Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions, the Aboriginal Way

Something about "Rabbit Proof Fence" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and maybe even "A People's History of the United States" seems relevant to the mess here in the West.

As a sixth-generation Northern Californian, i am well aware of strategic off-season fires. The MiWoks used to do it, and later the early ranchers did it as well. The Forest Service stopped allowing that in the early 1900s before it became known to forest scientists that this was a way to keep the forests healthy. But what this article does not say is why this is no longer a viable strategy in the overpopulated, overdeveloped Western U.S.: local governments have allowed real estate developers to build into the forest land. It's no longer viable to do effective control burning because of the proximity of houses. Southern California, and increasingly northern California and all the other western states where people who can no longer afford to live in Cali are moving, have homes built right up to and into fire prone forests. The Paradise fire in northern California was another instance of poor planning. It was a very small mountain town whose population doubled between 1970 and 2000. Why does that matter? Well, rural mountain towns were built differently in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with larger distances between houses. The amount of water used by that many more people (many of whom do not have the same sensibility about water as the long time locals do) drains the underground springs, leading to trees dying and becoming fodder for fire. The infrastructure is inadequate (roads in and out, etc.) The greed of developers and politicians created these situations.

I read all the comments. All those "Noble Savage" ones. Ancient wisdoms. Sorry, but most native/aboriginal practices were not about being stewards of the land. Just short term survival. Part of the reason they didn't do so much damage as the Europeans was that they lacked the tools to do so. Literally. Did you know the the now pestulant white tailed deer was on its way to extinction once? The Indians wanted the manufactured goods of Europeans, and using the latter's guns killed deer for just the hides, which they traded. The rest of the deer left for scavengers. Natives have probably better understood the connectiveness of all things, but that didn't stop them from doing what they saw as necessary for survival.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, the forests of the continent were many, many times more dense than they are now. However, it was a common practice of American Indian tribes to shape the landscape through controlled burning, creating open spaces where deer and other animals would come to graze, making them easier to hunt. Without being burdened by an inherent fear of Nature—rather, having a healthy respect, and sometimes a spiritual relationship with it—indigenous peoples acquired knowledge of ways to direct the forces of Nature to their advantage. European religions and cultures saw Nature as sinful. Their intent was to subjugate. After several hundred years of their intention to conquer the planet, we are seeing the end result of their practices and beliefs.

The European mindset in general seems to have lost its connection with and understanding of nature a long time ago.

I recall that some years back the US National Park service, in a then misguided conservation program, 'banned' lighting controlled brush burning fires at Yellowstone, allowing an accumulation of flammable undergrowth. Then one day the whole area caught light causing a very destructive major fire. Sometime in the 1990's I think. Perhaps the 'true' natives known a thing or two!?

The state of Florida has been using controlled underbrush fires for years as preventive measures. Rarely, one of these may be get out of control in terms of excessive smoke posing hazards to driving conditions, but it has generally been quite effective in preventing major coflagations.

You mean Australia never heard of the term 'control burn?'

There is a knee-jerk reaction to this method of "Oh, that's makes sense and it will work", but to anyone who has studied it in depth, they will understand that this type of control suits an environment that no longer exists - and will likely never exist. It takes more than interesting articles on the Internet - there is literature on this very subject. People also tend to brush over the fact that tens - if not hundreds of thousands of square miles we see now in Australia used to be lush forests - until it was raised to the ground by Aboriginals to create grazing pastures for easier animals to kill. People also like to quickly brush over the fact that many areas that are now burning were never cleared by Aboriginals, and there were no known fires - man-made or otherwise - in these forests for hundreds if not thousands of years. So clearly there were huge areas of land Aboriginals never considered for back burning - so why are they burning now? Climate. If you've an Australian continent that has the environment scientists predicted decades ago due to climate change then soon you won't have to worry about fires at all - there will be by and large just desert. After all, every desert used to be a forest and what changed them was never burning or not burning, it was the climate that changed. We don't back burn ever here in WV and never will have to because our climate means we don't need to. You can fight facts all you want. The truth is just painful.

There have been efforts, not very successful, to turn carbon from plants into fuel for internal combustion engines. If the efforts can be revived, they might supplement the preventive burns advocated in this article.

Since the massive Yellowstone fires of 1988, and probably well before, periodic articles such as this one have served as useful correctives, but they have had little impact on policy. One reason may be that the day to day reporting of wildfire continues to present fire as the enemy. That repetitive message has far more power than these periodic articles that say, "Oh, by the way, fire is actually an important part of fire ecology, and the real enemy is a dangerous buildup of fuel due to fire suppression." Nature is complex, while storylines are kept simple for easy consumption, and the result is a maintenance of the status quo that grows ever more costly and destructive. Knowing how important fire is for forest health, I read the daily reporting--which for some reason decides it's necessary to tell endless stories of victims while saying nothing about how nature works--and wonder how people are supposed to learn about fire ecology. The people who need to learn are not likely the ones reading this article. These periodic correctives are useful and important, but are not enough.

In reality, this technique is well know here in the US Forest Service for some time. It was noted by the Forest Service many decades ago down on the US-Mexico border. While we were fighting fires constantly on the US side, Mexico did not seem to have the fires we had. The cause was that Mexico did not have the money to fight fires near the border, it was an attitude of "burn, baby, burn". This too cleared out the fuel, while our efforts were in preserving forests and woodlands, put out the fires as quickly as possible. Preserve the forests and shrubs. It wasn't long before the Forest Service took on the same attitude of Mexico and the Australian Aborigines that have reduced fires. The Forest Service and states, fight fires actively when those fires threaten homes and lives. Sometimes, let it burn can be a benefit.

As far back as I can remember, experts in the United States have been recommending controlled burning as essential in preventing eventual uncontrolled forest fires. And people who live in the forest or even near it objecting to allowing any forest fire. It is an unfortunate side effect of democracy that popular whims override expert recommendations.

There are ways of living in the world that save the world. There are ways of living in the world that destroy the world. As those of us who live in ways that destroy the world become more affected by that destruction it would be wise to value the knowledge that those peoples who we pushed aside have. Our western ways of seeing the world as something to be exploited must be adjusted to a saner perspective or we will cause our own extinction.

The white colonizers may have been afraid of fire, but they were not at afraid to burn down the practices and customs, which--for millenia--connected the native people to the world around them.

Ah, isn’t our modernity, lost in the thickets of technology, sickening. We think we’re so smart. Here we’ve got a story of an Australian Aborigine following Nature’s need for periodic bushfires. She didn’t need a fire behavior computer model, a weather station or a report in the climate crisis from the UN to tell her that it was good to light her own fires. It’s time to let the practical smart women run the world, women like Violet Lawson and Greta Thunberg. We men have only screwed it up.

About time there was coverage about aboriginal solutions to white man failures in Australia. I have been wondering why such measures weren't tried, as fire has been round as long as aboriginal culture, despite the considered superiority of the white mans way of problem solving....all evidence to the contrary. NEXT, maybe there can be widespread professional respect for Chinese Herbal Medicine as a solution to antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria, virus, fungi. After all, it has only been working for 5000 years...but what could those Chinese possibly know that 200 year old white man science did not discover?

Using fire as a conservation tool was also practiced by Native Americans. The irony here is that we all grew up with the image and message of Smokey the Bear which was meant to stop illegally set fires but left the impression that all woods burning was bad. Here in the N. J. Pinelands and in the Pinelands of the Deep South forward thinking conservationists are using controlled burning to not only lessen the fuel load but also for the health of trees and animals in that forest.

It's true that we have much to learn from indigenous practices relating to land management in Australia (and I expect in the rest of the World), but practices developed over millennia, may need significant adaptation to cope with climate change. Cooinda is in the Northern Territory about 2000 miles from the Mallacoota in the south east. Cooinda's climate is classified as tropical savanna (with a dry winter), Mallacoota is classified as Oceanic with a wet winter. What works in one place won't necessarily work in another, but clearly things will need to change, if we want the country to stay the same! On New Years Eve the temperature in Mallacoota was 49C (about 120F)with a screaming westerly wind, the only thing that doesn't burn in those conditions is concrete.

There is no doubt the rest of Australia has much to learn about management of the land from its original custodians. However, I would like to hear about what those responsible for fire management in the south (other than the one ANU academic) have to say. In northern Australia, they have the monsoon season, a time when it is virtually guaranteed that controlled burns can be done safely. That is not necessarily true in the south, where the fire service is well aware of the value of controlled burns but know from experience that, unless they are guaranteed to have cool, wet wether, it is often too dangerous to do controlled burns. Also, unless something is done to reign in emissions globally, presumably with Australia playing its part rather than dragging its feet, northern Australia is expected to become uninhabitable. So all this could be a moot point. Interestingly, Aboriginal communities appear to be well aware that global warming poses an existential threat to their way of life. This is also a lesson the rest of Australia would do well to heed.

Lets not lose sight of the fact that the areas mentioned in this article are in northern Australia, a tropical monsoonal climate; vastly different from the arid conditions in the centre and the temperate climate in the south where the worst bushfires always occur. It's not easy to control undergrowth in mountainous terrain and with an ever expanding population encroaching on lands, a couple of years of drought followed by heatwaves will always present a danger and no amount of clearing can mitigate that.

For those who are reading in the US think about comparing the climate of Florida with that of Southern California. The micro climates in Australia are as diverse as those in the US and fire control is not a simple subject. Perhaps if the fire managers thirty years ago had done some listening and learning we may have had some ability to intervene in the current events, but I feel that smoke and mirrors are being introduced. the question that needs to be asked is what were the forestry practices of the local mob for there was no Pan Aboriginality.

as someone who has critiqued NY Times editorial policy about climate change and the weird silence of their opinion columnists on the existential threat, i was very pleased with this excellent climate reporting. it's not about how the weather is bad, or heat records are newly broken, or "more things that are like things we are gonna see more of in the future". all that implicitly nurtures a sense of helplessness. in this case, it's about adaptation, and adaptation -- change, change in the way we do things -- is one of the five principal climate change strategies: adaptation, conservation, "carbon pricing" and other incentive regulations, renewable energy technologies, and public education. mr. fuller's report assumes that we are capable to take charge of our destiny and shape it in a positive direction for all future generations. he has also deftly combined the rights of indigenous peoples, the rationale for adaptation, the importance of regulatory support ("cap and trade"), the fact that simple solutions can be powerful, and the truism that we are not powerless in the face of our future. kudos all around.

And this article is also flat out wrong in another respect. The reason the fires were less bad in Northern Australia was that the Indian Ocean dipole and and the el nino - nina combination Its science. Look it up. Outrageous that this feel good misreading of primitive hunting methods is being held up as a remedy. Really dangerously wrong. The best way is to deal with climate change, and put out fires as soon as they start with waterbombing aircraft, and to build physical barriers rather than adding more to the atmospheric carbon load with more burning. More animal deaths, more sparks that can be airborne.

BLM and the Forest Service have been employing controlled burns in the western U.S. to great effect - when fires do inevitably happen, there is much less fuel (such as tall grasses, dense tree network) to create the monstrous effects we have seen throughout the last decade, and especially in California. I think we'll need to see a big cultural shift happen in the U.S. for good fire management practices to be utilized. As homes keep expanding into rural areas, homeowners will need to be responsible and cautious about fuel mitigation on their property. Dense shrubbery and trees, not to mention grasses, will need to constantly be managed and far enough away from homes to have enough of an effect. And yes, even prescribed burns will need to happen on top of this constant vigilance to keep undergrowth manageable. I'm unaware because I live in a city, but does home owners insurance in rural areas require home owners to mitigate their risks by doing these practices? I surely hope so.

We were just in the Flinders-Chase National Park on the western end of Kangaroo Island. The main message of the exhibits there is that the flora is adapted to fire and needs fire to survive. It’s likely that fire suppression is doomed to fail in places like that. The problem is that farmers and homeowners and people who inhale are not adapted to fire.

Early reports of the US settlements described a park-like setting, in many places allowing "a carriage to be driven through it" as a result of regular burns by Native Americans. The land was managed effectively like a game park, using the fires set routinely. Early documentation comments that "every Indian has his fire sticks with him and uses them often". Use of controlled burns is not new, or special in the US as in Australia. And it worked for millenia. Perhaps it could be given a try.

It is now time for the “White Way” of thinking to step aside and be inclusive and open to the ways of other people. Our survival cannot be left to the belief systems of just one group of people, it simply isn’t working. Indigenous peoples across the globe have always known what to do, and how to work with nature. Many Native peoples, decades and centuries ago, saw these catastrophes coming...

This is simply untrue. Historically they used fire to flush animals from the bush so they could hunt them. No way was it used to prevent wildfires. Its grasping at straws and a joke in the face of climate change. It should not be held up as a remedy or an excuse.

“The country’s thinly populated north, where Aboriginal influence and traditions are much stronger than in the south, is not as hamstrung by political debates and residents’ concerns about the health effects of smoke.” The thin population density is what make this method possible. Let’s not ignore that.

I did some consulting for a mining company in the Northern Territory (Gove) about 30 years ago. On the weekend a couple of the mining engineers took me for a ride in the bush. The bush consisted of fairly widely spaced trees with very little undergrowth. I commented on this and the mining company employees told me that was because the local aborigines did controlled burning on a routine basis. The local engineers clearly felt that the aborigines knew how to do it correctly. So, this idea of controlled burning seems to have been common knowledge decades ago. Why hasn't the Australian government been using it?

There are parts of California and other regions of the western U.S. that have the same pattern of weather as much of Australia; a rainy season in winter, followed by a dry summer that virtually guarantees bush fires. It should be possible to use the same preventive burning methods here that we see the aboriginal people in Australia using. It is about time that we realized that the problem of wildfires in California is made worse by how we currently manage the land, allowing burnable fuel to build up, leading to large, uncontrollable fires. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let us relearn how to manage the land properly.

Wow! Learning new techniques from indigenous Aboriginals. I wonder whether our populations of indigenous people in North and South America might have some ancient ideas that could be put to use? That's a question I've never heard anyone in public office even raise.

What an ingenious promethean approach by the Aborigines! Old cultures have a better understanding of the world and nature than modern politics and profit-driven societies.