I thought we didn't have any left after the start of last year!
'Snort'
Come on. Sure, it was a pretty big bush fire, but there's still plenty out there. And, yes, in case you're wondering, said bush fire was vastly larger than it should have been, and Green policy is the reason why, coupled with general bureaucratic bullshit.
Out tale starts, as many do, with the first to farm the land, forests included. We call those people the Aborigenes. The had a way of farming, called, obviously enough, "Fire Farming". The practice was simple enough, start a fire when the conditions were right, and the fire would both drive animals to where they could be slaughered easily, and cause significant regrowth of edible bits.
Over the thousands of years they did this, the flora and fauna of Australia adapted- Or died out. There's a reason there's no mega-fauna in Australia.
Enter British colonials, stage right. They stopped the whole 'setting fire to everything' for a while, but were smart enough to ask a few questions of the Aborigene Elders, when they saw things going wrong, and then combined what they learned from both British and local sources, and came up with a way of dealing with the problem. It's even simple to do!
Specifically, it's to do a carefully controled burn, every 2 years, in any area which is both native forest and near humans.
Go back to the 1930-50s, I'm told by oldtimers who were there, and I'm told that the Australian Timber industry was so good a forest managment, they had people flying in to see how we did it. Then, in the 60's, the Greens started appearing, funded by a number of groups, including China, the USSR, and the OPEC nations. They gained influence, and their solution to Australian ecological problems, that the Timber Industry had often noticed, fixed, and not even bothered to mention to anybody, was consistent. Lock Them Out!
Today, there is approximately 80% of all Australian forests locked up. In NSW, my home State, that locking is so thorough that only the Forestry Department (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) own Rangers are allowed in there without prior approval. Last I checked? There were 12. For the state of NSW.
Note, I have a cousin who's an Envromental Scientist working for said Forestry Department. Even they have to get prior approval to go into said forests. Approval that she hasn't gotten in 15 years. As for fixing an issue in there? Hah! Good luck even getting those bureaucratic monsters to even admit it exists! And, if you can push, they blame "Climate Change", not their own inepitude.
Anyway, back to fire. Those parts who are locked up, you cannot, under any circumstances, do any back burning. In places where people live, however, there you can, and, officially, are encouraged to do so. Except, there are 3 different Gov agencies who require their own seperate criteria and process for approvals. All of which take days. All of which conflict, in one way or another. When the safe conditions for a Hazard Reduction Burn last hours, at best.
It's gotten bad enough that a Rural Fire Fighter in Vic seeing a bush fire coming to burn his town to the ground, did a perfect Hazard Reduction Burn to protect his house without approval, and only his house was undamaged.
He got prison time.
en.wikipedia.org
