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September 2, 2009
A good example of what conservatives mean by wisdom of the past and historical awareness within a technological mode of being in modernity can be found in Tom Griffiths' We have still not lived long enough. In that essay he says that:
lived experience alone, however vivid and traumatic, was never going to be enough to guide people in such circumstances. They also needed history. They needed – and we need it too – the distilled wisdom of past, inherited, learned experience. And not just of the recent human past, but of the ancient human past, and also of the deep biological past of the communities of trees. For in those histories lie the intractable patterns of our future.
There is a dangerous mismatch between the cyclic nature of fire and the short-term memory of communities and that the greatest challenge in fire research is cultural:
Testimony from the 1939 and 2009 fires suggests that there is one thing that we never seem to learn from history. That is, that nature can overwhelm culture. That some of the fires that roar out of the Australian bush are unstoppable....It seems to go against the grain of our humanity to admit that fact, no matter how severe are the lessons of history.
The historical wisdom is the inevitability of devastating fires within the Australian bush, given the failure of public memory to convey the threat posed on Black Saturday.
History, on this account, is a kind of discovery process, a learning process, which mostly transcends the ability of individual persons at one time and place to comprehend; and that the received beliefs contain sufficient ambiguities and inconsistencies that allow for a range of interpretation that open the way for reasonable innovations.
The insight that nature can overwhelm culture strikes a the very heart of modernity, since the Enlightenment tradition in modernity is premised on the domination of nature through the use of science and technology. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a classic example of trying to subordinate nature to human will and desire.
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The 2009 bushfires have made residents of fire prone areas reassess their response to bushfire. After noting the most likely fire route was along the road in, my friends have decided not to wait out the next fire, but pay their insurance and head to safety. As climate change continues to dry out Victoria fire conditions are becoming more dangerous.
Rural [and suburban] dwellers need to assess the fire risk for their site, what is the terrain and vegetation to the north west or south west of their location and what is their escape route from a fire from the north west or from a fire from the south west.
Perhaps the fire brigade should pay the head of the MDBA to say there is no increased fire risk from global warming.