By Neil R Marriott
In an interesting feature article in the June ‘Parkwatch’, Phil Ingamells states that “evidence against Victoria’s fuel reduction program is clear, yet burns are increasing. Calls for a pause and re-assessment of fire management are growing louder”. The most alarming result of “fuel reduction” burning is often fuel production burning!
The next most alarming thing is that the state government department that plans and performs those burns does no monitoring of what actually happens afterwards. Anyone marketing a car, a vaccine, or building cladding would be expected to know how it performs over time, whether it’s safe, and, of course, if it actually works. However, Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) doesn’t return to the site of its fuel reduction burns and record what has eventuated – not after one year, not two or, most importantly, not a decade or so into the future. That’s not just alarming, it’s downright puzzling, because DELWP boasts of the efficacy of its ‘Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting’ framework; the department claims it monitors performance and learns from what it does, allowing it to improve performance.
It might seem odd to say that a fuel reduction burn increases fuel, but there is now clear evidence that this is in fact the case. The first clear statement of this situation came from Judge Stretton’s Royal Commission into the 1939 Black Friday bushfire that roared through some two million hectares of forests and scrub. Referring to the common practice at the time of burning open forests and woodlands to produce green pick for cattle and sheep, Stretton said:
“The fire stimulated grass growth, but it encouraged scrub growth far more. Thus was begun the cycle of destruction which cannot be arrested in our day. The scrub grew and flourished, fire was used to clear it, the scrub grew faster and thicker, bush fires, caused by the careless or designing hand of man, ravaged the forests; the canopy was impaired, more scrub grew and prospered, and again the cleansing agent, fire, was used. And so today … the wombat and wallaby are hard put to it to find passage through the bush.”
Thus, way back in 1939, there was clear evidence of the threats of excessive burning. That was pretty controversial at the time, but in 1946 Stretton reinforced his claim in a second Royal Commission, this time into forest grazing.
On his recommendation, the right to burn was taken away from those holding a grazing licence. Burning became the sole responsibility of the government’s Forest Commission. But since those days, a land management body, that primarily practised the burning of ridge-tops to protect a timber supply, has transformed itself into a large, heavily-equipped, paramilitary organisation seemingly intent on frying the state. And this organisation, charged with protecting our lives and nurturing our natural heritage, has largely been left to report on its own performance.
Last year, however, following the third time in 20 years that a one-million-hectare wildfire tore through Victoria’s bushland, two independent inquiries have brought DELWP’s management into question. Among issues raised in the Inspector General for Emergency Management’s report was the observation that: “Even with an extensive fuel management program, bushfire risk remains as the vegetation regrows.” That statement is quite scathing of DELWP’s burn operations, and can be strongly backed up by recent independent research.
In a submission to last year’s Federal Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements, Associate Professor Philip Zylstra, Professor David Lindenmayer and colleagues illustrated their argument with a diagram showing how fuel flammability can actually increase for 30 years or more after a fuel “reduction” burn. The bush responds in complex ways to fire, as changes in species and forest structure depend on many factors, but empirical evidence now supports long-standing observations that burns can increase understorey flammability for decades.
I have recently been advised that DELWP have just carried out “controlled burns” in a number of the few remaining unburnt areas of forest in East Gippsland. These small patches were full of the surviving birds and animals that managed to escape from the Black Summer inferno. One wonders how many now survive, and what sort of logic justifies burning of some of the last surviving bushland areas in the whole region?
Here in Grampians Gariwerd a “controlled burn” north of Plantation picnic ground this autumn has fiercely burnt out one of the few remaining strongholds of the endemic Grevillea gariwerdensis Gariwerd Grevillea. I am fearful for the future for this species as two of the three known populations have already died out in recent years due to burning combined with climate change, and now the last population has been burnt. And as the above evidence shows, DELWP will not even monitor this, or any other species recovery or lack thereof. It clearly is time for a serious change in our public land management. It must be taken away from government and put in the hands of scientific experts, in collaboration with our First Nations people who had managed this land so successfully for over 60,000 years before colonisation destroyed their culture.