(A post from January 25th, 2018)
ABORIGINAL BURNING REGIMES
With
today’s news on the ABC that the Wye River fires happened “despite years of
extensive planned burns”, hopefully governments will finally understand that
their fuel-reduction control burning regimes are fatally flawed and have been so
from the very beginning.(1) The
inescapable conclusion after decades of expert research is that following the principals
of Aboriginal fire regimes is the solution to wide scale environmental protection,
restoration and ongoing management, bearing in mind that although these
principals hold true, details may need a collaborative adaptation with Western
experts, as what worked well for them no longer necessarily applies now that
the biodiverse ecologies they once managed so effectively have been massively
cleared, degraded, polluted, built-on and altered in many detrimental ways.
Indigenous forest management
burning regimes, revealing a deep and profound integration with Nature and
based on successfully tried & tested practices over many thousands of years
and through numerous changes in climate, are receiving increasing attention. My
own research reveals a pan-Aboriginal practice of never interfering in any way
with any dense, closed-canopy ecologies, such as tropical and
temperate rainforests, dry vine scrub, brigalow, mangroves, montane ash forests
and monsoon thickets – such ecologies were left
intact and protected from fire by routinely burning around the perimeters to
prevent any uncontrolled wild fire from entering them.(2)
Aboriginal
burning regimes were traditionally used for hunting, farming, signalling(3) and
discrete ecosystem micro-management. Wide corridors and small patches were kept
burnt in these forests however, for marsupial grazing, ceremonial purposes, access
to sites of significance and for trade route thoroughfares, which enabled easy
walking, kept snakes away and provided fresh grazing for prey animals to feed
people on their long stretches of journeying. The nature of the high density
biomass of these zones generated regular rain cycles which also helped keep
undergrowth damp, thus inhibiting fires. Clearing and fragmentation has severely
disrupted them and dried them out.
The recent fires in Esperance WA were fueled by
pre-harvest standing crops and stubble, initiated by lightning strikes in
extreme weather conditions. This scenario will inevitably be repeated across the
continent with global warming causing more frequent and severe weather conditions
and events. No amount of control burns in bushland can prevent that. In fact,
the only hope there is to stop wildfires is to regenerate and restore some of
those vast areas of cleared and degraded habitats back to bio-rich, naturally
fire-retardant bushlands and to connect last remnants wherever possible with
either wildlife corridors or stepping stone islands.(4)
We can never go back to the perfect equilibrium in
which Aborigines maintained the biodiverse ecosystems of this continent, but we
can learn to manage what remains of them in collaboration with the Traditional
Owner Knowledge Keepers. It is appropriate that Aboriginal science, fine-tuned
over many millennia, informs today’s management of these ecologies.
-----------------o0o-----------------
(2) Still practiced by
Traditional Owners – (provide link when found)
(4) http://worldatpolarity.blogspot.com/2015/01/continental-connectivity-co-operative.html
– link to current blog post
