How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox
By Paul Homewood
h/t Tallbloke
Some of us have been pointing this out for a long time!
Southeast Australia’s bushfire crisis culminated in the devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 that burnt nearly 25 million hectares of bush.
Our new research demonstrates how the scale of this disaster blew out due to legislation introduced in the 1970s, which was based on idea that nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention.
We investigated the bushfire history of one of the worst hit areas: Buchan on Gunaikurnai Country in Victoria. We found no bushfires burned there for almost a century until the mid 1970s, following the establishment of the Land Conservation Act of 1970—legislation that sought to protect the Australian bush from humans.
This legislation banned farmers from mimicking Aboriginal burning practices by using frequent fires to promote grass for livestock. As a result, the amount of flammable trees and shrubs exploded in the region. It was only after this prohibition on burning that catastrophic bushfires became an issue in the Buchan area.
The prolonged neglect of southeast Australian forests under the guise of conservation means our forests now carry dangerous levels of fuels. This creates the conditions in which climate-driven bushfires become megafires, devastating Country and people’s lives.
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-1970s-laws-australia-tinderbox.html
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Don’t forget the Australian 1939 fires – Black Friday.
Well before climate change became fashionable – and the subsequent enquiry led to forest management techniques – which were then ignored.
https://www.ffm.vic.gov.au/history-and-incidents/black-friday-1939
This sounds so reminiscent of tales from the US, where allowing build-up of flammable materials through bad forestry practice has materially increased severity of forest fires in many areas, with nothing at all to do with that universal panacea of the chattering classes “climate change”.
Putting out small firesm before they get going can’t help. Any natural reduction of flammable material is curtailed
Same as our recent fires (although a much smaller scale) here in the UK in the recent devastating 2 day heatwave. Lack of maintainance.
Being in a rural location all my services come in from overhead wires we regularly have either power cuts or phone /internet outages caused by trees falling on cables.
I know exactly what you mean. The incidence of power outages is so high where I am (North Downs – Kent) that I have a back up generator with manual transfer switch. It has come into service 3 times in the last two weeks. The slightest puff of wind now and overhead lines are coming down as the tree canopy has had no proper maintenance since the storm of 1987. That’s 35 years of unchecked growth on top of the fact that many of the poles are drifting around like drunken sailors.
This “protection” of trees has locally reached bizarre proportions. Recently the DIY retailer Wickes pulled out of opening a new branch in Canterbury because they could not guarantee preservation of some overgrown trees by a redundant railway cutting that nobody even knew was there. They opted to just give up and not bother. Trees seem to have more rights than humans theses days.
👍🏻
Once again, we are dealing with the “Mediterranean Sclerophyll Formation”. In California it is referred to as “chaparral.”
This is the plant formation which rings the drier areas of the Mediterranean, coastal California and Mexico, and Australia. It consists of shrubby species which have leathery, woody leaves filled with resins. All of this serves to protect the plants from drought. However, it serves another way. The resins are highly flammable and thus the formation is prone to frequent flash fires. Although those fires kill competing species, the members of the chaparral formation spring back from their live root systems.
When the intellectual elite prevent the natural occurrence of fires OR prevent the removal of forest litter then there is a build-up of fuel on the forest floor. Subsequent fires are not flash fires, but serious fires which kill everything, including the chaparral species. In California, this practice leads to serious mudslides following rains as there are no longer root systems for a fast recovery of the shrubs.
California may have an additional stresses during dry periods.
If you go back into the state’s early history, the central valley had 4 million acres of wetlands increasing the humidity of the central valley and the foothills. When the wetlands were drained to use these lands for agriculture, the wetland area was reduced to 400,000 acres but at least irrigation led to evaporative transpiration from the irrigated farmland.
Then the water conservationists started taking over. First they diverted a third of the water to “environmental discharge” which is essentially running fresh water out to sea. Then in dry years, the priority for remaining water is to send it to urban and suburban metropolitan areas. Central Valley irrigation for agriculture has the lowest priority reducing humidity in the valley and foothills in the dry years while making it hotter.
Off topic, but information about potential blackout periods in the UK:
Dang, forgot a / there in the tag. Too annoyed to type straight?
Yes indigenous Australians were innovative custodians and adept at suppressing megafires with their cool season patch mosaic burns ..One theory has it the 1851 Black Thursday infernos were so destructive because an estimated 80 % of Victorian aboriginals had died from introduced diseases spread overland from New South Wales before the first port and hinterland colonies were established so the land was left in a terribly unmanaged state when the fiercely hot blustery winds fanned the flames on that fateful summer morning …The bush fuel loads had piled up for decades as the surviving aboriginal tribes were forced off their lands The lessons of the 1974 -75 bushfires preceded by the record national rainfall anomaly of the 20th century that ravaged 117 million hectares of the Australian continent, should be heeded in light of the heavy La Nina rains of the past two years to prepare for the inevitable conflagrations over the next 1-3 fire seasons … ..The drenching rains stimulate grasslands and bush understory growth that transform into mounting flammable fuel loads during the summer months and future drought cycles if hazard reduction burns and other appropriate measures are not undertaken ahead of time .. I suspect they wont be . The encroaching conservation laws under state governments [ the worst of them NSW and Victorian Labor governments ] have locked up huge expanses of fire prone wilderness. Combined with neglected fire mitigation procedures and pernicious Green ideology permeating our public institutions , this has created a dangerous tinderbox effect .. Land management failures were one of the findings of the 2009 Black Saturday Royal Commission and the lessons were ignored once more before the 2019 and 2020 megafires raged over south-east Australia …..The myth of climate change driven bushfires will be recycled again to exonerate the laws and authorities reponsible
Very encouraging to read of this law. I filmed the aftermath of the 1983 fires in the Warnabool area of Victoria for the BBC1 TV Farming programme. In the middle of a drought as well, with sheep and cattle being slaughtered as there was no feed. The locals always blamed the “green” laws that stopped them controlling the bush – you needed legal permission to cut down any tree you could not get two hands around. Those who lost everything were amazingly stoical – “she’ll be right, mate” was the attitude. They never complained about the government not helping – Canberra erected fences between properties and that was all.
I have had huge respect for Ozzie farmers ever since – less so for the stupid and idealistic environmentalists, for whom any human action is wrong! Maybe the recent fires will have changed a few minds – but little sign of it here in the UK!
The stupid.
It burns.
I think ridicule is now the only strategy.
Next time someone claims “renewables are the answer” we should just laugh and say “are you you really that stupid?”.