Helga Vierich writes that Fire has long played a part in the ecology of the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. Among the Kua of the south-central Kalahari the power of natural and man-made fires is well understood. These hunter-gatherers use fire to control ticks, increase plant fruit yields, alter the species composition of wild plant communities, influence the movement of game, and to attract specific animals into snares and traps.

Article about Brown Mountain on the Anarchist media net says that the logging of Brown Mountain will be done by public servants who would be otherwise deployed in our poorly tended ecosystems if they were not sent off to log. However EEG disagrees on this point. See related important corrections to original article in comments below it inside. They also make interesting reading.

Threatened species day is 7th September 2009. It might just as well be Australia day because all our native animals are being squeezed out of their habitats. Perhaps the very most endangered is the little Leadbeater's Possum, living only within a tiny area of Victoria.
Decades of logging in native forests, the devastating impacts of the 2009 bushfires and the massive levels of Salvage Logging taking place post-fires are tipping our State Faunal Emblem over the edge towards extinction!
Please Act this Threatened Species Day … 7th September 2009 - more inside.

First new patient in Wildhaven since the fires.
The large and serious eyes in the long face make you think of E.T., but this is actually a tiny baby kangaroo. He will grow up for the next couple of years in the experienced hands of Wildlife carers, Stella and Allen Reid. When he is released into the adjacent forest, he will also have learned how to live like a kangaroo, but at the moment - still a little baby - he is living in two worlds.

HELLLPPPP!
The news just in is that the Brown Mountain decision will be made in a week or so and the loggers will go in immediately afterwards! Brumby is not planning to protect it! Be there Tomorrow at 10.30am on the steps of Parliament House Victoria. We want everyone who can come along - young and old. The more old growth we cut down the more drying of the land, reduced rainfall, increased temperatures and risk of more and hotter bushfires. Bushfires dominate in managed and thinned forest, not in old growth! Logging Brown Forest will cause more bad bushfires in Victoria. Campervan, 4WDS and cars needed. Contact 0413927044

click here for film
Biologist Willie Smits has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, save and house local orangutans, reverse climate change, stop forest fires and give sustainable income and justice to the locals. It all started because he rescued a baby orangatang from a rubbish heap...
We could do the same thing in Australia on all our degraded land. Only our government is stopping us.

In April this year [2009], Australia's leading bushfire research organisation, Bushfire CRC Ltd, published yet another significant report on bushfire fighting: 'THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF AERIAL FIRE-FIGHTING IN AUSTRALIA'
by Gaminda Ganewatta & John Handmer, via the Centre for Risk and Community Safety, RMIT University in Melbourne.

Bushfire CRC's report examines the economic effectiveness of aerial fire suppression and has made pertinent findings about the role of integrated aerial fire-fighting specific to the Australian landscape.

Previous so-called 'community refuges' were not purpose-built bushfire shelters, and most were no safer than a house or any other building. Many were potential death traps. They were buildings with raised, rubbish-littered sub-floors, holiday camps consisting of small, separated timber huts surrounded by metre-high grass, car parks and football grounds reached by narrow, bush-lined tracks.

See also: "How misconceptions about bushfire bunkers may cost lives" of 21 Jun 09, and "Fire bunkers could have helped in the Victorian fires" of 10 Feb 09.

It took many bushfires over many decades, but in December 2008, South Australia's Premier Mike Rann started seriously committing to Aerial Bushfire Fighting by securing an Erickson Aircrane water bombing aircraft being based in South Australia during the Fire Danger Season: ['Aircrane “Flynn” part of record CFS fleet'] The Erickson Aircrane, nicknamed 'Flynn' is now part of a serious fleet of 15 fire-fighting aircraft with crews dedicated "to improve the capacity and flexibility of the Country Fire Service to respond to potentially threatening bushfires,” Mr Rann said.

CFA Chairman Kerry Murphy

No Australian should forget that 173 people died in the Victorian Bushfires last February. That it could happen again should be so anathema to Premier Brumby that he should realise an overwhelming need for a paradigm shift away from the current misguided and out-dated strategies of the Country Fire Authority's Board and Executive.

One hope out of the avoidable tragedy of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires and out of the political football of the Brumby Royal Commission is that public will demand a paradigm shift in Australian bushfire fighting resourcing and standards.

One of the fundamental changes must be to force a leap frog from post-World War II bushfire detection to state-of-the-art 21st Century remote sensing of ignitions. The current system which relies upon members of the public calling 000 to report bushfires is substandard fire-fighting practice and unacceptable. Allowing ignitions to burn out of control in remote locations and blow up into fire fronts is also substandard fire-fighting practice and unacceptable.

A report by ABC journalist, Jane Cowan, 1-Jul-09, 'Bushfire lawyers blast CFA's Rees' states that lawyers assisting Brumby's Royal Commission into the 2009 Victorian Bushfires have in an interim report concluded that the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) was ill-prepared for 'Black Saturday'.

The Australian Press Council has just dismissed a complaint against Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine about her opinion article back on 12-Feb-09 ‘Green ideas must take blame for deaths.’ Devine's provocative article dogmatically accused "the power of green ideology" for poor forest management practices and as the key reason for the exacerbated scale and ferocity of the Victorian bushfires in 2009. ['Complaint against Devine dismissed, SMH, 26-Jun-09, p.5] But although provocative, Devine's 'opinion' article pales in comparison to the social implications of headline media reporting of extreme bushfire risk immediately BEFORE the bushfires! See also "Victorian Bush-fires: ABC 7.30 Report ignores facts, creates scapegoats" and "Responding to incorrect fire information by joining the debate" and "Comments on recent fire-management in bush-fire areas" and "Greens, logging, forest fires and malaria" and "Deforestation drys continents - new theory explains how"

We need to dig deeper if we are serious about the bushfire threat, and this doesn't mean just more charity to prop up the existing but failing system, as the PM seems to perpetuate. This goes beyond the Victorian Bushfires. Under-resourcing is a fundamental problem with Australian bushfire management nationally.

This article was written in response to a comment in the discussion in response to the story "Nearly half of Wilsons Promontory burnt due to CFA neglect".

The Victorian Premier Brumby's Royal Commission into the January-February 2009 bushfires is a mere incident review. If Victoria is to be protected from firestorms in future, it should undertake a root cause analysis, including the numerous past investigations into bushfires, with a view to achieving a cultural shift in rural fire fighting methods, resourcing and emergency management and into ecology management, housing approvals in bushfire prone areas, building design in bushfire prone areas, in bush arson criminology and into serious resourcing of rural fire management.

Emergency Management Australia (EMA), according to its website, "represents the Australian Government’s commitment to assisting States and Territories to develop their emergency management capabilities to protect all Australian citizens and their property. It provides national leadership in the development of measures to reduce risk to communities and manage the consequences of disasters." So how did this 'national leadership' provide measures to reduce the risk to afffected communities before and during the 2009 Victorian Bushfires and then manage the consequences afterwards?

Joan Webster, author of The Complete Bushfire Safety Book and Essential Bushfire Safety Tips believes that some information, contained in the article "Fire bunkers could have helped in the Victorian fires" of 20 Feb 09, is wrong and may put lives at risk. In this article, she explans why.

See also: "Bushfire bunkers strategy an 'after-the-fact' dead end" of 21 Jun 09.

As an alternative to the enormous ecological and economic costs entailed in building the kind of bunkers that may be necessary to guarantee the safety of residents of bushfire-prone, we should instead consider adopting more proactive measures to prevent fires in the first place and to detect them and fight them effectively should outright prevention prove impossible.

See also: "How misconceptions about bushfire bunkers may cost lives" of 21 June 09 and "Fire bunkers could have helped in the Victorian fires" of 10 Feb 09.

Fire stick farming is of great interest to me, as fire ecology as a tool for ecosystem manipulation appears widespread and old among hunter-gatherers worldwide. I made a study of this among the Kua, and it was actually what my grant was for, but I had to change topics in mid stream as Botswana had been converted to the "Smokey the Bear" philosophy by range ecologists at the world bank - so they had passed draconian ant-burning laws just before I got to the field.

http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/
Preliminary directions hearing on 20 April 2009. Public hearings commence 11 May.
Call for submissions. General submissions close on 18 May 2009.

Whilst many people have been aware (but have mostly been ignored) that vegetation, especially forests, creates rain, and whilst desertification has been linked to deforestation historically many times, there is a new and robust theory to explain how this may happen.
See also How logging causes forest fires

Out of the media frenzy to get ratings out of the Victorian bushfires, a 'so-called' bushfire expert on an ABC 730 Report panel (David Packham) advocated a 6 to 7 fold increase in prescribed burning for Victoria.

See also: "Victorian bushfires by arson" of 26 Mar 09.

The Australian Institute of Criminology reported last month that half of Australian bushfires are deliberately lit. Bushfire research needs to go further to evaluate whether in fact, of the most damaging, most are deliberately lit.

The term 'fire bug' is too docile and to start seriously dealing with it, we must change the perception and the language. Bush arson has become so deadly and catastrophic a crime that it warrants the term 'pyroterrorism'.

During February's bushfires, the Victorian government's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has allowed nearly all of the natural ecology of the northern half of Wilsons Promontory to burn. Is the Prom fire (now having destroyed 24,800 hectares of native habitat) being deliberately left to burn by DSE? DSE and CFA have protected private property at Tidal River and Yanakie. So is what's really happening down at the Prom away from public scrutiny?

See also "Wilsons Promontory – DSE fire management risking local extinctions" of 26 Feb 09.

Since Black Saturday - Feb 7, 2009 - when Australia's worst-ever bushfires on the hottest day in Victoria's recorded history completely destroyed all infrastructure at Wildhaven animal rescue and release center, Alan and Stella Reid have had a few visitors, including Steve Irwin's father, Bob Irwin, and Maryland Wilson of the AWPC, and four kangaroos that also escaped with their lives. Allan Reid tells an incredible story of his own survival as the place burned to the ground leaving him and perhaps four kangaroos alive. Please consider donating money for hay and rebuilding.See alsoImportant Wildhaven Shelter in St Andrews NE Victoria perished needs rebuilding and video.

"If you purchase two copies of The Age this Saturday, soak one in the bath overnight and read the other. Think of the copy coming out of the bath, as the landscape prior [to the impact of repeated fires] and the dry paper, as the landscape is today." (Article by Duane Norris for Natural Sequence Farming)

Andrew Bolt's story, "Green rules, black forests" is one of many mainstream media sources to keep alive the legend of the brave Sheehans' fight for justice and safety against their philistine greenie neighbours. But there is even more to that story than the press have so-far published. Read on...

Over two weeks since lightning struck the east coast of Wilsons Promontory on the Cathedral Range just north of Sealers Cove, most of the northern half of ‘the Prom’ has been burnt. The Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) website reports 23,000 hectares burnt out. The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) website shows the following map of the burn (shaded area below). The fire has burnt the Cathedral Range, along the east coastline right across and along the Corner Inlet shoreline to Millers Landing.

Just in via the bush telegraph, more on woodchip sales downturn

On 13th February, the fire on Wilson's Promontory was almost extinguished. However, Victoria's Country Fire Authority, seemingly unconcerned with preserving the dwindling remnants of our natural bushland where human lives and property are not threatened, failed to act to extinguish the blaze. As a result, almost 50% of our precious Prom has been burnt out.

See also: "Crews unable to slow Wilsons Promontory blaze" on ABC online on 17 Feb 09, "Huge blaze threatens the very heart of the Prom" in the Age of 19 Feb 09.