Burning Issues

Greenists Twisting in the Wind

Recently, we posted on the historic ferocity and loss of life in the recent Australian bush fires. A substantial component of the cause has been the growing greenist political influence over local and regional councils. Councils have prevented controlled burn-offs, and prosecuted and fined those who have been prudent to conduct (now illegal) burnoffs or clearings. The result has been a sustained build up of combustible material within vast swathes of the Australian bushlands.

Controlled burnoffs and clearing do not prevent bushfires. They mitigate them. It is argued that had such mitigation policies been systematically carried out over the past fifteen years, the recent fires would not have had their intensity and the tragic loss of life would have been far less.

Miranda Devine writes in the Sydney Morning Herald on how greenist lobby groups are starting to twist in the wind, and are launching new spin.

This burning issue of life and death

Miranda Devine
February 19, 2009 - 12:16AM

One of the biggest furphies in the supercharged debate in the wake of Victoria's bushfires is the claim by green groups that they are great supporters of hazard reduction burning.

Also known as prescribed burning, this scientific regime creates a mosaic of lightly burned land at regular intervals of five to seven years, thus reducing surface fuel loads by varying amounts within the mosaic.

This reduction of fuel loads is expensive, but Australia's pre-eminent bushfire researchers, such as the CSIRO's Phil Cheney and Monash University's David Packam, say it has been proven to reduce the power and intensity of fire. Every bushfire inquiry since the 1939 Stretton royal commission has recommended increased prescribed burning to mitigate the effects of inevitable wildfire.

It is a matter of public record that green groups have long opposed such systematic prescribed burning, as is evident in their submissions to bushfire inquiries from as far back as 1992. They complain of a threat to biodiversity, including to fungi, from "frequent burning" regimes and urge resources be spent on water bombers and early detection, as well as on stopping climate change - good luck with that.

Yet last week, Jonathan La Nauze of Friends of the Earth, Melbourne, in a letter to this newspaper claimed: "…not one Australian environmental organisation is opposed to prescribed burning … Environment groups are engaged in a sophisticated debate about where and how prescribed burning can be most effective."

Yes, it's sophisticated, all right. It just depends how you define "prescribed burning".

The greenist record on opposing prescribed burning and clearing around houses is undeniable. It beggars belief that greenists are now claiming "it ain't so." What are we then to think of a greenist who claims that not one Australian environmental organisation is opposed to prescribed burning. Well, we see here the execution of a classic fallacious and deceitful device: redefine a category, in this case "prescribed burning" to be so narrow and rarefied and restricted, then come out and claim that they support it.

Imagine an organisation which had twenty years of track record publicly opposing all toll roads. Then, when accused of being anti-toll roads, protested that it was in fact not against toll roads at all. It was only opposed to those toll roads where motorists were charged money to use. But in the case of someone else being charged--say the business sector--it would be very supportive of toll roading. Classic category revision. Classic fallacious argumentation. This is how greenists are now twisting in the wind in Australia.

On the other side of the country, one Peter Robertson, the West Australian co-ordinator of the Wilderness Society, was singing from a different song sheet. His letter last week to The West Australian stated: "Experience and risk analysis show that repeatedly burning tens of thousands of hectares of remote bushland and forest will do little to address the threat of bushfires to human communities … It would be a huge mistake if the community was led to believe that a massive, expensive and environmentally destructive prescribed burning program was going to protect them when it could make matters worse." Robertson is no lone ranger among greens in opposition to prescribed burning.

The WA Forest Alliance, for instance, lodged a submission to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the 2001-02 bushfires, claiming: "Frequent fires have a disastrous effect on many species of flora and fauna and their habitat structure." WWF Australia's submission claimed: "Inappropriate fire hazard regimes can damage biodiversity leading to the loss of native species, communities and ecosystems."

The NSW Greens state on their website as part of their bushfire risk management policy: "There is an urgent need to correct the common misconception that responsible fire management always involves burning or clearing to reduce moderate and high fuel loads…"

In 2003, lightning strikes in fuel-rich national parks in NSW and the ACT sparked bushfires which swept into Canberra, killing four people.

Days later, the NSW Nature Conservation Council's then chairman, Rob Pallin, described calls for increased prescribed burning as "futile" and a "knee-jerk reaction". "People who claim that hazard reduction burning is a cure-all for bushfire risk are either fooling themselves or deliberately trying to fool the public." It is another clever tactic of those who oppose broadscale prescribed burning to claim that it is not a "cure-all" for bushfire risk. No one has ever claimed it is.

Yet another example of deceitful and specious reasoning. Put up a straw man then vociferously and forcefully reject it. In this case, the straw man is to allege that proponents of controlled burning believe that it is a "cure all" for bushfire risk. Clearly, no-one argues that. Controlled burning is a mitigation, not a prevention. Bushfires in Australia are inevitable (and very necessary to the environment): controlled burning mitigates the risks. Without it, far too many people die.

As Cheney repeatedly has said, wildfires will occur, but prescribed burning reduces the intensity of a fire burning "under any set of meteorological conditions", and it reduces the spread of the fire, allowing firefighters to construct effective control lines.

And yet there have been recent moves to have controlled burning listed as a "key threatening process" under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Such a submission has reportedly been received by the Threatened Species Scientific Committee.

In NSW, already, the Department of Environment and Conservation has listed "too frequent fire" as a "key threatening process to biodiversity".

But the real threatening process is the holocaust we have just seen in Victoria.

Last week angry fire survivors in Victoria pointed the finger at local authorities who prevented clearing of vegetation. At a public meeting in Arthurs Creek, Warwick Spooner, who lost his mother and brother in the Strathewen fire, stood up criticise the Nillumbik council.

"We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down." Then of course, there is Liam Sheahan, the Reedy Creek home owner whose house is the only one in a two-kilometre area which survived the fires. In 2004 he was fined $50,000 for removing 247 trees around his hilltop house to protect it from fire. His two-year court battle against the Mitchell Shire Council cost him $50,000 in legal fees.

This is the case of the Kiwi couple whose plight was profiled on national television in this country a few days ago. If justice is to be served, this couple need to be restituted by Mitchell Shire Council--and all their neighbours who lost houses because they complied with the deadly and destructive council prohibitions on clearing trees should enter into a class legal action against the council for compensation. It is the only way that the greenist ideological control over council policies will be broken. They would have a good case. We understand that the Sheahan house was the only one left standing: everyone else who complied with the council prohibitions and restrictions have suffered the destruction of their houses.

It is a rich irony that Slidders Lawyers last week launched a class action on behalf of fire victims at Kinglake, against the Singapore-owned electricity company SP AusNet, alleging the fire was caused by a fallen power line.

After all, it was only in 2001 that Transgrid bulldozed a 60-metre wide firebreak under its high-voltage lines in the Snowy Mountains. For that it was prosecuted by four government agencies, blasted for "environmental vandalism" by the then NSW premier Bob Carr, and fined $500,000.

Two years later, during the disastrous firestorm that engulfed the mountains, the offending firebreak became the only safe haven for kangaroos and workers constructing a fire trail. The sad truth of such holocausts is that the environmental toll ends up worse than the most vigorous prescribed burning regime ever could be.

Victoria's bushfires have spewed millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - more than a third of Australia's entire output for a year, according to Sydney University's Professor Mark Adams.

No doubt the royal commission will recommend, like previous inquiries, that prescribed burning should be increased. After so many deaths will anyone listen this time?

We fear not--at least not until class legal action hits local councils in the pocket--who will then have to front up to ratepayers and insurance companies and do some explaining. Then greenist ideology will likely be seen for what it is: a curse upon humanity.