the evidence of DSE officers at the inquiry who wanted to the see the level of prescribed burning increased. Quite apart from the horrific environmental outcomes of the intense conflagrations we have endured in the last 6 years, apart from the appalling personal cost is the $1.8 billion dollars expended in suppression and recovery from large uncontrollable fires for which we have nothing to show. The ratio of spending in the last decade favours suppression 10 to 1 over prevention. The Americans have tried this 'big suppression effort' and failed. Every $1 spent on prevention has a $22 payoff in saved suppression and recovery costs. What we need is a new paradigm in public land management that recognises fire management is the cornerstone of public land management in a fire prone state like Victoria. See www.landsalliance.org for community concern on fire management.