Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia

 Sydney

By modern standards, my grandfather would probably be considered an environmental criminal. To clear land for his farmhouse in north-eastern Victoria — and for his milking sheds, pig pens, chicken sheds, blacksmith shop and other outbuildings — he cleared hundreds of trees. And he cleared thousands more for his wheat fields, cattle paddocks and shearing sheds.

Old man Hobbs would probably be found guilty of cultural appropriation, too, because he adopted the Aboriginal method of land-clearing. He burned all of those trees. He also established fire-delaying dirt paths through surrounding bushland.

This was once standard practice throughout rural Australia, where the pre-settlement indigenous population had long conducted controlled burns of overgrown flora — known as ‘fuel’ in current fire-management talk. They knew an absence of controlled burns would invite uncontrolled burns — such as the gigantic wildfires that have ravaged much of this drought-hit nation since September.

As those fires roared through Australia’s eastern coast, killing residents and volunteer firefighters and destroying hundreds of houses, a not-unrelated court report appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. It told the story of 71-year-old John David Chia, who in 2014 paid contractors to cut down and remove 74 trees on and around his property.

The judge in this case noted that Chia’s primary motivation for the tree removal was ‘his concern about the risk of fire at his property’, but found also the Sydney pensioner’s actions had caused ‘substantial harm’ to the environment. Chia ended up copping a $40,000 fine — more than $500 for each tree.

Similar legal rulings have become frequent in Australia, as a kind of ecological religious fundamentalism has taken the place of common sense. In 2004, Liam Sheahan was charged $100,000 in fines and legal expenses after clearing land around his hilltop property in Reedy Creek, Victoria. Five years later, that property was the only structure left standing in the area following the state’s deadly Black Saturday fires.