Due to the recent spate of bushfires along the east coast, there’s been a lot of discussion – in the media and around backyard BBQs - about whether we’re seeing something fundamentally different in fire behaviour than has been previously known. The media is quick to use terms like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unforecast’ to describe the extent and intensity of the fires.
But, before we join the same band-wagon, it’s worth considering the situation from an historical perspective. Specifically, for thousands of years before European settlement, Aboriginal Australians burned forests to promote grasslands for hunting and other purposes. Recent research suggests that these burning practices had a range of impacts on the ecosystem including an effect on the timing and intensity of the Australian summer monsoon. Habitual burning of vegetation impacted the environment by effectively extending the dry season and delaying the start of the monsoon. The practices also created a fire dependant ecosystem. And what about the extinction of Australia’s megafauna? There’s research indicating that even low-intensity hunting of Australian megafauna could have resulted in their extinction within just a few hundred years (University of WA (UWA), Monash University and Australian Geographic).
So, that’s lots of change to the environment - well before there was any evidence of significant climate change.
Now let’s take a look at what’s been going on since soldiers in red coats and convicts started calling Australia home. Since European settlement, we’ve seen almost half of the country’s forests cut down, largely for agricultural reasons: whether that’s to run livestock – or to grow crops (including rice and cotton) - that are fundamentally unsuited to Australian conditions. Nationally, Australia has lost 25% rainforest, 45% of open forest, 32% woodland forest and 30% of mallee forest in 200 years. In Victoria, 60% of the state's forests have been cleared.
And we’re not slowing down. In 2017–18, the clearance rate of woody vegetation in Queensland was 392,000 hectares per year—over four and a half times what it was in 2009. Nationwide, around 5,000 square kilometres of virgin bushland and advanced regrowth are destroyed annually. In addition to wiping out native wildlife, land clearance is a major cause of salinity and causes around 14% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. As for the animals, more than 100 species have become extinct in NSW alone since European settlement. All in all, around the country 1,000 animal and plant species are at risk of extinction. And it’s not just koalas.
The problem isn’t simply that land clearance destroys habitats. For one thing, it also contributes to lower rainfall. If you've ever walked in a rainforest (or a greenhouse for that matter), you'll know that the air inside is heavy with moisture. As Dr Andrich from UWA puts it, “[f]orests create water vapour and that then turns into rain. Around 50 per cent of native forests in the state's south-west were cleared between the 1960s and 1980s, which coincided with a decrease of around 16 per cent in inland rainfall compared to coastal rain. Around half of the rainfall decline, at least up until the Year 2000, is a result of land clearing." And, if land clearance reduces rainfall, then it shouldn’t be too surprising to hear that it contributes to warming our land mass as well. That’s because trees support micro-climates. According to satellite research being undertaken at UWA, temperatures are 2 to 3 degrees hotter in areas that have no trees.
So, what’s all this got to do with bushfires? Well … to be blunt we humans have messed things up. We’ve altered Australia’s vegetation in ways that are irreversible. As dense forest has been replaced by open sclerophyll forest, and open forest has become grassland, and fire-tolerant species have come to dominate – we’ve generated an ecosystem dependent on bushfires. In turn, the vegetation has become drier and the land mass has become hotter.
We know that Australia had fire events (created by lightning) before the migration of the Aboriginal into Australia because of ash deposits in the Coral Sea dating to 100,000 years ago. But those fires would not be the mega blazes we’re seeing today because they’d have been mitigated by the wetter forests and adjoining systems.
Which all goes to show: while we may mourn the devastation caused by the current spate and intensity of bushfires, we shouldn’t be surprised by them. After all, we – ourselves - created the conditions under which fires burn – and burn – and burn. And we then complicate matters by not having adequate burn regimes in our National Parks and Forests.
So, what to do about it all?
Would turning all of the prime farming land into woodland be of benefit? Would it reverse what we have now? Would it make it rain? Probably not. But if we stopped land clearing and allowed the marginal agricultural areas to regenerate, it would certainly allow things to cool things down a little. Which would be a good thing. And it would produce moisture into the atmosphere. Which would also be a good thing. And it would help maintain biodiversity and reduce extinctions. Which would be a beautiful thing to do for our planet.
Planting trees would help as well. Yep. That’s a no-brainer. It would help lower the local air temperature and help retain moisture in the soil and lower salinity. More water in the rivers results in more natural growth and healthier systems. But what else could YOU do? (Notice the emphasis on YOU, not the Government or someone else – YOU!).
For one thing, you could stop wasting the produce that this country’s ecosystem pays so heavily to generate. What do I mean? Well, did you know that dumping a kilo of beef wastes the 50,000 litres of water it took to produce that meat; throwing out a kilo of white rice wastes 2,385 litres; and wasting a kilo of potatoes costs 500 litres?! And if you think all this wastage is being done by ‘someone else’- you’re probably wrong. Consider the following statistics about food waste in Australia (from www.ozharvest.org):
· Australians are throwing away food worth $5.2 billion a year, with the average household wasting $616 worth.
· Australians waste close to three million tonnes of food per annum, or 136 kilos per person.
· Australians discard up to 20% of the food they purchase. This amounts to one out of every five bags of groceries they buy.
· An estimated 20 to 40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected even before they reach the shops – mostly because they don’t match the supermarkets' excessively strict cosmetic standards.
And before you think that last point is some-else’s fault (the supermarket giants), think again. The more you demand the perfectly round orange and the more perfectly conical and straight a carrot, the more waste there is, of both produce and water. If you were happy to pay the same price for bent carrots and spotty apples as you are for pretty ones, then the standards set for growers wouldn’t be so high. And the food would not be wasted.
Altering the landscape, over land clearing, over stocking, over pumping, over populating, over consuming. They’re all connected. So, as the bushfires continue to burn along the east and west coasts, with no sign of let-up anytime soon, the real question is: have we learnt anything? When the smoke subsides, the ash settles, the earth begins to regenerate and houses are rebuilt, will anything have fundamentally changed in our attitude towards our environment? Or will we simply settle into a ‘new normal’. A ‘new normal’ where spring morphs into summer, where bushfires habitually raze huge tracts of our country, where plant and animal species line-up to join the list of extinct and critically endangered, and where – meanwhile - we all continue to stand around our BBQs agreeing with each other that “this has been one hell of summer” – and its only just begun!
