BY JOHN NASH
Country Squire readers will recall Australia’s terrifying Black Summer, 2019/20, when massive bush fires burned some 35 million acres, destroyed an estimated 3 billion vertebrates (perhaps driving a number to extinction), wrecked scores of irreplaceable rock paintings, wiped out 3000 buildings and, sadly, 47 people died. The tragedy may have cost Australia as much as A$80 billion.
Now research has revealed the cause of this catastrophe. In a work entitled “How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox” a number of researchers from major academic institutions across Australia and elsewhere have published their findings in MDPI, the largest open-access, peer reviewed publication in the world. This, then, is grown-up, serious, local scientific analysis of a truly dreadful event.
The reason for the ferocity and extent of the fires is now clear. Detailed findings for one of the worst affected areas found that before the 1970s there were fewer bushfires, while after the 1970s they became more prevalent, eventually resulting in the horror of the Black Summer. So, what changed in 1970? This new research demonstrates that the pivot point was legislation, introduced in the 1970s, based on the trendy idea that:
“Nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention”
It now appears that this legislation, “The Land Conservation Act of 1970” — aimed at “protecting the Australian bush from humans” banned farmers from mimicking the earlier traditional Aboriginal burning practices of using frequent fires to promote grass for livestock. As a result of the ban, the quantity of flammable trees and shrubs expanded, resulting in huge volumes of dry fuel accumulating year on year. It was only after this prohibition on traditional burning that catastrophic bushfires became an issue in the study area.
Originally, like Native Americans, Aboriginal Care for Country promoted a safe, productive and predictable environment based on Cultural Burning, also known as “fire ecology”, the practice of regularly burning overgrowth to promote the production of fertile grassland. In Aboriginal Australia, it was regulated by strict spiritual, cultural and pragmatic protocols. Until the 1970s, many settler farmers in Australia observed and mimicked this practice of cultural burning, resulting in large swathes of green grassland suitable for livestock. However, after the introduction of the trendy legislation, under pressure from “environmentalists”, pragmatism was replaced by dogma. The result was the uncontrolled growth of eucalyptus forest, a dangerous environmental fuel load, and the tragedy of Australia’s Black Summer.
It is clear that the prohibition on regular burning allowed a vast amount of flammable fuel to build up in the environment, a disaster waiting to happen.
Wild Justice, like the so-called “hands-off conservationists” of Australia, have been attempting to stop the regular, controlled burning of heather, known as rotational or proscribed burning or Muirburn in Scotland. Here in the UK, it has the same objectives and outcomes as ancient and traditional land management by fire. Muirburn is a simple concept, shared by rural people across the world – small, controlled burns (called “cold” burns) of heather, gorse and other bog or moorland, undertaken while the soil or peat beneath is cool and damp, quickly prunes the dead material and promotes new, green growth. This easily controlled, intentional action increases the food available for wildlife while suppressing scrubby growth and removing potential fuel for wildfires. Being entirely pragmatic, responsible and limited in extent, it works with nature rather than against it, as rootstocks and seeds survive the cool burn, while a lot of the wildlife burrows down or migrates from patch to patch to avoid the activity.
Even our own PM understands the principle – saying, while still Chancellor, ‘the rotational burning used to manage our heather moorland may seem odd to some, but without it our moors would not regenerate and support the rich wildlife and biodiversity they do’ – and he is more used to balance sheets than balancing nature.
I remember the gorse fires that raised huge plumes of white smoke across the wild Lizard and Lands End peninsulas of my youth. They were never the slightest cause for alarm – you simply looked up, saw them, and thought, “They are controlling the gorse again”. There were no eco-warriors or ARVI (animal rights/vegans/insane) campaigners then, and guns were simply land management tools, not a cause for infantile anti-hunting paranoia posing as animal welfare. In those days, the only loud noise was hard working people doing their best for the land.
Wild Justice however, stirs eco-angst and hatred among urbanites and eco-morons by claiming that burning kills the heather, murders wildlife, sets alight the peat beneath, releases carbon, causing water pollution and soil erosion. It all sounds feasible if you don’t know your countryside from your backside or this green and pleasant land from Disneyland. Crowdfunded by their followers, Wild Justice even took managers to court about it.
In reality, burning encourages heather, provides food for wildlife and travels so quickly that the peat below stays relatively cool and is certainly not set alight or destroyed. Although the burning releases quantities of carbon, that release is quickly taken up again by rapid regrowth.
Some purposely exaggerate some side effects of burning (it releases 260,000 tons of carbon – we’re all doomed Captain Mainwaring) but he hides the greater benefits of burning and the huge risks of not doing it properly (just one uncontrolled wildfire alone released 700,000 tons). You can read more about management by fire in an FAQ at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust or via the Moorland Association written by proper country people who have actually lived and worked these areas for generations and know a bit more about it. Thankfully, the Judge in the case had a better understanding of reality than Wild Justice’s deceptive red herring and kicked their cunning stunt out of court:
“Failed legal challenge on heather burning in England may have a positive impact on how future regulation of muirburn is shaped in Scotland. The latest court defeat for Chris Packham’s Wild Justice group came this week when a High Court ruling by Mr Justice Dove dismissed Wild Justice’s ‘speculative’ attempt to judicial review Defra’s most recent burning legislation in England”.
The Judge was of course correct and now the latest Australian research proves it, confirming our own Cambridge University findings published in Nature Geoscience, that controlled burning increases carbon storage and root biomass, preventing uncontrolled wildfires that are hot enough to destroy even the soil bacteria and fungi and so destabilise the soil, preventing carbon-rich organic matter from binding to minerals in the soil.
Experienced field managers, gamekeepers and farmers, like all traditional occupiers of land, have to deal with reality and know better than the idiotic mutterings and theories of a celebrity twitcher and his two twitcher trolls, and the RSPB posing as experts in order to garner support for their blind, hidden anti-fieldsports agenda.
It’s about responsible management. If you don’t manage the habitat properly and responsibly, woody growth spreads and the fuel load builds up. Eventually, when it does burn, it burns out of control, often in hot weather. It produces very high temperatures that destroy everything, including all the animal and plant life, and is very likely to set underlying peat alight. With the top cover gone, soil erosion is then almost inevitable.
It’s not rocket science.
In fact, the Australian Black Summer research now proves that deceptive campaigns and childish lies about “hands off nature” do not help the land, the habitat, the wildlife or the people of the countryside. In fact, they are downright bloody dangerous, and their advocates, typified by the BBC are actually the ones playing with fire.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.