The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Last Saturday afternoon, while millions of Australians were busy extinguishing the dying embers of the Rudd government, incendiary activity of a more ominous nature was under way in the prime minister-elect’s own backyard.
In what may be a prelude to a long, fiery summer ahead, dozens of firefighters backed by 20 trucks and two water-bombing helicopters battled to contain a blaze in Forestville Park in Tony Abbott’s electorate of Warringah. Abbott’s house is barely a mile away.
Here in the States we are experiencing a very similar conversation about climate change and the wildfire problem. Here’s the bottom line.
The incidence of wildfires has increased primarily because of unintended consequences of polices for decades by the Forestry Service undisciplined logging and the anti-logging wing to the Environmental Movement. For decades the Forestry Service policy has been to immediately address and extinguish fire outbreaks thus curtailing low order ground fires from burning undergrowth. These fires are essential to the overall health by returning essential nutrients to the soil, removing the primary fuel source before the density increases in volume that causes the old growth trees to burn. In the case of the Sequoia tree the heat from these fires is an essential element of their seeding cycle, the heat causes seed release. The problem has occurred because the two primary tools for reducing the density of fuel in forests–controlled burning and disciplined logging–have been increasingly restricted by the Forest Service. Controlled burning of moderate stands of undergrowth–fires that would not be hot enough to harm larger trees–is no longer possible in many areas of the west, because the forest density is so great that foresters fear such fires could not be kept under control. Disciplined logging, which preserves forest health in privately owned forest lands, has been dramatically cut back in National Forests because of protests by a small but vocal group of anti-growth, anti-logging organizations with little or no expertise in forest management process. The anti-logging campaign has resulted in essentially the same outcomes.
They take a quote from a 24 year old fire fighting volunteer and somehow that is meant to put the fear of God into us.
September has always been a very hot month in Australia; it generally cools somewhat in October, then warms up again for summer. Being only 24, he probably is too stupid or dense to know this so I don’t know why he is volunteering with the fire brigade.
Besides, the greenies have forbidden us to burn back the low scrub which is what catches fire easily.
But as has been demonstrated in previous fires, and the most recent, they are more than likely deliberately lit….sometimes by volunteer fire fighters!