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February 11, 2009
Stephen Pyne is the author of The Still-Burning Bush. In that book, which builds on his earlier Burning Bush: Fire History of Australia, he argued the following narrative.
Australia's landscape was shaped by Aboriginal fire-stick farming; colonisers sought to suppress fire but eventually were forced to adapt to it; the resulting fire-stick forestry was a singular achievement of science and administration; new environmentalism has unraveled fire-stick forestry; active burning needs to be at the centre of the new approach based on the twin pillars of fire-stick ecology and risk management.
Pyne has an op-ed in The Australian in which he says that Australia seems to have gotten the basics of fighting bush fires right:
It developed many key concepts of fire ecology and models of bushfire behaviour. It pioneered landscape-scale prescribed burning as a method of bushfire management. It devised the protocol for structure protection in the bush, especially the ingenious stratagem of leaving early or staying, preparing and defending. In recent decades it has beefed up active suppression capabilities and emergency services.
Despite this, Pyne says, Australia keeps enduring the same Sisyphean cycle of calamitous conflagrations in the same places because it isn't translating what it knows into its practices. So what needs to be done?
Alas Pyne disappoints. He says:
With or without global warming or arson, damaging fires will come, spread as the landscape allows and inflict damage as structures permit. And it is there - with how Australians live on the land - that reform must go. Australia will have fire, and it will recycle the conditions that can leverage small flames into holocausts. The choice is whether skilled people should backburn or leave fire-starting to lightning, clumsies and crazies.
If it is not possible to remake the burning bush into an unburnt Oz as Pyne argues, then those who live in the bush (including the treechangers) will have to build houses that provide a much greater defence against bush fire: more firebreaks, concrete bunkers, and much higher building codes.This is where the states--SA, Victoria, ACT and NSW---are to be found wanting.
The states have have been very slow in moving towards more realistic building codes because of the extra expense and the resistance of the building industry. So we have the common practice of building flammable houses in fire-prone bush. Wooden framed houses in the bush should be a no no. Brrumby's longstanding opposition to any changes that would make housing more expensive is not persuasive.
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Baggs,Sydney A., Baggs, Joan C. & Baggs, David W., Australian Earth-covered Building, New South Wales University Press, NSW Aus, 1991 ISBN 0868400602