Sea change required in the way forests and bush are managed in Australia
January 3rd, 2007 by Warwick HughesThere are lessons to be learned from the December 2006 wildfires in Victoria and Tasmania. There were also lessons from the 2003 South Eastern Australian high country fires but many do not seem to have taken notice.
First lesson is crystal clear, if we do not achieve greater areas of, timely, hazard reduction burns, when they can safely be done in winter and spring, then nature will do the burning for us, at her pleasure, as we have seen in December 2006.
Watching the media reporting it was obvious that many burning areas were overgrown with tangled and thick (probably weedy) understorey.
I recall two cases where mention was made that firefighters had been impeded by access tracks having been blocked and I have heard that Victorian land managers have been blocking tracks by dozer and use of fallen logs etc for near many years now.
What else should be done ? Not in any particular order of importance:
Quite enough for now and I have not even got to the media hype linking the fires with “global warming”.
Posted in News and Views | 8 Comments »
January 4th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I would say that the US and Australia need to compare notes on this. The US, especially here out West, has been down the same road, of late, and has the same problems you have highlighted.
January 5th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Steve,
correct – but the main problem seems to be that the Greens have basically got control of the various EPA’s here in Oz, and are trying to infiltrate, via their lefty mates, the Department of Industry and Resources here in Western Australia.
What our parents fought for in WWII seems to have reborn as the Green movement but fortunately not yet with the worst of what those regimes achieved at the time and in some cases, to this day.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:14 am
Yes Louis,
Hitler was a greenie too, (I don’t think you meant the “for”did you?) the concern for nature over human life comes out in conversations with them as you gain their confidence.
Tom Clancey in “Rainbow Six”, a 700 page thriller, takes it to the logical conclusion of a very plausible plot by the environmental movements extermists oops ,freudian slip, extremists, to spread a modified form of Ebola around the world, object total depopulation but for the chosen few. With the way that AGW has been taken up as a religion by people in power this 1998 plot looks more plausible daily, just read bird flu for ebola, avoid the vaccinations – they are the real spreader!
January 17th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Google brought me here.
I was looking for some balanced and reasoned debate.
Obviously won’t be finding it here.
Let’s keeping going in circles, calling each other names.
Let’s keep calling our enemies “Hitler”, “Ebola virus spreaders” and “Extremists” (without even noticing the irony in that).
Let’s present our point of view as if it’s the only right one and everyone who thinks differently should shut up or preferably die.
I despair!
January 17th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Clay, but Hitler was a Greenie. He was a man ahead of his time. He anticipated both today’s neo-pagan totalitarians (witness the National Bolshevist movements and their credo) and today’s Green dirigiste types (witness Nanny government embracing the “precautionary principle” as an excuse to reassert itself into highly micromanaged economic, life style and land use control). The Hitler analogy is spot on.
January 18th, 2007 at 2:23 am
No, I’m afraid the analogy is completely wrong.
To say “Thing A is like Thing B” I think you would have to agree with me, that that Thing A would need to be at least, say 60%, perhaps even 90% like Thing B.
I’d say you would be seriously struggling to get 1% alikeness between Hitler and “Greenies”.
I don’t know any greenie who has advocated genocide as a policy, nor extermination camps, nor youth indoctrination camps, nor making people of a particular race or sexual persuasion wear badges to”mark them” so they can be ridiculed/monitored, nor invading other countries as a way out of economic strife, nor assassinating your opponents, nor bringing military uniforms in as a national fashion, nor creating giant patriotic edifices, nor slave labour…
These things I mention may in fact be a very small part of who Hitler was, or what he did (he did some great things, such as the “National Car” the Volkswagen, that was affordable to almost anyone), or what policies he had.
But they are what is evoked in everyone’s mind when you say the word “Hitler”.
Which I’m sure is why you say it, because it’s probably about the greatest insult you could give to those people you disagree with (but obviously don’t know any personally, or you would know that they are about as far from Hitler you could get).
It’s a style of communication known as “propaganda”, pretending what you are saying is rational and completely reasonable when in fact you are appealing to people’s baser instincts and emotions, particularly fear.
Do you feel so powerless that you have to go to such extremes?
January 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Clay:
dieoff.org
Inspired by Margaret Sanger, et al …..
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:44 pm
[...] Satellites find cool lower troposphere over SE Australia when fires started in December 2006. We are waiting for updated surface data. You read it first here. For global map climate.uah.edu/dec2006.htm Previous posting; www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=74 Last Update: Saturday, January 20, 2007. 2:10pm (AEDT)ABC Online Experts warn of rising ‘megafire’ threat [...]