Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher, a biogeographer from the University of Melbourne, explains why bushfires have increased in southeast Australia since the arrival of the British and removal of Aboriginal care and management.
Originally published by 360info
Originally published by 360info
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00:00 The 2019-2020 catastrophic bushfires that impacted an enormous area of
00:06 Southeast Australia, the narrative around these fires that are actually increasing
00:09 in time is that they are an inherent feature of the Australian landscape.
00:13 They're something that we need to deal with and that are being exacerbated or
00:17 made worse by climate change and we really want to interrogate whether that
00:20 was true or not. The understanding that I have both from my cultural
00:25 background as a Wiradjuri person but also in my research with and for
00:29 Aboriginal communities is that landscapes and country in Australia was
00:33 very different prior to the British invasion and that it's quite possible
00:38 that these catastrophic fires have been made more frequent and more severe not
00:44 only through climate change but more deeply through the lack of care and
00:48 management of country. There's a whole bunch of different kinds of information
00:52 we can glean views of the past from and what country was like or what landscapes
00:59 were like in Australia prior to the British invasion and the removal of
01:02 Aboriginal care and management. There's writings of settlers and farmers and
01:06 colonists. There's the paintings from realist painters such as Eugene
01:12 Vongarad whose paintings are considered so accurate that they've re-vegetated
01:16 landscapes based on being able to identify species within his paintings.
01:20 And there's the empirical scientific data that I collect which is essentially
01:26 microscopic remains that are produced by plant communities and by fires and all
01:31 of these kinds of processes that happen that have blown around in the atmosphere
01:35 and they land on lakes and swamps and bogs and they settle and build up over
01:38 years and years and years and sometimes millions of years much like an ice core
01:42 but on land. By piecing these various fragments together to build up a
01:47 whole picture of how country has changed we know that there was a strong
01:53 narrative that Australian landscape particularly in the southeast were open
01:57 so we can glean from that that the landscape has changed a lot. We've got
02:02 sites ranging from Bundjalung country which is a little south of Byron Bay
02:07 right through to Wadawurrung country which is to the west of Melbourne in the
02:12 southwest and they are all from within contemporary forest ecosystems and they
02:18 all show a significant increase in eucalyptus trees occurring immediately
02:26 following the removal and suppression of Aboriginal care and management. It's in
02:30 the mid 1800s you see this increase in eucalypts and why that's important is
02:35 what we know is that eucalypts are incredibly flammable they're fast
02:38 growing and flammable so this increase in eucalypts is associated almost
02:44 uniformly once again with an increase in charcoal okay the products of fire
02:48 being deposited. Eucalypts increase and then fire increases and we see this as a
02:55 uniform pattern right up the east coast of Australia and through the southeast
03:00 and really importantly this happens prior to the onset of anthropogenic
03:05 climate change and now we're in this situation where we have overloaded
03:11 forests that are not cared for or managed as they have been for millions
03:16 of years, sorry thousands of years. We readily conserve or protect but we don't
03:22 return the kind of care and management that these forests need and to keep them
03:28 safe to live in. The approach to looking after country that dominates now
03:34 the conservation the National Park ideology is based on a fundamental lie
03:41 which was that this landscape was uninhabited, was that Aboriginal people
03:45 were intelligent parasites who had no discernible impact on the environment
03:49 all they did was happen to glean their vegetable and animal sustenance where it
03:55 arose and this lie perpetuates it stems from those early colonists ideas about
04:01 country they would write these open landscapes the splendor of these open
04:05 landscapes that we know ecologically if you leave them alone turn into forests
04:08 so the fact that they were open and grassland meant that there was some
04:11 intervention happening so right at that foundation the founding document
04:16 that terra nullius is based on was unoccupied land terra nullius, nobody's
04:20 land and that myth and that lie is perpetuated right through to the present
04:24 day. In terms of solutions it's multifaceted we need to address that
04:28 deep fundamental cultural schism that is perpetuating this problem that is
04:34 setting up things like you know our firefighters they are incredible people
04:39 but the fundamental paradigm that you need a paramilitary organization to
04:45 fight fire in a landscape that is incredibly flammable and has been cared
04:49 for and managed with fire for at least 60,000 years is one of the systemic
04:55 things or at least representative of the systemic schism the split between
05:00 reality and where we're existing today that exists in this continent and I see
05:05 society sitting now you know a very simplified spectrum between this
05:09 narcissistic view that environments and the world is there for us and we take
05:14 take take take take you see there's a mining sector logging sector all this
05:17 that everything's there for us that has given rise to this misanthropic the
05:22 human hating group the antidote to that is to lock humans out and keep them out
05:26 and it misses the whole appropriate engagement with country and the very
05:31 fundamental principle of healthy country healthy people but Aboriginal people
05:34 because we are a part of it we need to get it get inventive you know if we're
05:40 not happy with handing over the reins to Aboriginal people and letting them take
05:43 control and in many cases that's it's not very possible because we've let
05:46 these systems get so wild and so sick that converting them back to healthy
05:53 country with fire becomes too dangerous so do we have to go in and intervene
05:57 selective logging follow up with some burning there's resistance to that but
06:01 let's try it let's try these these different things we have to get
06:05 inventive you're in this moment of almost chaos or or uncertainty and we
06:10 have to start trying different things but the one fundamental thing that
06:15 needs to underpin it all is engaging traditional owners this isn't a us or
06:19 them situation we all live on this country now on this continent and we all
06:23 live on country this is about empowering Aboriginal people to reconnect and bring
06:28 their enormous reservoirs of knowledge to solve the wicked problems that we
06:32 have now
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