IN 1994, Ray Evans bought a cottage at Marysville (Victoria, Australia) which he and his wife subsequently renovated and extended. The cottage and its extensive garden were destroyed by fire on the night of Saturday February 7 – now known as Black Saturday. In the following provocative and political article Mr Evans blames the fire “on green doctrine” and the Victorian government wilfully ignoring the advice of a previous inquiry because it did not want to “offend the sensitivities of the Greens”.
“IN 1966 the Victorian government published a booklet entitled Summer Peril. On the cover was a terrifying photo of the 1964 Lorne bushfire. The foreword was by the Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, who began: “Over the years our state of Victoria has been plagued by bushfires leading to tragic loss of life and devastation of natural resources, public and private property.”
The booklet offers practical advice to farmers and rural landholders about the precautions they should take to minimise the risk to their property and what to do if bushfires should engulf them. One noteworthy sentence declares: “Anyone who ignores warnings about the fire risk during acute danger periods must be a fool, and a selfish, ignorant and stubborn one at that.”
The report by the Environment and Natural Resources Committee of the Victorian Parliament Inquiry into the Impact of Public Land Management Practices on Bushfires in Victoria, July 2008, lists twenty-three bushfires from 1965 until 2008, resulting in the deaths of 102 people. On February 7, 2009, Black Saturday, 173 people died. Those words from 1966 now have a prophetic ring to them.
On February 9 the Victorian Premier, John Brumby, announced the establishment of a Royal Commission with wide-ranging terms of reference to inquire into the causes of the firestorm and to recommend policies which would mitigate against future disasters. The Premier would have been aware that the appointment of such a body would forestall criticism of his government for failure to act on the recommendations of the parliamentary committee that had reported in July 2008. This committee made very specific recommendations, particularly about the need for fuel reduction activity, which had either been rejected by the government or accepted in principle only. The committee, chaired by former Labor minister John Pandazopoulos, comprised members from both houses and both parties with an independent, Craig Ingram, as deputy chair. Its report is an example of the great benefits that federalism provides. Canberra could not match this document. It is comprehensive in its scope, witnesses of all shades of opinion are quoted at length, there is much historical material woven into the narrative, and much detailed local knowledge is laid out for the reader; but its recommendations, made without dissent, were ignored by the Brumby government.
The Royal Commission has now been established. My deep interest in the proceedings and outcome of this Royal Commission is a consequence of the decision my wife and I made in 1994 to buy a cottage at Marysville. We renovated and extended the cottage, which we rented out to tourists; we constructed two outbuildings, and developed a magnificent garden on three-quarters of an acre. The house and the garden were destroyed on the night of Saturday February 7. The workshop survived.
Paragraph 2 of the Royal Commission’s terms of reference refers inter alia to the “prevention … of bushfire threats and risks”. As far as I am aware no submission or comment following the tragedy of Black Saturday has raised arguments concerning the prevention of bushfires in the future. All the attention so far has focused on what went wrong. The Royal Commission would be doing a much greater service if it inquired into ways in which bushfires in Victoria were to be eradicated.
The Brumby government ignored the 2008 report for reasons which were wholly political and which go to the heart of the problems we face not only on the bushfire front, but also on water supply issues and on any major development in Victoria which offends the sensitivities of the Greens. The Brumby government, to its credit, stared down the Greens on the Port Phillip channel deepening issue, but that is the only attempt it has made to win a serious confrontation with the political-cum-religious forces which seek to stop economic development in Victoria or, as in the case of the Latrobe Valley brown coal power stations, simply shut them down and thus leave Victoria without electricity.
The takeover by the socialist Left of the environmentalist movement in Australia can be dated from the early seventies, culminating in the 1973 AGM of the Australian Conservation Foundation, an organisation founded by Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Maurice Mawby, funded in part by the McMahon government, and which had as its aim increasing the public awareness of the importance of environmental matters.
By the late 1960s the communist Left was suffering from defections over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but more significantly from the brutal repression of the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968. The Communist Party of Australia and its fellow-travelling socialists in the ALP were having doctrinal and morale problems. In a brilliant strategic move, it was decided that the environmentalist movement was a new and promising vehicle for obtaining political influence and power.
The American sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote in a review article in the American Spectator in 1983:
“As an historian, I am obliged by the record of the Western past to see Environmentalism—of the kind espoused by the [Barry] Commoners and the [Paul] Ehrlichs—as the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history; the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.
“The appeal of Environmentalism, in its more extreme manifestations at least, becomes irresistible to that permanent cadre of political and social radicals Western society has nurtured ever since the French Revolution. This cadre has never been primarily interested in the protection of nature,but if such a movement carries with it even the possibility of political and social revolution, it is well that the cadre join it; which, starting with the late 1960s, it did.”
So Greenpeace was taken over in Canada, its founder, Patrick Moore, was ousted, and in Australia, the Left, having enrolled into the ACF in considerable numbers, ousted the old guard in October 1973, and installed Geoff Mosley, hitherto a recent employee of the ACF, as its new Director. John Blanche, the former head of the organisation, resigned immediately, as did many members of the board.
An example of the attitude of the new regime to the role it envisaged for the ACF is found in 1983-84 Annual Report, written by Geoff Mosley:
“Undoubtedly the main issue to attract the Foundation’s attention was peace and disarmament and the related topic of opposition to uranium mining and export.
“The worsening arms situation not only threatens annihilation, but by absorbing resources and creating a feeling of doom is rapidly eroding the possibility of dealing with drastic social problems such as land degradation and deforestation.
“It is, indeed, difficult to see the arms race and deterioration of the physical and social environment as being in any way separate matters. Any solution will require a global anti-nuclear movement.”
The ACF has adhered to a hard Left position on every environmental issue ever since.
In 1982 the Cain Labor government won office in Victoria. Although Rod McKenzie was appointed Minister for Forests in 1982, Joan Kirner was in charge of the political agenda. Kirner was the leader of the Socialist Left faction in the ALP, in effect a medieval baron not beholden to the Premier for her office. In June 1983 Cain announced the creation of a new mega-department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, which subsumed existing departments of Forestry, Crown Lands and Surveying, the Department of Planning and the Department of Conservation. The Victorian Forests Commission was dissolved and the new department came into being in December 1983.
Joan Kirner was the first minister and early in 1985 she fired Ron Grose, a forester with an internationally distinguished reputation, who had been chief of the Forests Commission. She also fired or retrenched the people who had served in the top three layers of the Forests Commission. She appointed as head of the new department Tony Edison, an unknown figure from the UK, who was outspoken in his hostility to foresters and forestry, and he in turn appointed hardline greens as senior officials in the department. From that day to this the department, now officially the Department of Sustainability and Environment but known throughout rural Victoria as the Department of Scorched Earth, has been completely dysfunctional.
The Victorian Forests Commission had a history going back to its establishment in 1918, and had built up a culture of expertise in forest management which made it respected throughout the international forestry community. Its expertise and knowledge of local terrain and silviculture extended deep into the domain of Victoria’s forests. Some of that expertise and knowledge is still to be found in the people, mostly now retired, who once worked for the Forests Commission. Its dissolution at the hands of Joan Kirner was akin to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, but where Henry handed over the vast treasures of the monasteries to his favoured courtiers, Kirner handed over the treasure trove of Victoria’s forests to the Greens.
The cause of the dysfunctionality of the DSE is doctrinal. At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and that mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet. So the logging and timber industry has been targeted by the Greens for extinction, just as whaling was targeted for extinction in the 1970s. In fact the ban on logging in parts of Western Australia, and the closure of timber communities in those regions, for example, was specifically likened by West Australian Greens to the end of Albany as a whaling town. Trees and whales are either very tall or very large, and both are sacred.
Two characteristic examples of the articulation of Green doctrine, one from 1990 and one from 2007, illustrate this point. Ted Traynor, lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of New South Wales, gave a talk on Robyn Williams’s ABC radio program Ockham’s Razor in May 1990:
“For a long time to come, our top national priority in countries like Australia should be to reduce the GNP as fast as possible, because we are grossly over-developed and over-producing and over-consuming and there’s no possibility of all people ever rising to the per capita levels we now have, let alone those we’re determined to grow to.
“Often it is obvious that developments that would do wonders for the GNP should be prohibited, such as devoting local land and water to export crops.
“There would be far less trade and transporting of goods than there is now. There would have to be many co-operative arrangements; the sharing of tools, many community workshops, orchards, forests, ponds, gardens, and regular community meetings and working bees.
“Applying the concept of appropriate development in the over-developed countries would make it possible for most people to live well on only one day’s work for cash per week, because many of the relatively few things they need would come from their own gardens, from barter, from gifts of surpluses and from the many free sources within the neighbourhood.”
Paul Watson, the anti-whaling activist who has been charged with piracy on the open seas, said in an editorial on May 4, 2007:
“We are killing our host the planet Earth.
“I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth”. I make no apologies for that statement.
“No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.
“We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.
“Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”
Statements of this kind could be multiplied hundreds of times. They are representative of the core Green movement. Although most people who vote for the Green Party in Australia would be horrified if governments enacted legislation to bring about the reduction in population and living standards thought essential by Traynor and Watson, these are the doctrines which illuminate and influence Green decision-making, wherever the Greens have political or administrative power.
Now a department of state which has management responsibilities for forests on Crown land (an area in Victoria comprising one third of the state), but which is staffed at senior levels by officials who believe that trees are sacred, and are there to be worshipped rather than exploited for the use of mankind, cannot manage the forests. Because an explicit avowal of such beliefs would, at this stage of the Green Revolution, be premature, the sacred nature of forests is euphemised by words and phrases such as “old-growth forests”, the incommensurability of “wilderness”, and by appeals to the over-arching importance of biodiversity and the necessity, therefore, of leaving forests untouched and dead trees on the roadside undisturbed. Biodiversity is a magic word which is used to legitimise the expropriation of private property (amongst many other uses).
Green doctrine on trees and forests is pre-Christian and incompatible with Western civilisation. An important example of the clash between the pagan worship of trees, and Christian utilitarianism concerning the use of timber for structures and implements of all kinds, took place in Germany in the early eighth century.
An English boy called Winfrid was born in Devon about 675 AD. He showed great intellectual promise and wished to devote his life to the church. His parents objected but he eventually obtained their permission and was ordained as a priest in about 705. He became a Benedictine monk and eventually received the Pope’s permission to evangelise the German-speaking peoples to the east of the Rhine.
He was later appointed bishop, taking the name of Boniface. In one famous encounter with the environmentalists of his time, and to show the heathens how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence, Boniface felled the oak tree sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the Prince of the Apostles. The local tribesmen were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak tree marked the decline of pagan influence in that part of Germany.
Today St Boniface would be prosecuted for cutting down a tree without a permit, although since it was an oak tree he may have escaped the watchful eye of our own Green high-priests who, in a nice blend of paganism and xenophobia, are concerned with worshipping eucalypts and anathematising exotic deciduous trees. This may seem a trivial thing, but it is indicative of the power which the Green movement has seized. It is arguable that environmentalism has become the established religion of the Commonwealth of Australia, in contradiction of Section 116 of the Constitution which prohibits such establishment.
The firestorms of Black Saturday are a stark reminder of the incompatibility of pagan beliefs about trees and the demands of twenty-first-century life. As the Victorian parliament’s report of July 2008 demonstrated, any program of bushfire control in Victoria’s eucalypt forests which has any chance of success must rely upon continual and sustained fuel reduction as the basis of policy. In the absence of more radical changes to property rights in Victorian forests, this requires the end of Green hegemony within a restructured public service charged with responsibility for managing Crown forests.
The most illuminating recent defence of Green doctrines concerning forest management is found in an essay entitled “Thoughts on the Victorian Bushfires”, in February 2009, by Andrew Campbell, who claims to have been a Victorian forester; a bushfire researcher; the founder of the Potter Foundation’s whole-farm planning in early 1980s; one of the initiators of Landcare; CEO of Land & Water Australia until about three years ago; and is now a consultant living in Queanbeyan, close to the corridors of power in Canberra. This essay has not been published but is available on his website and has been widely circulated.
The essential points he makes are as follows:
“Claims that more broadscale fuel reduction burning in Victoria’s forests would have prevented these fires … are nonsense … [Extreme weather conditions following] lots of late spring-early summer growth, after a decade of drought, made for an explosive tinderbox …
“The crucial point that must be underlined is that under very extreme conditions (Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) above 50—see below), fuel loads are no longer the key driver of fire behaviour, compared with weather (some of which is fire-induced) and topography (especially slope) …
“Prof Ross Bradstock … from the University of Wollongong and the Bushfires CRC, has pointed out that the Fire Danger Index (FDI) was over 150 in Melbourne on February 7. The FDI incorporates temperature, wind speed, humidity and a measure of fuel dryness. It was developed in the 1960s and calibrated on a scale from zero (no fire danger) to 100 (“Black Friday” 1939) for both forests and grasslands. Fuel reduction research has mostly involved small-scale experiments at FDIs between 10 and 20. A forest FDI (FFDI) above 50 indicates that, due to fire crowning and spotting behaviour, weather becomes the dominant indicator of fire behaviour, and it becomes impossible to fight a running forest fire front. When eucalypt forests are crowning, fuel reduction at ground level is academic. Recent research suggests that with a drying warming climate we are now seeing unprecedented FDIs, and need to introduce a new fire danger rating above “extreme” called “catastrophic” to more realistically present the dangers associated with days like 7 February …
“The whole planning system should be overhauled, way beyond just building codes and vegetation management. Premier Brumby and his cabinet—and I suspect now Kevin Rudd—appear to understand that business as usual will not do. They also seem to understand the link to climate change in making events such as these (and worse) more likely in future. But they have yet to make the logical jump to the urgency of mitigating climate change, which means setting ambitious targets, and retooling the economy from top to bottom to achieve them.”
I have quoted from this essay at length to illustrate the current state of the Green justification of their stewardship of the forests, and also to illustrate the revolutionary ambitions of the Greens in combining the bushfire tragedies with their faith in anthropogenic global warming, in order to justify “retooling the economy from top to bottom.”
Nevertheless Campbell has made an important point about fires in the crowns of eucalypts. The reason why we have had so many bushfires in south-eastern Australia is because eucalypts, after long periods of hot, dry conditions, become equivalent to large fire bombs, containing highly flammable hydro-carbons which are released into the air above the trees as vapours, where they form a fireball when ignited. When our forests are composed entirely of eucalypts, the outbreak of bushfires cannot be prevented, although their severity can be greatly reduced by ensuring the fuel content of the floor of the forest is as close to zero as possible. We know that the eucalypts were not always dominant in Australia; some time in the past eucalypts were restricted to the outskirts of rainforests and various native beech trees (which can still be found in sheltered gullies) were the dominant species.
It is impossible, therefore, to escape the conclusion that if we are to make Victoria free of bushfires, we need to reduce substantially the density of eucalypts in our forests and replace them with other species. On Black Saturday exotic deciduous trees, poplars, elms, oaks and plane trees were in large measure untouched by the fires, particularly if they were at some distance from eucalyptus trees. The Gould Memorial Drive on the Buxton Road approaching Marysville, two glorious rows of Lombardy poplars, provides such testimony; as does the Fernshaw Park Reserve, a haven of elms, plane trees and oaks, halfway up the Black Spur Road from Healesville.
The argument that Victoria has to replace a major portion of its eucalypt forests with exotic trees such as English oaks, poplars, plane trees, and other non-flammable exotic species will be seen as sacrilege of the most egregious kind by the Greens who have ruled the DSE and other departments since the 1980s. But since it is they who must now give an account of how their stewardship of Victoria’s forests resulted in the deaths of more that 170 people on Black Saturday, and the loss of billions of dollars worth of property, they first have to acknowledge that what has been done since the 1980s has been a terrible mistake. If that does not happen then there has to be a reversal of the Kirner revolution of 1983 and new people, untainted by Green pagan doctrine concerning the sacred nature of indigenous trees, have to be appointed to senior positions. More of the same will not survive a serious political backlash.
The greater part by far of Victoria’s forests are never seen by the public except from the air. Whether they comprise eucalypts or other species is a matter only of symbolic value. From a social point of view, the squeeze that has been placed on the logging and timber industries by the Green bureaucracy—a squeeze designed to kill the industry within a politically acceptable framework and timetable—has significantly reduced the number of people living and working in the bush (people with a knowledge of bushfires and firefighting); has reduced road access into the forests; and has exacerbated greatly the damage done in the recent disaster.
The deliberate and systematic throttling of the timber industry has been manifest in the establishment of the Great Otway National Park and the shutting down of the timber industry in the Otway Ranges; the reduction of timber harvesting in the box-ironbark forests to a minimum level; the ending of timber harvesting in the Wombat Forest; and the establishment of new or expanded national and state parks totalling over 100,000 hectares.
These vast areas of forests become wilderness, symbols of Green religious power, in which man is a hostile and unwelcome intruder. They also become sanctuaries where feral animals and noxious plants of all kinds flourish and can spread into neighbouring farms and properties. Above all they become huge reservoirs of stored energy, awaiting the next dry spell and hot weather before turning into raging infernos.
From an economic point of view the closing down of that substantial portion of the timber industry based on Crown forests has resulted in timber shortages, increasing dependence on imported timber, and above all, the substitution of steel for timber in the domestic building industry. If steel were to replace timber as the consequence of competition between alternative materials on a level playing field, which culminated in a cheaper product of equal or superior quality, that would be one thing. But when an industry is deliberately choked to death by government fiat, that is another.
In order to protect Victoria from a repeat of the tragedy of Black Saturday, the logging industry must be given a new charter which will provide confidence for revival, growth, new investment and the development of new technologies and processes which will restore timber’s competitiveness with steel. Such a charter requires the transformation of the Crown forests, however they are designated, into ninety-nine-year leaseholds which can be auctioned in appropriate sizes together with covenants requiring the replacement of eucalypts with exotic non-flammable trees (excluding pine trees, which burn readily), up to a certain proportion, within a reasonable period.
Once secure property rights were established for the forests, investors and entrepreneurs would not only see opportunities in developing the logging and timber industry but also in investing in eco-tourism and recreation. Above all, these proprietors would have an overwhelming interest in securing their assets from the destruction of bushfires, and in ensuring they were not liable for damages to neighbouring property caused by their own negligence. The government could then withdraw from the business of forest management, confident that the interests of proprietors and the public alike were in alignment.
We know from the Soviet tragedy that communal farming and the absence of property rights in the farming industry produced chronic famine and shortages. The absence of property rights in the Victorian forests sector has produced the same sort of result. It is no coincidence that the radical students of today proclaim themselves as activists in the green-red coalition.
Many of the deaths on Black Saturday were caused by the transformation of roads under firestorm conditions into “channels of death”. Roger Underwood, an experienced forester from Western Australia, came to Victoria after Black Saturday and was taken through many of the regions devastated by fire. He subsequently wrote:
“I was shocked to observe kilometres of long-unburnt road reserves running through semi-cleared and agricultural landscapes. These are more like tunnels than roads, with a narrow strip of bitumen winding between overhanging trees and bush right at the road edge which had clearly not been burned for over 20 years and carried a fuel load of about 35 tonnes to the hectare. These roads are potential death traps, not escape routes.”
Currently the clearing of fallen logs and other debris from roadsides is prohibited. This prohibition is another example of Green Power in action. People should not only be allowed, but should be encouraged, to obtain firewood from the roadside and to keep the road verges clear of debris.
The capture by the Greens of a number of shire councils and the regulations such councils imposed on new housing certainly aggravated the damage and arguably caused increased loss of life on Black Saturday. This issue has received considerable attention in the media but there has been no comment on how a small group of people, admittedly passionate in the religion which gives meaning and purpose to their lives, can capture a council and impose regulations which are not only dreadful in their consequences but are also regarded as lunatic by most people living in the shire.
Following the changes made to local government by the Kennett government, in which a large number of small shires were amalgamated into fewer, much larger entities, local government became too big to be responsive to local opinion and knowledge, and too small to be taken seriously by most people. This enabled small groups of zealots, through commitment and political skill, to capture these bodies. They had the advantage that a high proportion of Greens are childless (most Greens are against children) and many are well off in secure jobs. They therefore had the time, energy and resources to devote to political activity. The Nillumbik Shire Council on the north-eastern edge of Melbourne is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon, but other rural shires on the outskirts of the metropolis have the same problem in varying degrees.
The answer to this serious problem is a return to local government. In other words, shire councils should represent real communities, not conglomerations of towns and hamlets extending over hundreds of square kilometres. If, for example, Marysville had its own shire council, then local government would be representative of Marysville and its immediate surrounding district, and local knowledge of the district would be brought to bear in every discussion on council. The argument that there are economies of scale in local government, and that amalgamations would lead to reduced costs, is belied by the substantial increases in rates that have occurred since the Kennett “reforms”.
The same arguments apply with equal force to Kinglake and Flowerdale, two other towns destroyed on Black Saturday.
It may be said that the Greens are too entrenched both politically and in the bureaucracy for any arguments made here to gain any support. However, the next Victorian government will find, as in 1992, that Victoria is deep in debt and radical measures are necessary to restore the financial viability of the state. Turning the Crown forests into private leaseholds would bring in a very large sum of money, and it would demonstrate to everyone that the new government is prepared to take desperate measures in desperate times and, in particular, is resolved to ensure that bushfires of the kind we have experienced so often in recent years become a thing of the past.
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This article is based on Ray Evans’s submission to the current Victorian Royal Commission. It was first published by Quadrant under the title ‘The Lessons of Black Saturday’ and is republished here with permission from the author. http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/7-8/the-lessons-of-black-saturday
The picture, via Noeline Franklin, shows the bushfire that devastated Canberra in January 2003 as it emerged from Brindabella National Park.
This post is part 16 of a series ‘Defining the Greens’. Earlier parts of this series can be found through the search box at this blog using the words ‘defining the greens’ and also here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/index.php?s=defining+the+greens
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Great article, Ray. The need and means to prevent bushfires is hidden by politicians of the major parties grubbing for green preferences. People need to understand this.
OK, I’ve read what Ray Evans needs to say and I would like to talk about my friend Annelise.
Annelise is a green activist in Victoria and she has been a firey for a number of years, attending many fires these past summers. As a green she has campaigned on a number of issues.
During that terrible period of fires this year she spent over three weeks (all off work) in the thick of the fire and its aftermath, leading teams, repeatedly risking her life. She also patrolled during the aftermath, dealing with a number of stupid people (non residents) who, despite the gravity of situation, didn’t think about the situation they were entering. When I was back in Australia in April Annelise gave me a spin free, ideologically free account of the devastated aftermath, of all the properties she had to revisit and check, a heartbreaking job, a heartbreaking account.
Annelise is one of those people Evans is blaming for the deaths and destruction.
At one stage during this conversation in April I asked her what she thought of fuel reduction burns. She stared at me as though i was stupid and replied, “what do you mean, they are essential?”
Let me repeat Annelise is a green, let me repeat she is being accused of murder, let me repeat she risked her life during the fires something she has done repeatedly.
Annelise is a also, like Jennifer, an atheist, she enjoys tweaking me about my christian beliefs by parodying horrible happy clappy choruses. I’m saying this because I think I’m someone who can recognise ‘religiosity’ or worship and Annelise has never displayed any religion like stuff to any aspect of her life.
During that conversation I told Annelise various specimens were using the deaths of over 170 people to advance their ideology by accusing people like her of being a murderer. She didn’t get angry, she just snorted and grinned which showed me what she thinks of specimens. I asked her if I could use her name if this sort of thing came up and she said “yes” because while she regards such people as low life she knows the bile they spout needs to be combated.
I am writing this to defend my good friend Annelise who risked her life for the likes of Ray Evans and others and is now being accused of being a murderer.
conspiracy theory, and in contradiction with facts like the Forest Fire Danger Index. ( he assumes that this is part of a green/communist conspiracy?!?)
it is pretty interesting, how a person with such an obvious agenda, is trying to accuse others of being driven by bizarre motivations. really strange article.
i am looking forward to your sceptic look at what he said!
Just to be clear my friend Annelise’s reply to me, “what do you mean, they are essential?” in my post above meant she thinks controlled burns are essential……. I don’t want any of the ideologues here twisting my bad grammar for their own grubby little purposes.
More lies. This is one more attempt to turn a scientific issue, AGW, into a political brawl. “Greens vs Skeptics”. Excellent framing, but nothing to do with trying to create a rational debate on many complex issues.
Well, what an extraordinary rant! Bush fires in Victoria, whaling in Albany, 7th century Christianity all in the same post. And wasn’t it long, it went on and on and on and on. Really if this was Hyde park corner the poster would have been hauled off to Bedlam. I skimmed the article and I don’t think there is a scintilla of fact, just the same old hard right straw men i.e. anyone who promoted environmental conservation is a Green and all Greens value trees over human life thus they are fanatics therefore I win. And you have tagged this as philosophy? More like drunken rambling.
Nice to see my home town get a mention though.
One in 20 wildfires are actually started by logging industry practices in Victoira. So how do you defend that one.
If the finger is to be pointed at anyone for a lack of fuel reduction burns in the past, then the facts clearly point at the native forest logging industry.
The Esplin Inquiry into the 2002-2003 Victorian bushfires included an analysis of prescribed fires between 1991 and 2003. There are three types of prescribed burns: (1) fuel reduction; (2) burning after clearfell logging to promote regrowth; and (3) burning for ecological purposes.
The Esplin Inquiry found that the number of burns conducted after logging dominated, representing an average of 63% of prescribed burns each year compared with 33% for fuel reduction. However the average area burnt each year due to logging is tiny at only 2% compared with 90% for fuel reduction burns. Why? The average size of each logging burn is 24ha compared with 700ha for each fuel reduction burn.
The Esplin inquiry found that the limited resources to conduct all forms of prescribed burns have historically been diverted away from fuel reduction and ecological burns in order to prioritise post-logging burns.
Congratulations Ray,
That is the best summary and short history of the broblems faced by Victorians, but sadly also repeated in other states.
Keep up the good work in exposing what is an undemocratic scandal that has developed between State Labour Governments and the radical political Greens.
Sadly this is now being copied in Canberra.
To JeremyC,
This article is not a personal attack on your friend Annelise.
It is an attack on those at the political level that have allowed their thirst for power to totally subvert thier responsibilities to the people.
Great article.
Pikey.
“It is an attack on those at the political level that have allowed their thirst for power to totally subvert thier responsibilities to the people.”
And who are those people? He offers nothing more than a wild eyed rant.
Again this agitators style of guest blog. You guys would suit well in the Stalin and Lenin cohorts.
Once again this claim that environmentalism is a ” relic” from the Soviet era.
FYI, there are people in my near family that are WWII survivors and as well survivors from Gulag and refugees from behind the Iron curtain and who have been forced to be soldiers in the Soviet Army, German Army , the Estonian Army and the Swedish Army. They are the last ones of the WWII era.
It’s people in my family that care about the environment, hardly no communists!!! Their homes have been burned by the Soviets. Now they mostly subscribe for conservative newspapers and most are or have been M.D’s . Because those as myself care about the environment are now called commies.
It’s really comedy hour at Jen’s site.
Re whaling at Albany I heard they closed because of lack of whales.
Birrell, nice example of how the green theologists such as yourself can twist what has been written in an inquiry to suit your agenda.
I notice that you did not add that the same report identified that the land area subject to prescribed burning acccunted for 90% of the area burnt.
Rather than cherry picking to suit your argument you might want to try to absorb the broader recommendations of the chapter you quoted from such as:
* the limited number of days available for prescribed burning due to weather
* the insufficent staffing of DSE to enable them to carry out more precribed burning and
* that the fuel management zoning was not up to the task it.
Esplin identified that the fuel management zones used by DSE were not up to up to the task and needed to be revised to take into account the realities of forest management especially those fuel management zones that were estabished for ecological burning. Esplin recommended that they could be incorporated into the broad-scale fuel management zone.
Nowhere in his report did Esplin state that resources had been diverted from broad acre prescribed burning for post harvest burning.
My ‘green’ beliefs date from the Second World War, so predate those of current urban poseurs and dissemblers.
Excellent article Ray, from my own experience, you are simply telling the truth. There is no single ‘Clementsian Climax’, and forests are not holy groves. Landscape is politically negotiable. Some may prefer grassland, or heath. Fire is part of the system, and always will be.
Our political choice is between fierce, uncontrollable fires, and relatively mild, controllable ones. I will vote for politicians who opt for more controlled burning, rather than futile, and increasingly expensive attempts at fire suppression. As Ray suggests, there are places where eucalypts and other flammable plants could be replaced with non-flammable types. The choice should rest with local inhabitants. Provided they don’t harm native species, don’t exotic species increase the ‘biodiversity’?
Those interested in the political ecology of fire might read Dr Christian Kull’s ‘Isle of Fire’, which addresses the traditional use of fire by Malagasy villagers, despite attempts, for a hundred years, at suppression by the French colonial government, and, more recently, by organisations such as WWF.
I believe Christian is now at Monash University. He is a real fire expert, and I wonder why he is not consulted by both government and the news media, instead of those academic boof-heads who pose as ‘fire experts’, on the basis of their shallow, prolix, boring papers in ‘refereed journals’, or their connections with some crackpot ‘conservationist’ ideology.
“instead of those academic boof-heads who pose as ‘fire experts’, on the basis of their shallow, prolix, boring papers in ‘refereed journals’, or their connections with some crackpot ‘conservationist’ ideology”
Note the rapid onset of the Rightwing disease. What starts as a rational if wrong headed statement tumbles head over heals into fevered abuse. Actually a quick re-read reveals signs of the illness early in the piece (‘urban poseurs and dissemblers’). The author is struggling to control their malady, sadly they succumb.
To Simon Birrell:
Perhaps you could explain how “one in 20 wildfires are actually started by logging industry practices”?? My understanding is that no such statistic is specifically recorded.
In fact, the most telling long term statistical trend is that the ~25% of Victoria’s fires naturally ignited by lightning are responsible for ~75% of the annual area burnt. This is because they occur in remote areas where it takes time to reach them. Also, a build-up of fuels in these areas allows them to grower larger quicker and makes them even more difficult to control. These factors applied to the 2003 and 2006/07 fires which each burnt > 1 million hectares.
In contrast to this, most fires ignited by human activity occur in well-accessed areas closer to fire-fighting forces. Traditionally, most of these fires are controlled quickly and kept to relatively small areas. However, there are exceptions such as “Black Saturday” where human- derived ignition (in this case of various types – but not including anything to with logging) coincides with exceptionally bad fire weather.
As for the role of the “logging industry”, timber harvesting is not permitted on Total Fire Ban days and, in some places, also on other days where there is a predicted high fire danger. That is not to say that accidental fires haven’t or won’t in the future result from timber production, but you are greatly overstating their significance.
From you’re other comments it seems you are promoting an overly-simplistic position that if we simply close the native hardwood timber industry, we will suddenly have all these extra resources available to do more fuel reduction burning. This implies that you believe there should be more fuel reduction burning, which is surprising given that in your activist role with the Melbourne Catchment Action Network, you have expended considerable effort in trying to discredit the practice as having no value.
When I started my career with the Victorian Forests Commission in the late 1970’s, about 3-4 times more area of forest was being logged and regenerated annually compared to now. At the same time, greater areas were being fuel reduced despite the greater committment to conducting post-harvest regeneration burns.
For example, in the 1980-81 financial year, ~477,000 hectares of Victorian public forest was fuel reduced – the current state target is 130,000 ha which is only occassionally achieved. There are a range of social and demographic factors at play here, but there is no doubt that the reduction of economic activity in our forests over the past 25 years has been a critical factor in reducing the capability and will to do fuel reduction burning.
On the basis of this trend, it is unlikely that closing the rest of the industry (as is your objective) will lead to any significant increase to the amount of fuel reduction burning. Indeed, the opposite is more likely given the loss of experienced forestry personnel and closure of access tracks that would most likely occur as more area is put into parks and reserves (as has been the case thus far).
““For a long time to come, our top national priority in countries like Australia should be to reduce the GNP as fast as possible, because we are grossly over-developed and over-producing and over-consuming and there’s no possibility of all people ever rising to the per capita levels we now have, let alone those we’re determined to grow to.”
Yes, we have the same type of activists here in the US. In fact, they have recently taken control of the Gubmint and are well on their way to destroying the economy of the US, fulfilling this perverted ideology.
An excellent post. Pity about the hysterical responses.
The thing that is mostly overlooked by those promoting the “fire is natural” agenda is that the entire landscape of the continent was shaped by thousands of years of aboriginal burning.
One of Victoria’s worst bushfires in terms of area burnt was in 1851, just long enough after the demise of the tribal aborigines for the fuel levels they had so strenuously suppressed to have built up to dangerous levels.
What we have seen since is a return to the destructive power of pre-human wildfires. But now, thanks to the millennia of aboriginal burning, we have a landscape that is far more flammable because the dominant species are fire-dependent.
We need to remember too that the aborigines harvested fallen woody debris for the campfires they kept burning at all times.
Those who have ignored the advice given by a succession of inquiries and Royal Commissions, built on the wisdom of the original occupants, have much to answer for.
PatricB: “Note the rapid onset of the Rightwing disease.”
At least you are consistent – the instant the argument doesn’t go your way, out come the sneers and ad hominems.
The Green Movement has it’s roots in Europe and many of it’s devotees find “Mein Kampf” a useful source of policy.
Ray’s essay is, as Green Davey and others comment, factual.
KuhnKat – seems the Fabians have finally achieved their goal – so it’s batten down the hatches and hang on for a ride. The only way they can solve it is to start another war.
Ray is right. For the sake of fire safety and forest health, the forests must be privatised. The government is too incompetent and corrupt to manage them.
To Jeremy C (and friend Annalise):
Your story is interesting because I suspect it is a pointer to the defense that will be mounted by ‘green’ activism when its complicity in shaping public land management is examined by the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.
My dictionary’s defintion of murder is: “the intentional killing of one human being by another” On this basis, I don’t believe the words of Ray Evans or anyone else who has written about the influence the environmental movement re forest fire management can be construed as accussing them of murder as you have chosen to presume.
The real villians in this are rarely the rank and file ‘green’ supporters (perhaps such as Annalise). They are generally guilty only of being gullible and unquestioning in just accepting the utterances of the prominent environmental activists/groups. This is somewhat understandable, given that these key ‘environmentalists’ have developed the skill of simplistic plausibility whilst deliberately avoiding key concepts such as scale and proportionality; and intended and unintended consequences.
It is these prominent environmental groups their spokespersons who are most culpable in adversely affecting public land management, because – after all that has been said by both sides in the forests debate over the decades – they are surely aware that they have for years peddled grave misconceptions about forest management in blinkered pursuit of an ideological outcome without any thought or care for the (well known) consequences.
If you want an example (as some others have clamoured for), Simon Birrell who has contributed to this discussion earlier, is one. His Otway Ranges Environment Network campaign forced the closure of the local hardwood timber industry. At the time, the industry was operating within a net 22% portion of the Otways public forests – so 78% was never going to be logged. The annual area being logged and regenerated was around 300 ha – yet he and his group portrayed this as some kind of environmental catastrophy, when clearly it wasn’t.
Having won this battle by helping to convince the Victorian Bracks government that closing the Otways industry would secure the support of ‘green’ voters, Mr Birrell is now campaigning to stop the small amount of timber production that is still permitted within a 12% portion of Melbourne’s catchments. Again, as 88% of the catchments will never be logged, Birrell is pushing an issue that has little environmental significance. Yet he continues, I suspect knowing only too well that this is the case and to hell with the consequences.
Through political activism, Birrell and the many others of his ilk have (over a long period) deliberately fostered changes to the way Victoria’s forests are managed. This has been a significant contributory factor in the over 3 million hectares of forest burnt since 2003.
“Ray’s essay is, as Green Davey and others comment, factual.
KuhnKat – seems the Fabians have finally achieved their goal – so it’s batten down the hatches and hang on for a ride. The only way they can solve it is to start another war.”
Interesting arrangement of the words “Factual” and “the Fabians have finally achieved their goal”. I think the word you are looking for is “Fantasy”.
To Mark Poynter et al,
You’re defense is to grandly assume my friend is gullible, rank and file etc.
Bollocks!
I said Annelise is an activist. If met her you would never, never call her gullible.
You have called her a murderer, now you are dissasembling.
You lot are not making valid arguments, you are not defending a point of view or your very own paradigm, you are not ‘low life’.
You are just inadequate.
To Jeremy C,
No one on this blogg has accused your friend of murder.
GROW UP.
LEARN TO READ AND COMPREHEND.
Or get off this site and stop wasting our time.
Differing opinions, reasonably argued and backed by example are the basis of determining truth in relation to complex issues.
Youe comments above are far removed from this.
Pikey.
instead of discussing communist conspiracy theories, why not handle the facts?
Taken from DSE data current to this week:
• 50% of estimated area of Vic fires are on private property
• 12% in national parks
• the remainder in state forests, crown land or undisclosed.
and
The fire on Mt Riddle was ignited by a lightning strike and burnt the northern
slope. At the beginning of last year, the DSE/Parks Victoria lit a large control burn
on this slope, of which it even scorched the crowns of the eucalypts. This control
burn did not prevent the ignition and spread of this fire into Healesville and
surrounding forest.
and
5. Many of these fires have started on either private land or non-forest areas (ie the
fire that burned over Mount Disappointment). The only fire at this stage to have
started in National Park was the Mt Riddle Fire.
http://www.eco-shout.org/downloads/response.pdf
Patrick B,
Sorry to demolish your claim of ‘fevered right wing abuse’, but I am, actually, slightly left of centre. One of my grandfathers was a trade unionist in the 1890s. He would, I suspect, be greatly disappointed in you.
Perhaps JC, after his stunning and riveting personal deposition on behalf of activist Annelise, the angel of the forests, can answer who was behind this submission to classify controlled burning as a similar threat to biodiversity as AGW;
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25042644-30417,00.html
There is no doubt that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how humanity’s interaction with nature is assessed. Previously any encroachment of pristine nature was judged in terms of how it impacted on humanity; for instance, a dam proposal would have its pros as water supply, perhaps hydro and recreational benefits; the cons would be loss of perhaps arable land and dislocation of some people. Now the criteria is that pristine nature should not be disrupted, that humanity should curtail growth in numbers, economically and in terms of population, and exploitation of nature necessary to sustain that growth should cease.
That is, undisturbed nature is being promoted as a virtue in itself regardless of how that impacts on humanity. People who want to live in leafy semi-rural areas should be prevented from doing so and if that doesn’t work than no safety measures like hazard reduction should occur.
There is a stark choice emerging here with AGW the pinup but with spot-fire confrontation points like the bushfires. That choice is this: humanity’s interest and nature preservation have diverged so which comes first, humanity or nature?
To SOD:
It is remarkable how opponents of fuel reduction burning try to equate it with fuel ‘removal’ so as to discredit it if a fire passes through a treated area. As the term implies, it reduces fuel loads not removes them. So it is unsurprising that fire can pass through recently burnt areas, particularly areas in which the burn itself scorched the trees (as described at Mt Riddell) and thereby would have promoted dead leaf fall.
The point is that summer wildfires passing through these fuel reduced areas are far less damaging to the environment, far more controllable (subject to weather conditions), and less likely to threaten life and property. However it will not guarantee that lives won’t be lost as that is still largely dependent on property and householder preparation.
The benefit of fuel reduction was illustrated during the Black Saturday fires, when a fire was ignited by lightning in areas burnt during the 2006/07 fires north of Dargo. This fire eventually burned for more than a week and covered about 15,000 ha. However, as it was located in already burnt forest, the DSE was able to largely ignore it while concentrating their resources on the problems in central Victoria.
Cohenite,
Why do ya think humanity and humans are more important than nature and other animals?
Personally , I would like to say as one Swedish Nobel Prize laureate that ” humans / we/ me are just a flyshit in the Universe…”
Sorry about your loss Ray and good summary on bushfire history.
Joan Kirner should be invited to answer questions in the Royal Commission.
They wouldn’t know where to start.
A good start would be her introduction of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.
Joan Kirner is part of the left wing socialist party, was not voted in as Premier but ‘took over’ from Cain. She then won proceeding Premierships on Green preference votes.
Joan Kirner was to ‘transform’ the way in which the environment would be managed. Land management was to be dictated by ecologically based decision making processes and legislation.
This, coincidentally, was about the same time the ‘new ecological approach’ was introduced in the U.S., under Clinton/Gore, which completely altered the beauractric structure of the U.S. Forest Service.
There were a series of problems with this new approach though, amongst them, the lack of ecologically based raw data and the issue of wildfire management.
When it comes to raw data, one does not need to look to far into the ‘ecology’ of many Australian vegetation communities, to see the inextricable link between fire and not only individual species but entire forest ecosystems. One could be forgiven for thinking then, that as raw data libraries, based on this new legislated concept of ecology were developed, that bushfire/wildfire would be an ‘over-arching’ consideration in many ecological plans. Especially, when you consider the catastrophic nature and behaviour of historic wildfires in the State of Victoria and the fact that we are acknowledged as one of the most fire prone areas in the world.
But they didn’t? On the contrary, it seems someones gone out of their way to avoid the full acknowledgment of the issue.
As part of the new ecological approach, the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (1988??) is introduced. This is announced as a piece of ‘over-arching legislation’, over all other land management legislation. The FFG Act was to enable the listing of ‘threatened species’, ‘threatening ecological processes’, etc. Powerful legislation.
Looking at the FFG Act we see some interesting procedures or protocols.
The first is that Joan Kirners government removed humans as a species when scientifically describing the term, ‘fauna’. This is not right and discriminatory. Last time I checked we were warm blooded mammals and clearly a ‘species’. Joans government preferred this unprecedented and unexplained description :
‘Fauna means any animal-life which is indigenous to Victoria whether vertebrate or invertebrate and in any stage of biological development and includes fish and any other living thing generally classified as fauna but does not include humans;’
I note, that this therefore excludes Aboriginals and consequently, their historic ‘ecological’ relationship with fire. This missing link of information is vital, for it initiates thought processes, discussion, acknowledgemnet and awareness, at a policy level, of wildfire in an historic ecological sense. And because you now have legislation that is specifically focused on ecological management, management decisions should include historic ecology, which then by default includes, bushfires, including the potential for catastrophic wildfires, which must be considered without reserve, in many, many ecologically based management desicions.
The FFG Act calls for ‘community participation’. This allows any member of the public to nominate a threatened species or threateneing process.
Generally, it could be said that the vast majority of the public would not have the ability to put together a report/submission, nominating a threatened species, that had sufficient scientific and other relevant data to satisfy to a reasonable level, that indeed that species was threatened and required special protection, by special people. So what’s this methodology really used for?
The community consultation process is also anonymous.
Anonymous community process. Classic.
Is this a backdoor into an influential area of environmental policy making?
Do NGO’s use this to influence government policy?
Then there is the way in which listings are made. They are very loosely put together. Essentially key parameters relied on in a listing are unquantifiable. Even if you tried.
These are examples:
‘Inappropriate fire regimes causing disruption to sustainable ecosystem processes and resultant loss of biodiversity.’
‘Loss of coarse woody debris from Victorian native forests and woodlands.’
‘Predation of native wildlife by the cat’
‘Increase in sediment input into Victorian rivers and streams due to human activities.’
Unquantifiable generalisations that can mean anything. You don’t need to be a scientist to realise the above. Often it will then come down to people who ‘manage’ individual species and the like, and how they describe, often in ‘potentials’ only, the affect as they see it on the environment.
By creating a ‘potential threat’ one can then, theoretically in the least, apply the Precautionary Principle, a mechanism that can shut down an activity, even without credible scientific evidence.
The one threatening process, the one that has killed millions of animals in the last decade alone, catastrophic, large scale, high intensity wildfire, has been all but ignored by our ecological warriors. How convinient, to under acknowledge this profound and ‘in your face’ ecological disturbance. This leaves farmers, miners, recreationalists, fisherman, etc. as the next areas of focus. So convinient.
A good point raised by Christian Kull, in his book ‘Isle of Fire’, is that the French colonialists were the first to ‘criminalize’ landscape burning in Madagascar. The locals resented this, as they could clearly see the profound difference between a traditional management tool, and real crimes such as robbery or murder. The British in India similarly ‘criminalized’ the traditional use of fire by villagers, and the same happened in Western Australia in 1846, with the first Bushfire Act.
This muddle headed ‘criminalization’ led to all the bushfire problems we now have, due to unmanaged fuel. Is it time to decriminalize the use of landscape fire by ordinary people?
Penalties for causing death, injury, or loss of property are already covered under other laws. If local people could burn whenever they thought it necessary, and safe, we would see an end to megafires. If some communities choose not to burn, then so be it. They might still be liable, under other laws, for causing death, injury, or damage by failing to maintain fuels in a safe condition.
Is the decriminalization of fire a worthy political objective? Should we push for the criminalization of failure to manage fuels? What are the legal and political possibilities? Would it make an election winning party policy? Over to you, Stewie.
SJT,
I presume it is I you are aiming your comments to – yes the Fabian goal is somewhat a fantasy, though their stated (and published) aims are anything but.
It’s the sundry useful idiots they use who are blissfully unaware.
What an extraordinary, bizarre outburst!? The paroxysms of paranoia from the “right” are becoming quite spectacular.
When one encounters a wild beast, avoid eye contact and back away slowly.
I’ll just holster my six shooter and watch this absurd piece of in-house theatre from afar. The rabid intellectual contortions are compelling and mesmerising.
Chapter 11 in Ian Wishart’s book Air Con gives a good little account of the Aussie bushfires.
“In one area, a homeowner who defied the Green restrictions,and cleared debris and trees several hundred metres back from his house, was fined more than $60,ooo dollars for breaching environmental bylaws. But in a tragic lesson to Austalian bureaucrats and environmentalists,his house was the only one left standing in his street, untouched by fire.”
This bloke was actually a kiwi interviewed on TV seen here. He wasn’t grizzling about the fine at that point!
WRT to Ron,
You are using the deaths of over 170 people to further your ideology. To do that you have to blame people for murder.
Coehnite comes out with ideological dribble.
To be able do this you can only be inadequate.
To SOD:
It is remarkable how opponents of fuel reduction burning
i do not think that there is a single “opponent of fuel reduction burning” posting here. please give us names!
but i am an opponent of false claims about fuel reduction burnings. and i am an opponent of ignoring the special conditions on the day of the 2009 fire.
one could say that i am an opponent of ignoring facts or making up false facts. call me a sceptic, if you want!
try to equate it with fuel ‘removal’ so as to discredit it if a fire passes through a treated area. As the term implies, it reduces fuel loads not removes them. So it is unsurprising that fire can pass through recently burnt areas, particularly areas in which the burn itself scorched the trees (as described at Mt Riddell) and thereby would have promoted dead leaf fall.
you are contradicting yourself. if a fire would pass a region that burned last year (and cause devastating effects), how could prescribed burning every couple of years help?
The point is that summer wildfires passing through these fuel reduced areas are far less damaging to the environment, far more controllable (subject to weather conditions), and less likely to threaten life and property. However it will not guarantee that lives won’t be lost as that is still largely dependent on property and householder preparation.
i agree. but “far less likely” might still be much more than we can handle, if temperature, drought and humidity are TWICE as bad as in the worst days of the past!
The benefit of fuel reduction was illustrated during the Black Saturday fires, when a fire was ignited by lightning in areas burnt during the 2006/07 fires north of Dargo. This fire eventually burned for more than a week and covered about 15,000 ha. However, as it was located in already burnt forest, the DSE was able to largely ignore it while concentrating their resources on the problems in central Victoria.
another example not supporting your position. a completely burned area burns again after 2 years. how often are you planning to burn stuff? once per month?
Having been involved with the Left and the Greens in Europe and then Australia, as well as teaching a unit on Deep Ecology to Year 11-12 students, I was fascinated by the author’s analysis of the origin of the Greens. Obviously her deep hatred of the Greens and conservationists leads her to this position, real Lunar Right conspiracy stuff.
I was under the impression that the Greens began in Tasmania in 1972 over the Lake Pedder issue when the Laborials were so closely tied to the big end of town (as they still are), that the Green Independents were formed for the opposition to rally around. Even Robin Gray, now with Gunns, says there is no difference between Labor and the Liberals so the Greens are the real Opposition in Tasmania. As for Europe, the Greens came out of the Left, that’s true, basically the opposition to the nuclear industry and the pro-United States position of the Social Democratic parties (as in Australia). Where else could we go ?
The Greens have no time for the ACF these days so I’m not sure where J.M.’s thoughts will take her on that bent – Peter Garrett went from the ACF to selling his soul to the Labor Right in NSW (the same machine that rolled him in 1984) and the Greens are bitterly critical of the ACF in its current relationship with the Labor government on climate change.
Conservationists would disagree with J.M.s analysis of the problems with fire in Victoria – not that simple. Where does “the move to live in the bush” come in for a start ?
So I’m talking ideological dribble JC? How do you react to Anne’s little contribution;
“Personally , I would like to say as one Swedish Nobel Prize laureate that ” humans / we/ me are just a flyshit in the Universe…”
And you conclude I’m inadequate. I think you and the rest of the “flyshits” should discard your clothes and wander off into the Simpson Desert or some similar ‘natural’ environ and become honest purveyors of your faith.
Sod,
From your comments, you seem to know as much about fire as you do about the mathematics of Paul Erdos – namely sod all. Please attend a few hundred real bushfires before wasting our time with your pseudo-science.
Regular burning (every few years) makes areas safe for humans, and most animals. Some areas can carry a fire every summer, or even twice in the same summer, due to leaf fall after a fire that was too hot. But those fires will be mild, no matter what the weather. Mark Poynter knows what he is talking about, you obviously don’t.
Start by reading a little history. For example, in NSW (1842), Ludwig Leichardt said ‘During my excursions in the bush my interest in bushfires has often been aroused … Others ascribe them entirely to the blacks … who light fires all over the place to cook their food but leave them unextinguished. During the hot summer the grass dries out and becomes highly inflammable, and the leaves of the myrtaceous plants, which are full of essential oils, also get very dry. The consequence is that bushfires quickly spread over enormous areas, though without becoming a danger to human beings.’
A fire in one or two year old fuel will have an intensity of only about 500 kw/metre, and has flames under a metre high. A human can walk away from such a fire, or step over it. Small animals can, and do, run through gaps in the flames. The burnt ground is not so hot that it will burn their feet off, as happens with the sort of fires you seem, in your ignorance, to favour. Think about it, Sod.
Gee wiz, Jeremy C provides a single example of a real or imagined green activist who favours hazzard reduction burning in the pathetic hope that this one offering will be sufficient to out weigh all the other boofheads who don’t. By that logic the very presence of a single person in Charlie Manson’s group who did not approve of the slaughter of Sharon Tate would be sufficient to absolve the whole murderous bunch.
And as for Birrell, the sleazoid failed to mention that the reason for doing post harvest burning is to IMPROVE the quality and diversity of post harvest regeneration. To include this data in a discussion on fire prevention only underlines the extent of this bogan’s ignorance.
Ray is spot on with the need to privatise the forest estate. The bureaucratic classes have squandered any claim to competent forest management. Indeed, how can anyone claim to be a competent forest manager when the forest is essentially dead?
Landowners have already responded to vegetation fascism by substituting exotic species. They now need to recognise that the dominance of green ideology will only end when it has been allowed to run its course. It will only collapse when it has completely destroyed it’s own credibility in the way communist ideology imploded on itself.
And that situation will not come to pass until the custodians of sound ecological mangement stop propping up a fundamentally flawed regime. By continuing to provide advice to a corrupt system one merely prolongs the suffering of the systems victims. A true patriot would withdraw their input to bring the system down as soon as possible.
I once had a vision to completely cover my property with regrowth of the original wet forest mosaic. I now know enough to work with nature to complete this task cheaply and within just a few years. But I now know that this would be folly and I now encourage exotic species and do the direct opposite of what the cadres desire. For in learning how to work with nature to create a forest, one also learns how to work with nature to get rid of a forest the green goons don’t deserve.
When the greens stole my property rights under fraudulent mandates their ignorance was always going to produce the environment they deserve. And when, and only when, they restore those rights, expose their own lies and obtain proper mandates, then I will think about whether they deserve any better.
Green Davey,
‘Is the decriminalization of fire a worthy political objective? Should we push for the criminalization of failure to manage fuels? What are the legal and political possibilities? Would it make an election winning party policy?’
I am not to sure about questions regarding criminal law, however, due to the parameters involved here either way you have to acknowledge it in environmental law. Surely we must first define wildfire, including it’s potential, correctly.
This then, I would think should include potential rate of spread, radiant heat levels generated, potential ember production/ behaviour, potential flame height, etc. This should be acknowledged in a manner that explains it ecologically. It clearly also should include historic events.
Ecological management has been in place now in Victoria for nearly 20 years, introduced by Joan Kirner. What we seem to have ended up with, at best, is vague, non-committal report writing processes that avoids facts and reality.
Is ecology meant to help the environment or is the vagueness of this theory, with all its unknowns, the perfect political tool to political power?
We have known since at least the 1800’s, what the extreme end of the scale is when it comes to large scale wildfires in Victoria.
Who carries the duty of care to inform senior management and ministers, of the impending potenetial of future wildfires. Surely those that ‘manage’ the flora have an important role to play in this. They manage the very stuff that burns and it is this stuff, vegetation, also referred to as fuel load, that is in question here.
What sort of an ‘expert’ would sit back, who is privy to detailed information, while receiving acclolades, promotions, even awards, for their work in ‘saving the planet’, for ‘future generations’, while doing nothing about an issue which has the potential to wipe out millions of native fauna, raise to the ground entire forest systems (and the one next to it and the one next to that, etc.), destroy towns and kill many people (including children, elderly people, disabled people and other innocent people), their pets, family history and major public infrastructure, including significant historic and cultural ‘assets’.
It seems to me people who call themselves ‘ecologists’ have done this. It is they that work on a day to day basis on such issues, funded by the taxpayer. It is they that carry a ‘duty of care’ to fully inform their supervisors and they in turn inform their Minister. Appropriate action should be then taken to inform the public of the true nature of wildfire, its behaviour and the true level of threat to the community and our environment.
Have they?
This is from the Royal Commisson followiing the 1939 fires. In his opening remarks Justice Stretton says:
“The speed of the fires was appalling. They
leap from mountain peak to mountain peak or far out into
the lower country lighting forests six or seven miles in
advance of the main fires. Blown by wind of great force
they roared as they travelled. Balls of crackling fire
sped at a great pace and in advance of the fires consuming
with a roaring explosive noise all that they touched.
Houses of brick were seen and heard to leap into a roar of
flame before the fires had reached them. Some men of
science hold the view that the fires were generated and
were preceded by inflammable gases which became alight.
Great pieces of burning bark were carried by the wind to
set in raging flame regions not yet reached by the fires.
Such was the force of the wind that in many places
hundreds of trees of great size were blown clear of the
earth, tonnes of soil were embedded, masses of rock still
adhering to the roots. For mile upon mile the former
forest monarchs were laid in confusion, burnt, torn from
the earth and piled one upon another as matches strewn by
a giant hand.”
P.S. I know some fire ecologists and I hold them in the highest regard. Their knowledge is impressive and their concerns devoid of political ambition. If I knew you Green Davie better, I would say that you are one of these. I know of others though who pass themselves off as ‘ecologists’, who are in senior flora and fauna positions and are radical greens and are deeply dedicated to a political cause, which like the reality of wildfire, they prefer not to make public.
“i do not think that there is a single “opponent of fuel reduction burning” posting here. please give us names!”
There must be, otherwise their whole case fails.
Cohenite I conclude that Anne has some serious problems since she considers animals the equal of humans….maybe even superior because i bet she doesnt think polar bears are just flyshit in the universe. This seems to be the thinking of many and seems to be a serious paradigm shift over the last 30 years.
Imagine this scenario;you are in a hot air ballon and need to gain height to get over a mountain range.
If you crash into the mountains you will all die.
On board are 3 humans and 8animals ( 2 chickens, 2 piglets, 1 baby polar bear, 3 ducks that have been rescued from being force fed fois gras..so they can t fly) that they are about to crash into unless they an gain sufficient altitude. combined the animals weigh the same as 1 human. To gain the extra altitude needed to get over the mountains they need to jetison 1 human or all the animals. Who would you throw out?
To my mind if you say the animals then you need medical attention…however I suspect many including anne would favour the animals?
Who wants global governance!?
” Cohenite I conclude that Anne has some serious problems since she considers animals the equal of humans….maybe even superior because i bet she doesnt think polar bears are just flyshit in the universe”- Ann N
Maybe Toby I have an issue with humans though never with animals. When I worked proferssinally with horses I was called something like the ” horse whisperer” and one paper wrote ” Ann the angel for the birds”.
And I have had boyfriends that have only been flyshit;))))
Toby poses the classical boring question again re surgery and the the ” triad” issue. Would I save an animal or an human first.
Actually I have been a medical student for many years in a first class medical school and been accepted to attend the same med school that nominates the Nobel Prize medical laureate and working for yonks every holiday in hospitals.
And I have been doing nasty experiments on frogs in med school.( You would be astonished by the amount of lab animals / dogs outside the VeterinRY Institute).
Please don’t label me , I’m hardly a member of any NGO, I classify myself as an INDEPENDENT THINKER and animal friend.
I have had a harsh argument with an animal rights person currently that wrote about lab animals in a major paper.
I wrote since the author had no idea if the pigs the surgeons use for skilling their methods were shot before or after the surgery , the author should not write the article. The author had no idea that it was essential that the pig was alive ( so the organs worked) and under anestesia during surgery.
So I fully support surgeons practising surgery on pigs that are under anesthesia.
In Toby’s scenario my decision might depend on who the human was. But then again, those I might be tempted to throw out might be useful sources of hot air. Hmmm…
Ann, I too prefer animals to humans. I have long conversations with my 15 year old pussy cat. She is good company, and has recently joined the Fabian Society. She is a whiz at Deep Ecology, if a little felicentric. She is interested in Number Theory, and eats a Prime Number of native birds each day (2,3,5,7,11 etc.). She is working on the Goldbach Conjecture, and will soon publish in a refereed journal (look out Larry…). She is a machine for converting sardines into theorems. To relax, she reads Omiaow Khayyam.
Ray Evans refers here in his post to the Australian Conservation Society and also to Joan Kirners government.
If my memory serves me correct, around 1991, the ACF was about to fold due to funding shortages. Joan Kirners government saved the day with a $250,000 grant, which it seems they have essentially used for membership campaigns.
I’m just wondering if they paid the $250,000 back?
A fire in one or two year old fuel will have an intensity of only about 500 kw/metre, and has flames under a metre high. A human can walk away from such a fire, or step over it. Small animals can, and do, run through gaps in the flames. The burnt ground is not so hot that it will burn their feet off, as happens with the sort of fires you seem, in your ignorance, to favour. Think about it, Sod.
why don t you counter the points i quoted, instead of making up your own stuff?
The fire on Mt Riddle was ignited by a lightning strike and burnt the northern
slope. At the beginning of last year, the DSE/Parks Victoria lit a large control burn
on this slope, of which it even scorched the crowns of the eucalypts. This control
burn did not prevent the ignition and spread of this fire into Healesville and
surrounding forest.
again: burned one year before. still threatening Healesville.
the idea of doing controlled burns everywhere every year is idiotic.
GD, I did consider as I typed that scenario, that infact it was not completly black and white. I can certainly think of people ( criminals, despots, dictators etc) who I might infact want to throw over the edge instead of the animals!
I also understand there have always been a few people ( some might call them eccentrics) who do favour animals over humans, and maybe with good reason. But it does seem to be a paradigm shift that animals are now, for many more people, our equal…or even superiors.
To me this emphasises why I like free markets ( within reason, laws are required!). Let me work out what is in my interest, not somebody with entirely different values and ethics. You may not like my values, but so long as I dont impinge on yours, then it shoudl not matter. What worries me is the “environment” and “carbon” are going to be used to control me…and I suspect with more and more people thinking like Ann, this is not an unlikely scenario. ( Ann you are welcome of course to your beliefs, and I do not mean to offend, its just that to my paradigm, its seems quite bizzare to place animals on an equal footing with humans and even more so to consider us as just flyshit in the universe…maybe you need to work on your self esteem, if you have the ability to help horses, then you are not only their superior, but also of great benefit to them?)
Toby,
Your ethical thought experiment can be extended, but becomes ever more difficult. What if one of the humans in the hot air balloon was of a different race, religion, or culture? Perhaps handicapped, old and infirm (like me), or has terminal cancer? Or is terminally illogical, like our friend Sod?
Golly, we humans have taken a load of responsibility on our shoulders. As captains of the world, we deserve a few privileges. I suppose that’s why the officers’ mess is more comfortable than the barrack room. Are officers still allowed to shoot other ranks, but not vice versa? But, in cavalry days, other ranks sometimes shot horses. Should responsible captains of industry be allowed to shoot irresponsible greens? Why are orcas allowed to kill whales? My 15 year old pussy cat refuses to answer.
Of course humans are only dull, boring , quarrelsome son of bitches:)
Can they ever compete with the animal world???? Can Travolta ever be as sexy as this bird:)???
http://birdcinema.com/view_video.php?viewkey=fb92720359db84e0dd0d
GD, please let me know when your cat does shed some wisdom on this topic! You can of course bring diversity to the agenda..personally if you ( or Ann, or reasonably decent human being) had just 5 minutes to live once we landed, I would still throw out the animals.
Now if the question was would I endanger my life to save your life…then the answer is probably no….although i might surprise myself.
If the question was would I endanger my life to save one of my childrens, the answer is instantly ( I assume, although who really knows how much courage we have until we actually need it!?)
If the question was would i endanger my life to save an animal. the answer is a clear no.
GD Im not sure if you have ever read bernard cornwell’s “sharpe series”..or seen sean bean in the movies…but he insinuates it is the duty of a good soldier to shoot a bad officer!..hell of a good series if you haven t seen them
The idea that humans have strayed from an ordained path and arrogated nature’s primacy is at the very least a quasi-religious one; here a leading advocate of this gospel, clive hamilton, pontificates;
“So I think where we’re going is to begin to see a Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi, which will transform our attitudes to it away from an instrumentalist one, towards an attitude of greater reverence. I mean, the truth is, unless we do that, I mean we seriously are in trouble, because we know that Gaia is revolting against the impact of human beings on it.”
I’m sure clive would not approve of hazard reduction just because it is part of this heretical usurptation of nature; how is this different from misanthropy?
To One and All,
The article which is the basis of this thread is not about:
Where a particular fire may have started.
Nor is about how or by whom was it started.
Neither is it about the capabilities of the response.
Most importantly it does not condemn any particular person or Group with the charge of murder.
Ray Evans thoughts are about how modern man manages and mismanages the environment in which we live.
It is about the usurping of ‘rule of the majority” by a minority.
It explores the changes that have taken place in recent times to the management of lands both private and public.
For JeremyC to claim that: ” you have used the deaths of over 170 people to further your idiology.”
Is an insult to reason and an affront to those supporting the arguments expressed by Ray.
I repeat: GROW UP AND LEARN TO COMUNICATE AS AN ADULT.
To confine the debate to Australia, what we are arguing is that since the arrival of white man in Australia, there have certainly been mistakes made in how we treated the environment and in how we responded to the challenges of an initially difficult and misunderstood landscape.
However as man always does, from mistakes leasons were learnt and Australians can be proud of what has been achieved since the second world war.
Management of our our forests, grazing lands, farmland and our capacity to control the elements of antiquity ( particularly fire) have been thoroughly fashioned on the anvil of experience and until recently widely understood by those most closely aligned to protecting these varying landscapes.
All of this changed when the political Greens ( with NO PRACTICAL understanding of the issues) sold their preference votes, invariably to State Labour Parties in return for “behind closed doors” deals, that have delivered outcomes that are not in the best interests of:
The environment.
The comunity.
The flora and fauna.
Future generations or
The Nation.
For anyone who has experience with fighting wildfire and with controlled burns, (given the wonderful equipment available today), we cannot accept that recent disasters are anything other than:
Maladministration.
From huge city centered bureaucracies with no local knowledge.
Radical environmental but misguided practices established as a result ot political compromise.
We can as a Nation do much better than recent practise.
That will require people like SJT, Jeremy C, Sod and others to stop crying
” Right wing idiology.”
“You are inadequate.”
” This is a rant.’
It will require a rational appreciation that there are people out there and even on this blogg who have vast and reasoned experience in living with our challenging but wonderful environment and that modern man is never going to go backwards to some non-existing utopian dreamtime.
We presently have a problem!
Please open your mind to this possibility.
Calling me and others names may make you feel better, but it is not building a better Australia for our Grandkids.
Pikey.
Ron Pike, you weren’t called a name. You were described.
How very Kafkaesque of you JC; or should I say Commissar; being “described” sounds painful, or at least serious; all part of the Brave New World I guess.
To One and All,
The article which is the basis of this thread is not about:
Where a particular fire may have started.
Nor is about how or by whom was it started.
Neither is it about the capabilities of the response.
Most importantly it does not condemn any particular person or Group with the charge of murder.
Ray Evans thoughts are about how modern man manages and mismanages the environment in which we live.
Jennifer wrote the introduction. she says, that “Evans blames the fire on green doctrine”. and i think she captured the article well.
Ray Evans thoughts are a random collection of false claims and wild conspiracy theories, spanning the full 20th century. he is completely ignoring the hard facts about temperature, drought and humidity data of the day of the 2009 fires, even though he mentions that data in his post!
We can as a Nation do much better than recent practise.
That will require people like SJT, Jeremy C, Sod and others to stop crying
” Right wing idiology.”
“You are inadequate.”
” This is a rant.’
for a start, stick to some facts when writing articles.
and stay away from right wing id(i)o(t)logy. for example don t praise privatisation of land as the solution, when in reality the fires on private property did NOT behave differently, than in protected state woods.
Green Davey wrote:
“I have long conversations with my 15 year old pussy cat. She is good company, and has recently joined the Fabian Society. She is a whiz at Deep Ecology, if a little felicentric. She is interested in Number Theory, and eats a Prime Number of native birds each day (2,3,5,7,11 etc.). She is working on the Goldbach Conjecture, and will soon publish in a refereed journal (look out Larry…).”
Still riding the same Goldbach hobbyhorse, are we? My response to your penultimate remark on the subject is currently the last item in that earlier thread:
http://tinyurl.com/m8xmpc
Notice that our extremists never miss an opportunity to prove that enviro-extremists are dim.
I live in the Yarra Valley and whilst not actually having fire closer than 5 km from me, I was inundated with ash and burnt leaves and bark. In this area we are not even allowed to trim Tea Tree on our properties without council approval…If its my property I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I like with it…so long as it does not hurt anybody else.
Big Brother is a serious problem and if you can t see that then god help us! ( and that from an agnostic)
Ray Evans said,
‘This enabled small groups of zealots, through commitment and political skill, to capture these bodies. They had the advantage that a high proportion of Greens are childless (most Greens are against children) and many are well off in secure jobs.’
I have noticed that there seems to be a high number of homosexual type people who are represented in environmental and eco-tourism positions.
At the top we have Bob Brown (Leader of the Greens), Penny Wong (Minister for Climate Change, Fed), Gavin Jennings (Environment and Climate Change, Vic). Then in regional Victoria we have a number of tourism spokespeople who are gay.
Of course this doesn’t look like a conspiracy but you now you got to ask what’s going on?
Is there any connection to the out of control Victorian, ALP branch stacking. If I heard what the Ombussman say is correct, we have 100’s of illegal political branches, these branches may have been forming/ contributing to policy making, we have illegal representatives in government and they were truly ‘out of control’. It seems a ‘free for all’ that has been going on for decades.
If we consider what people say, in that, the Greens and the ALP Left wing are one in the same thing. They sing from the same song sheet. They co-ordinate their media releases, etc.
And many believe climate change politics is nothing but the ultimate grab for power and a means to ‘force’ complete change to society.
And now we have the Greens blaming climate change for the Black Saturday fires, while also giving opinions on international economic issues. And when this group was on the rise in the 1980’s the media did not touch them. Free ride.
Right under everybodies noses.
Have they picked the right psychological profile to do the job on us (& future generations)?
“The idea that humans have strayed from an ordained path and arrogated nature’s primacy”
If I ever meet a person who thinks that, I’ll be sure to pass your message on.
Sophists, like SJT, Jeremy C, and sod, spend far too much of their time in pissing-contest mode. A standard rhetorical tactic of such bottom-feeders, who aren’t particularly interested in seeking the truth, is to attack the weakest points points in the arguments of their opponents, and to pretend that the strong points don’t exist. Then they can say: Ha ha, I won!
Here’s what I consider to be one of Ray’s stronger arguments. And I haven’t heard anyone here dispute the veracity of this specific point.
“Many of the deaths on Black Saturday were caused by the transformation of roads under firestorm conditions into “channels of death”. Roger Underwood, an experienced forester from Western Australia, came to Victoria after Black Saturday and was taken through many of the regions devastated by fire. He subsequently wrote:
“’I was shocked to observe kilometres of long-unburnt road reserves running through semi-cleared and agricultural landscapes. These are more like tunnels than roads, with a narrow strip of bitumen winding between overhanging trees and bush right at the road edge which had clearly not been burned for over 20 years and carried a fuel load of about 35 tonnes to the hectare. These roads are potential death traps, not escape routes.’”
“Currently the clearing of fallen logs and other debris from roadsides is prohibited. This prohibition is another example of Green Power in action. People should not only be allowed, but should be encouraged, to obtain firewood from the roadside and to keep the road verges clear of debris. The capture by the Greens of a number of shire councils and the regulations such councils imposed on new housing certainly aggravated the damage and arguably caused increased loss of life on Black Saturday. This issue has received considerable attention in the media but there has been no comment on how a small group of people, admittedly passionate in the religion which gives meaning and purpose to their lives, can capture a council and impose regulations which are not only dreadful in their consequences but are also regarded as lunatic by most people living in the shire.”
Although I’ve never been to Victoria, I do have a little low-level experience fighting forest fires in the Western US. From my outsider’s perspective, I’m convinced that the “channels of death” aspect is gross negligence–or worse–on the part of the powers that be. Come on Victorians, get your act together. Demand accountability, and get rid of the born-again Druids who set environmental policy in the tinderbox you call home.
Larry,
Despite our mathematical tussles, I like your term ‘Druids’ for the more muddle headed of our urban ‘environmentalists’. I see wild hair, rolling eyes, and waving arms. One reason they dislike regular forest burning is because it kills their sacred plant, mistletoe. They are unaware that, under long fire exclusion, mistletoe proliferates, and kills trees.
P.S. I won’t tease you about Goldbach’s Conjecture any more, now you have looked it up in Wiki. My pussy cat’s proof has been accepted by the Journal of Catemathics. The answer to the prime number problem you set is the transcendental 42.498769… Paul Erdos solved it over his last cup of coffee.
Larry,
How do you like my gravatar? It’s based on Knot Theory. Have a google, and get back to me. Highly relevant to bushfire mosaics. Druids don’t like it.
Latter-day urban Druids all wear robes and pointed hats, with white stars on a dark green background.
I like your gravatar just fine, even though it doesn’t have a shoe-phone. Shouldn’t I be able to see a likeness of Smokey Bear in there?
Smokey What!! Wash yo’ mouf out, Larry. That name is not mentioned in the circles I move in. Did Gifford Pinchot invent him? Wasn’t Gifford a graduate of l’Ecole d’Eaux et Forets Verts at Nancy – nuff said.
“One reason they dislike regular forest burning is because it kills their sacred plant, mistletoe. They are unaware that, under long fire exclusion, mistletoe proliferates, and kills trees.”
I don’t recall anyone saying they disliked burning off. Did I miss something?
I do recall someone on the radio making disparaging remarks about the DSE, calling them the “Department of Sparks and Embers”. You can’t win.
“Although I’ve never been to Victoria, I do have a little low-level experience fighting forest fires…”
Says it all really Larry.
Let me explain.
The issue of roadside vegetation is a bit of a furphy, like so many elements of the bushfire equation it is simply an aspect that allows rednecks to fixate and froth.
Sure, some areas have by-laws against people removing vegetation from roadsides but that’s because the roadside verges often provide remnant habitat for endangered species e.g. trees with nesting hollows. If the forests and farms hadn’t been flogged and/or denuded of every plant thicker than 80cms or higher than grass it wouldn’t be an issue. You can always rely on dumb rednecks to come up with a proposal to compound a bad situation.
Also, if people manage to die in a scrappy strip of bush less than fifty meters wide and dissected by a road I think we’re entitled to ask a few questions. We know that most of the people who have died in these “fiery tunnels of death” (as the calm and considered Ray calls them) have died because they have crashed their cars in thick smoke or blind panic and have then been caught by the flames.
If you’ve driven off into smoke you haven’t been listening….to anything or anyone for a long time. Darwin might have something to say about that. If you’re in a forest, the concept of a “fiery tunnel of death” is a nonsense. If you’re driving in farmland, why would you wait for the road to become a “fiery tunnel of death”? Wouldn’t you drive into a paddock and then drive through the fire front onto burnt ground?
Better still, grow a brain and face the reality of where you live.
I shouldn’t waste my time on dumb rednecks. There are plenty of smart people who are willing to listen and learn. As has always been the case, the dumb, inbred and half baked cretins will need to be shepherded in the rear. There’s an old saying about the halfwits who are dragged along yowling, kicking and screaming at the rear of humanity as we evolve into higher beings…”The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on”.
“fiery tunnels of death” my @rse! You idiots need to wake up to yourselves.
I’m glad that at least one of our resident Druids is making a feeble attempt to respond to specific points raised in Ray’s article. However attention to detail isn’t RWFOH’s strong suit. In this article, Ray did not used the expression “fiery tunnel of death”.
RWFOH, if you quote someone, you should take a few extra seconds to get it right. And if you paraphrase someone, do not use quotation marks.
RWFOH wrote:
“Sure, some areas have by-laws against people removing vegetation from roadsides but that’s because the roadside verges often provide remnant habitat for endangered species e.g. trees with nesting hollows.”
I have two responses to the RWFOH quote. First, I’m calling your bluff; let’s see what you’ve got in your hand. Please name ONE endangered species that lived in the specific roadside verges in question.
Second, suppose that there was an endangered species that lived in the specific roadside verges in question. RWFOH, do you feel that choosing to provide critical habitat in a location that recklessly endangers humans living in that area is a reasonable thing to do?
Reading between the lines of your post, that’s the impression that I get. If I’m correct, then I’d like to thank you for partially corroborating another of Ray’s points.
“At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and that mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet.”
The first Victoria related link in a search reveals:
“The conservation of at least two threatened species in Victoria, both typical of the dry box and ironbark woodlands, is dependent on roadside vegetation.
The grey-crowned babbler is an endangered bird in Victoria, with total numbers estimated at about 2,000 individuals. These individuals occur in about 500 family groups making up at least 77 local populations. The species has gradually declined in southern and western Victoria. In northern Victoria, the size of local populations is significantly related to those districts with extensive networks of roadside vegetation. …
Forests dominated by grey box and yellow box on the higher-rainfall plains fringing the Box-Ironbark region are of great importance for conservation of the squirrel glider, an endangered mammal in Victoria. In the Euroa – Longwood – Nagambie area, for example, roadsides dominated by grey box support high densities of gliders compared with other known habitats. …
Surveys of reptiles in remnant woodlands of the plains found that, on average, roadside vegetation supported a larger number of species per site than comparable sites in either small or larger fragments of woodland (Figure 2)….”
etc., etc.
http://tinyurl.com/mn3x3z
There’s no shortage of information about the value of roadside vegetation.
The flipside of the so-called “Green doctrine” coin is the fundamentalist zealotry of the “Man’s dominion over Earth” brigade.
These pseudo-religious nuts are so detached from reality and devoid of common sense they would remove every last tree from the planet lest some idiot drive into one and deprive the human gene pool of their genius.
At least the so-called “Green doctrine” has some benefit to humanity in that it seeks to conserve the natural systems that render the planet habitable for our species. I’m at a loss as to why the God Botherers think it is a religious duty to find and justify increasingly banal means and reasons to despatch ourselves from the Earthly realm. The whole twisted belief system is based around venal gratification and egocentricity.
Guns and Roses had once this tour named ” Attracted to destruction” , suits the idiotic neo cons quite well, they are as boring as bad sex.
Whaddayaknow? Our resident green-crowned babbler can get specific once he sets his bird-brain to the task. Now my follow-up questions. Is there something specific about the roadside that makes roadside vegetation especially useful habitat for the squirrel glider and other animals? Do the reptiles get off on the NOx from auto exhaust?
My educated guess is that the observed biodiversity in roadside vegetation has more to do with the man-made ecotones, than with the magical powers of asphalt and gravel. If I’m right, isn’t choking off bushfire escape routes a pretty stupid strategy for mitigating habitat loss due to farming and sustainable timber harvesting? In other words, why not declare eminent domain on some narrow and disconnected strips of farmland (with reasonable compensation for the landowners, of course) far from the road, and plant ironbark, dry box, grey box, and yellow box there? And then throw in FRBs every few years for good measure.
I specified disconnected for two reasons. First, preliminary studies in the US show that the putative species-preserving efficacy of ‘wildlife corridors’ is largely an urban myth. Second, if the strips are disconnected, then the once-in-a-century monster bushfires will spread somewhat slower, and they will serve up fewer crispy critters. And as an added bonus, fewer people will get killed, not that that consideration shows up on your radar screen.
In the US, we do have a little experience with environmental mitigation. Example: The Forest Service can specify that for the sake of the birdies in certain areas, a specified number of snags be left standing on any given timber sale. That strikes me as reasonable.
The idiot Greenies in Australia can learn a thing or two about environmental conservation from the rest of the world. Yes, that includes our mistakes. You don’t need to re-invent the square wheel. And you don’t need to prove your ideological purity, by choosing mindless environmental mitigation schemes that kill the maximum number of people, and then turning around and blaming the victims for your deliberate obtuseness.
If this topic is about defining the Greens, then an example from New Scientist magazine recently might throw some light where light is needed; rather than the oppobrium being flung about above.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/lthdzn
Yeah no worries Larry, if we need to hear another lecture on the bleedin’ obvious you’re at the top of the list of people to call. Pity you’re about a hundred years too late though!
RWFOH wrote:
“Pity you’re about a hundred years too late though!”
Not necessarily. In some cases, ‘artificial’ mitigation is an option worth exploring. Case in point. Here in Sacramento County (California), we have vernal pools that are home to a species of fairy shrimp that’s not found anywhere else on Earth.
Eventually, some developers would like to build houses in the area. If that comes to pass, the developers would dig a few holes in the ground in a less commercially valuable location, stock them with fairy shrimp and other assorted beasties, stir lightly, and attempt to pass them off as environmental mitigation. Would it be real mitigation? Could the transplanted fairy shrimp survive there in the long term? I do not know. There’s only one way to find out. And it ain’t computer modeling.
One could do a similar albeit longer-term experiment with a few test strips (having approximately the same width as the roadside verges) of the eminent-domained farmland that I alluded to earlier. Plant ironbark, dry box, grey box, and yellow box there. After the trees reach a reasonable age and there’s a significant amount of forest litter, start doing FRBs every other year. Then transport some squirrel gliders there. (The grey-crowned babblers will probably find it on their own.)
Get your hands dirty and do the bloody experiment. Then get your mind dirty, and analyze the bloody data. If you get good results, then the ‘artificial’ mitigation would be more efficient than the “channels of death” (Ray’s term) that you’re so fond of.
The next question: Would Gaia forgive you for short-changing her on the number of burnt human offerings to which she’s become accustomed?