Green academics and junk science are responsible for Australia’s massive and ever-increasing fire management problems. By Vic Jurskis.
Professor Bill Gammage’s award-winning book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia, doesn’t explain how Aborigines originally made Australia. It’s more about how country was maintained after humans changed fire regimes and vegetation, exterminating the megafauna and creating new ecosystems that depend on human management. …
The problem with land management in Australia is neither racial nor scientific.
Our history clearly demonstrates that green academics and junk science are wholly responsible for massive and ever-increasing fire management problems including pestilence, holocaust, erosion, siltation, pollution, loss of biodiversity and massive preventable ‘greenhouse’ emissions. …
Things were bad in the mid 20th Century when thousands of hectares of hydroelectric catchments were aerially bombed with dangerous pesticides in diesel oil to control insect outbreaks and three Western Australian towns were destroyed by a megafire. Things are worse now because management has regressed again.
Only two decades after broad-area burning, including aerial ignition by means of light planes, restored healthy and safe landscapes in the 1960s, academics raised theoretical objections to burning because they confused biomass/fuel with biodiversity. Since then, burning has been reduced and an ever increasing reserve system has been managed under the ‘lock it up and let it burn’ notion of ‘conservation’. Our supposedly world’s best forest management systems have been conceived in a wilderness mindset, as if the hands of man, black and white, have had no role in shaping the landscape. …
Since the 1980s, not 1788, beautiful, healthy, safe, resilient and diverse bush has turned into sick, dirty and explosive scrub with plagues of animals such as koalas and psyllids that feed on sick trees. There are plagues of predators such as dogs and carpet snakes, or bellbirds, which feed on the leaf-eating animals. The truly endangered fauna are those, such as small mammals, that rely on diverse grassy groundlayers and are being choked out by scrub.
Pestilence is happening across the country in forests sick from lack of mild fire. At the same time, millions of dollars are being thrown at academics to study these mysterious ‘diebacks’ that are, of course, supposedly a consequence of climate change rather than loss of resilience due to neglect. …
The problem is not lack of traditional knowledge. the problem is that land management is under the control of academics and fire chiefs who don’t know firestick ecology. They’ve prevented traditional burning by blackfellas and whitefellas alike.
As Noel Pearson puts it, the problem is “greenfellas putting their foot on our throats”.
Greenfellas control the narrative now.
