The Bloodwood Tree

While the flames still burn and the bodies are still being found, the ‘experts’ are coming out of the woodwork to put the boot into the ‘greenies’.

Federal Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey wasted no time saying “Governments who choose to lock up these forests and … treat them with benign contempt, well, others pay the penalty”. Tuckey’s main claim is that forests now have nearly 10 times the number of trees per Ha than they previously did, that what they really need is a good logging.

Miranda Devine from the Sydney Morning Herald was even more direct with her article ”Green ideas must take blame for deaths”. Her angle is that numerous State and Federal bushfire inquiries tell the land management agencies to conduct more prescribed burning, but they refuse due to the diabolical power of the green ideology. Phil Cheney, a retired researcher who certainly carries some clout said that the number of fatalities “absolutely” would have been lower if there had been more prescribed burning. David Packham from Monash University agrees.

The issue seems pretty clear cut then I suppose; tree-huggers have put possums ahead of people and we are now paying the price. Well, I have some thoughts as a firefighter, a fire behaviour scientist and a Christian.

Fuels and Fire Behaviour

Fire behaviour people talk about the “fire triangle”. The way a fire burns is influenced by weather, terrain and fuel. We can’t change the weather, we can’t flatten the hills but we can reduce the fuel. The billion dollar question is how. Traditionally in Australia, we define fuel as the dead leaves, bark and twigs on a forest floor. If we burn this material, theoretically there is less fuel for a while and the forests will be safer from fire. I found this definition of fuel very strange when I first began to fight fires - why do we only call the dead leaves fuel and not everything else that burns? If the fire is only burning the stuff on the ground you can beat it out with a tea-towel; it’s when the shrubs and trees catch fire that we have a real problem. After becoming a researcher I soon found out that I was not alone in thinking this. The reality is that Australia is the only country I am aware of that limits the definition of fuel to the forest litter, certainly the US and European nations model fire behaviour based upon some estimate of plant flammability. This is also traditional knowledge in Australia, most old bushmen can point out a bit of “kerosene bush” that burns like billy-oh. We’ve been saddled with this simplistic view of fuels due to a fire behaviour model produced by Alan McArthur from the CSIRO in the late 60’s/early 70’s. Unlike any other accepted field of science, the McArthur Meter was never published for peer-review and the data remains unavailable for scrutiny. Not only that, but there has never been a systematic study to find out whether it’s right or not, we just had to take his word for it. Don’t get me wrong, I think he was a visionary. I also think we can and should ask questions and try to do better as we learn more.

CSIRO thought the same, and led by Phil Cheney they embarked on a study called “Project Vesta” to build a new and better fire behaviour model. Vesta was a multi-million dollar project spanning a decade, and it is with the kudos of Project Vesta that Phil Cheney makes his bold claim. But what did Vesta actually tell us?

One of the most notable finds was that surface ‘fuel load’ had almost nothing to do with fire intensity. Does this then mean that prescribed burning doesn’t work? Not necessarily. For fires in the conditions studied by Vesta, the most influential fuels were the shrubs, followed by the dead grasses and litter suspended above the ground in the low shrubs. If a prescribed fire removes these, the intensity of the next fire will be less and it will be easier to put out. This was the net finding of Vesta - on average, the longer you leave country unburnt, the more flammable it is. Case closed? Not yet.

The Fuels Fight Back

The fascinating thing about the Australian bush is just how many plants seem to thrive on fire. I spent a week on a fire in the Southern Highlands during the heat wave this summer and it was quite incredible to see that even wile we were putting the flames out, areas burnt just a few days before were already sprouting into life. Take a walk through the Snowy Mountains and look at the areas burnt in 2003. Under the dead stags of the fire-sensitive trees you will find more life than you could ever want to scrub bash through. Fire kills some plants, but it germinates and feeds others. Herein lies the rub. Nearly every fire I attend in the Snowies involves bashing through dense regrowth, plants bursting with life following the 2003 fires. Some areas were always scrubby, but other places used to be open until the fire came through and germinated the plants. Sometimes the fire roared through, in other places it trickled; in both cases the bush “scrubbed up”.

The issue with “scrubbing up” is the fact that as Vesta identified, the main fuel affecting the speed a fire travels and the height of its flames is the amount of shrubs and trees suckers that there is. The old snowlease holders used to know that - blokes like Roy Hedger who had the country to the west of Jagungal said “we would never burn bush country as it would make it worse and bring suckers up.” So if burning the bush makes more shrubs come up, and shrubs are the main fuel in a fire, why did Vesta find that the longer a patch of bush goes without fire, the more flammable it is? The answer is that what it found was that on average for the forest it studied, this was the case. Vesta studied Western Australian Jarrah forests only, so strictly speaking its findings are accurate only for those forests. Interestingly, of the 2 sites Vesta studied, one site clearly became more flammable the longer it went without fire, but the other site increased its flammability until it was about 6 years old then either stayed the same or became less flammable. The difference was that the understorey was different.

The hard reality is that there is not a silver bullet. Prescribed fire works well in some kinds of bush, but millennia of Aboriginal knowledge, centuries of European observations and plain common sense tell us that there are also places where it doesn’t work as well and places where if anything, it makes things worse. Doesn’t it make sense to focus our efforts where they will have the most benefit? For every fire, there is a Miranda Devine ready to stir up a lynch mob blaming land management agencies or greenies for not burning enough. As the public pressure mounts, the inquiry hands down its finding - “burn more”. Contrary to what Miranda or Phil might say, the agencies do burn more. And when the next fire comes along and causes problems they burn more again because there’s always something else you can burn. Lighting a prescribed fire that won’t turn into a bushfire is a difficult task, but the practitioners are out there doing it, more every year, dealing with increased risks. Most fire fighter fatalities in NSW are from prescribed burns, but they carry on; often even burning those areas that blind Freddy on a galloping horse could tell you were going to scrub up but forced to by the weight of media driven public pressure. Then when the next fire comes, the good men and women that volunteer their time to fight the fires are joined by those from the land management agencies. During the 2002/2003 fire season many spent up to 3 months away from their families fighting fires in one form or another. Some families didn’t survive that season. What didn’t help was that as the season wore on and the lynch mobs started to come out, many of those people who put their lives on the line every day became unwelcome in their local shops. Some of their friends didn’t want to talk to them any more. A quietly spoken, friendly young man I know walked into a pub in his NPWS fire fighting gear and was hit in the head from behind then kicked repeatedly as he lay on the ground; all thanks to the efforts of the media and a local politician determined to win the redneck vote.

So where does this leave us as Christians? The obvious answer is that we need to try and be wise, try not to be whipped up for the sake of a good story, a political agenda or a personal bias. We are needed as salt and light in our community, the peacemakers, the voices of reason. Recognise your limits - if you don’t know the science, don’t pressure for certain actions. David Packham for instance is a Climatologist. He has no more authority on fuel management or the Aboriginal use of fire than your dear old auntie. Phil Cheney is a fire scientist, but the authority of a scientist is in his evidence and Phil Cheney does not have any evidence to back his inflammatory comments. Let’s be wiser. Fire behaviour is incredibly complex - the statistics from Project Vesta show that even for this gargantuan project, fires that travel faster than 1km/h are 72% mystery! There are a couple of things we do know though. Australia has always had bushfires, and often in the same places. Some of the towns that were destroyed by this fire were also burnt to the ground at least twice before, in periods when the bush was burnt constantly. Can we really blame people that care about the bush if we put our homes directly in the path of these fires? We keep burning the bush more often despite the fact that in some areas this is wiping out some of the plants and animals that God created and said were “very good”, but how often is enough? The first 100 years of European settlent saw the Snowy Mountains burnt 8 times more often than Aboriginal people burnt it, but huge fires like the one that burnt Canberra in 2003 happened 4 times more often than they do now. This, despite the fact that our climate is measurably hotter and drier than it was. Is Wilson Tuckey right - the only way to live with the bush is to cut it down? Did God make a mistake with Australia by not making it enough like England or are there ways that we can learn from our mistakes and start to accept the nature of the country we live in?