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More than 300 men from our despised timber industry are out fighting the terrifying fires that have roared through the state this past fortnight.
I'm told these wicked tree-killers haven't seen many green activists helping them, which is a shame.
A real shame, in fact, because never have we had such a clear warning that the green cult of tree worshipping - aided by this Bracks Government - has helped to turn our forests into lethal fire traps.
How odd. What do we get from green politics? Black forests.
When the flames are finally beaten, Victoria will need an inquiry into why these fires were so savage. Only a miracle and brave firefighting have stopped them from destroying fewer than two dozen houses. So far.
Years of fierce drought are of course most to blame. Add lightning strikes and hot wind, and we'll always be in strife.
But what may well have made these fires worse much worse - is the lunacy promoted by evangelists of this new green religion, who preach that forests are sacred and best left untouched by human hands.
It's a lunacy that had the CFA brigade at Licola, for instance, last year warning Premier Steve Bracks it had no confidence in his Government's ability to "manage the serious fire risks to life and property" in its area.
Most obviously, the treeworshippers have pushed governments into locking up much more of our forests into parks, in which the worst of the fires are raging.
The Bracks Government, for instance, boasts that it created more new parks in its first term than did any previous government.
But what has this meant? With cattle being driven out of our forests, the grass has grown higher, as the Licola brigade tried to warn us. (Even the director of New South Wales' parks admitted last month that "cattle grazing reduces some of the fuel".)
Foresters are being driven out of our native forests too, which means there are fewer forestry tracks to reach fires. And there are steadily fewer resources to fight those fires, too.
For instance, there are 83 bulldozers today scraping fire breaks and access trails through our forests to save towns from the terrifying fires.
“Burn-offs help stop fires getting out of control but greens loathe them”
Half of these vital machines are owned and driven by men who won't be around next year to be called on for help. These men are timber workers who must leave the industry over the next few months after the Bracks Government last year banned logging in even more forests, to win the green vote at the election.
We've also had new restrictions by the Government and councils on picking up firewood, even a lousy dead stick by the side of most country roads. Doesn't that look silly now?
This wouldn't matter so much if the mania of governments for creating ever more parks was matched by dollars to manage them.
Instead, the Department of Sustainability and Environment has had manpower to do only a third of the hazard-reduction burns it planned for Gippsland over the past decade.
Worse, Parks Victoria admits in its latest report that it got around to burning just 71,000 of the 294,000 hectares it had planned to do in the 2001 season.
It blames bad weather for stopping it from doing more, but if it had been given enough men and machines, there is little doubt it could have done far better.
<Photo of bulldozer>
Heavy metal: timber workers provided big machines to fight bushfires
but when they're forced from the industry, they'll take their dozers with
them.
But there are also mounting allegations, which the department battles to deny, that it was simply too spooked by green activists to do what was needed.
The trouble is that while fire experts, including the department itself, agree that burn-offs help stop fires from growing out of control, green activists loathe them.
The influential Wilderness Society, for example, bizarrely claims they just make bushfires worse, but its real objection is that "regular hazard-reduction burning does not mirror the natural ecological processes in forests". And what's not natural in the green religion is sinful.
The Colong Foundation for Wilderness, founded by renowned activist Mile Dunphy, even demands that "trails constructed during firefighting operations should be closed and rehabilitated immediately following the operation". Which shows how religion really can addle brains.
True enough, the Department of Sustainability and Environment has closed many trails in the Chiltern box ironbark forest - trails useful for fighting fires. And its guidelines for hazard burn-offs repeatedly stress the need to "meet ecological objectives". This madness must stop. The history of human progress is a story of humans trying to master nature. But the new earth worshippers want us to once more live as nature's servants -- at the mercy of everything from famine to forest fires.
Fine, if that's what they really want. But as the firefighters in our northeast will tell you, most of the houses they're trying to save aren't owned by greenies.
No, such tree worshippers tend to live in inner city suburbs, surrounded by concrete they know can never burn.
But the forests? Just watch the flames fly.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
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