Let's set the Victorian bush fires in their ecological and meteorological context. Victoria had been sitting at the tail end of a fourteen year drought; things were pretty dry, then, in the first place. Then there was the extraordinary heat wave pushing temperatures to over 45 degrees. Then there were the gale force winds, with immensely strong gusts, often in random directions. The conditions for raging bush fires were excellent, to say the least.
But the Australian media are now starting to look a bit deeper. Who or what is to blame? Now there are those who shrug their shoulders at the inanity of the question. Natural disasters happen. They are without any direct human causality. Why bother with the blame game? There is merit to this line of thought. Or is there?
In the face of threats from natural disasters, human beings have always sought to adapt and take actions that lessen the impact of such catastrophes. The Greenist, both in Australia and New Zealand have been quick to the chase. Global warming is to blame, they tell us. The only long term response to tragedies such as the bush fires that makes any sense is to combat global warming. Anything less is simply polishing brass on a sinking ship. So, maybe the Greens have got it right this time. Maybe anti-global warming strategies are the best and most sane human adaptation strategy to bush fires.
Think again. Let's put the bush fires not just in their meteorological context, but in the context of the environmental policy regime in which they occurred. Over the past few days, several leading Australian newspapers have carried articles on how greenist inspired policy and lobbying turned out to have the unexpected consequence of exacerbating the bush fires significantly. Get this right: Greenist progammes and policies are now alleged to have made the bush fires many times worse. Why? Because Greens have succeeded in banning prudent preventative strategies throughout Victoria.
First up, Miranda Devine, in the Sydney Morning Herald, provides a succinct sketch of the conditions which led to some of the worst fires in fifty years.
It wasn't climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn't arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves. (Emphasis, ours)
Green ideology prevented landholders from clearing vegetation away. Come on! That's a bit of a long bow, Miranda. Surely? Miranda clearly thinks not. She is calling for figurative blood.
So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.
Mmmm. Greenies from lamp-posts. Is Greenist ideology really to blame?
Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of "prescribed burning". Also known as "hazard reduction", it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.
In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.
"Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire … since … about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic." God help him, he was right.
Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake - at the epicentre of Saturday's disaster, where at least 147 people died - during a smaller fire there in 2007.
"The contractors were out working on the fire lines. They put in containment lines and cleared off some of the fire trails. Two weeks later that fire broke out, but unfortunately those trails had been blocked up again [by greens] to turn it back to its natural state … Instances like that are just too numerous to mention. Governments … have been in too much of a rush to appease green idealism … This thing about locking up forests is just not working."
Around about now we suspect you are starting to get a bit mad. Us too. Greens preventing controlled burn offs in the quiet season. Greens stopping or obstructing fire mitigation strategies. Greens blocking up trails. Greens trying to "protect" gum forests by keeping humans and their mitigation strategies out.
The Kinglake area was a nature-loving community of tree-changers, organic farmers and artists to the north of Melbourne. A council committed to reducing carbon emissions dominates the Nillumbik shire, a so-called "green wedge" area, where restrictions on removing vegetation around houses reportedly added to the dangers. In nearby St Andrews, where more than 20 people are believed to have died, surviving residents have spoken angrily of "greenies" who prevented them from cutting back trees near their property, including in one case, a tea tree that went "whoomp". Dr Phil Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit and one of the pioneers of prescribed burning, said yesterday if the fire-ravaged Victorian areas had been hazard-reduced, the flames would not have been as intense.
Kinglake and Maryville, now crime scenes, are built among tall forests of messmate stringy bark trees which pose a special fire hazard, with peeling bark creating firebrands that carry fire five kilometres out. "The only way to reduce the flammability of the bark is by prescribed burning" every five to seven years, Cheney said. He estimates between 35 and 50 tonnes a hectare of dry fuel were waiting to be gobbled up by Saturday's inferno.
Fuel loads above about eight tonnes a hectare are considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. . . .
Only seven months ago, the Victorian Parliament's Environment and Natural Resources Committee tabled its report into the impact of public land management on bushfires, with five recommendations to enhance prescribed burning. This included tripling the amount of land to be hazard-reduced from 130,000 to 385,000 hectares a year. There has been little but lip service from the Government in response. Teary politicians might pepper their talking points with opportunistic intimations of "climate change" and "unprecedented" weather, but they are only diverting the blame. With yes-minister fudging and craven inclusion of green lobbyists in decision-making, they have greatly exacerbated this tragedy.
Well, maybe it's just Miranda. She is known as a bit of a hothead. She is a professing Christian, and after all you know how weird those people are. Let's engage in a bit of good old fashioned ad hominem, and go chain ourselves to a few more trees. Not so fast.
The issue here is pretty simple. Even stupid people like us can see how build-ups of tinder dry vegetation would exacerbate a fire. Even simpletons know that controlled burn offs to prevent a worse fire later make sense. But is it really the Greenists and their controlled councils that are to blame.
Yup. It would seem so. Consider this article in the Melbourne Age:
Angry survivors blame council 'green' policy
* Andrea Petrie, Arthurs Creek
* February 11, 2009
ANGRY residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk.
During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne's northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze — criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council's help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. "We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down," he said.
"We wanted trees cut down on the side of the road … and you can't even cut the grass for God's sake."
Later, the meeting was cut short when Mr Spooner's father, Dennis, collapsed in his chair and an ambulance had to be called. Despite losing his wife and son and everything he owned, a friend later said he had not stopped or slept since the weekend.
So, it's real then--not just a wild allegation. Homeowners have faced local council force and prevention of them carrying out the simplest of prudent preventative strategies because of Greenist pressure upon councils.
And then there was the article in The Australian two days ago. (This article was publicised in the NZ blogosphere by Adolf, then later by Whaleoil)
THE shire council covering some of the areas hit hardest by the bushfires was warned five years ago that its policy of encouraging people to grow trees near their homes to give the appearance of a forest would lead to disaster. One of Australia's leading bushfire experts, Rod Incoll, warned Nillumbik Shire Council in a 2003 report that it risked devastation if it went ahead with changes to planning laws proposed by green groups that restricted the removal of vegetation.
Mr Incoll, the Victorian fire chief from 1990 to 1996, and David Packham, a former CSIRO bushfire scientist and academic who also produced a report on the issue, argued against the regulations, which actively encouraged the builders of new homes to plant trees around the houses for aesthetic reasons.
Mr Incoll told The Australian yesterday the proposed planning rules were "foolhardy and dangerous and ought not to be proceeded with". . . .
Mr Incoll said that in 2003, green groups were pushing for changes to planning laws that included restrictions on the removal of vegetation, "and worse still, the requirement for planting vegetation around and almost over houses, as part of any planning permit to build a house in the shire of Nillumbik, so it gave the appearance from the outside of being a forest". . . .
Victoria's auditor-general warned 17 years ago that a failure to carry out controlled burn-offs placed the state at risk of bushfires. In a 1992 report to parliament, the auditor-general criticised the Department of Conservation and Environment for letting combustible material build up on the forest floor.
"The failure of the department to achieve its planned fuel reduction burns each year has resulted in an increasing accumulation of fuel on forest floors," the report stated. "This makes Victoria's forests and protected lands more susceptible to the occurrence offires."
The report said the department was not burning in "priority1 zones" because they were too close to houses".
"Those areas warranting the highest level of protection to human life, property and public assets had in fact received the lowest level of protection," it said.
The auditor-general's audit found "fuel loads" of combustible material on the forest floors in the range of 20 to 60 tonnes a hectare in the Alexandra and Orbost regions and at Blackwood near Geelong - seven times higher than the department's target.
So there we have it. To the Greenists, trees are holy icons. They are not to be touched. Protect them at all costs.
Will this lead to a change in policy? Sadly, we do not expect so. Greenism is part of Athenian religion which is always interested in the self-destruction and self-degradation of man and it has a thousand ways and policies and ideologies to achieve it. The trees and "nature" will remain sacrosanct. It is people who will be banned. Councils will hop to it. People will not be allowed to live any more in the countryside. "Remember the terrible bush fires of 2009," the council bureaucrats will sanctimoniously intone, while passing more an more restrictive measures stopping people from subduing the earth, managing it, and husbanding it.
People-free forests is what the Greenists really want. Well, no, actually they would really prefer a people-free planet.
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