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The bushfires burning across vast tracts of south-eastern Australia are far from extinguished but already the flames of a more infernal dialogue are being fanned. The issue of fuel-reduction burning - or prescribed burning as it is more properly called - will become a key political debate this year. The debate is not a new one. The devastating recent fires have simply raised the public profile of the discussion about whether to burn the bush in order to save it. Among scientists, land managers and environmentalists, argument over prescribed burning has been smouldering for years.
The loudest voices heard so far in the broad debate have been those of farmers, graziers, loggers and assorted bush workers whose claims to expertise in the area rest upon their occupation of the land, sometimes for generations. Their broad argument is that, except for the interference of government departments, environmentalists and assorted city folk, they would have carried on burning the bush to reduce the risk of uncontrolled fire as they did in the old days, following in the footsteps of the Aboriginal occupants. There is a lot of romance, little science and lots of self-interest in the argument. It was an approach implicitly rejected as far back as the inquiry into the Black Friday fires of 1939. It also ignores the problem of more complex fires on the fringes of cities, like those that roared out of the Namadgi National Park into Canberra or into the streets of outer-suburban Sydney.
There is no question that fuel-reduction burning should be part of forest management practice in Australia. It already is. Unlike foresters in the United States, Australian land managers have never sought to totally exclude fire. But the appropriate use of prescribed burning is a highly complex issue. A small number of environmentalists argue against the use of fire. Others, including many environmentalists, land managers and firefighting agencies are convinced of the place of fire as a management tool in an Australian landscape vastly altered since European settlement. The real arguments are about how to apply it, who should be responsible, and in which specific ecosystems it is a useful and appropriate strategy to reduce unwanted or uncontrollable fire.
There is still much to learn about the impact of fire on the Australian
environment. For all of the years of study already done, the fire science
is not yet detailed enough. That is one reason behind the setting up of
the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre to coordinate Australian efforts
in bushfire research. That exercise should allow for input from all interested
parties. More rigid assessments than those based on simple folk history
will flow from that initiative. And while men and women place their lives
on the line fighting the current fires, the wider debate might be better
left until ashes and tempers have cooled.
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