Prescribing Fire
The intentional use of fire arouses passions and conflicts, write Professor Mark Adams and Dr. Peter Attiwill in Burning Issues, their just-published book on the role of prescribed burning in the sustainability and management of Australia's southern forests. "The forest manager faces an almost insurmountable problem: people, most of whom live in the cities, have an innate fear of fire. If fire is always seen as bad, how can it be used for good?"
Lighting a research test controlled burn at Ngarkat, South Australia
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Concern in Australia about bushfires has, in part, been replaced by an urban-dwelling concern about the use of planned fires for fuel reduction and forest regeneration. According to the authors, this "speaks as much about the increased separation of city and country, of the increasingly poor knowledge of city people as to what is required to live in and manage the bush, as it does about the discomfort of smoke-tainted washing or wine, or conscience-twanging images on the nightly news or rants in major daily newspapers by columnists and others who make a living from the media, about 'escaped prescribed fires or back burns.'"
Professor Adams, a Bushfire Cooperative Research Center board member and former project leader, is dean of the faculty of agriculture, food and natural resources at the University of Sydney. Fire has been a constant element of his research since bushfires burnt his Ph.D. forestry study sites on the outskirts of Melbourne in 1982 and 1983. Dr. Attiwill is principal fellow in botany and senior fellow in historical studies at the University of Melbourne and editor-in-chief of the international journal Forest Ecology and Management.
In Burning Issues, they describe the history and role of fire in Australia's ecosystems and how fire can be managed for both safety and ecological diversity, with the aim of changing public attitudes to fire and to influence and encourage changes in land management by government agencies.
After the disastrous Black Saturday fires in the state of Victoria in February 2009 — in which 173 people died — there were calls for a single, simple answer on fuel reduction burning to reduce bushfire risk. But Professor Adams and Dr. Attiwill emphasize it is a complex issue without a simple answer.
Nowhere is the role of fire in ecosystems more important than in Australia, they write. As the continent drifted north from Gondwanaland 130 million years ago, it became hotter and drier. The former extensive cool-temperate rainforest was gradually replaced by today's common hard-leafed vegetation and an increasing incidence and spread of fire caused by lightning.
Fire played a dominant role in the evolution of the Banksia, Acacia (wattle) and Eucalyptus that now dominate Australian forests. Fire frequency increased with the arrival of the ancestors of today's indigenous Aborigines some 45,000 to 70,000 years ago, and it increased again when Europeans arrived 220 years ago.
They quote American fire historian Stephen Pyne, who has written extensively on fire in Australia and around the world: "Eucalyptus is not only the Universal Australian, it is the ideal Australian — versatile, tough, sardonic, contrary, self-mocking, with a deceptive complexity amid the appearance of massive homogeneity; an occupier of disturbed environments; a fire creature."
The authors note that diversity and productivity of forest ecosystems are maintained by random periodic disturbance. One needs to differentiate between "disturbance," as the word is used ecologically, and its use generally. "Because many species depend on the cyclic renewal of resources by fire, disturbances by stand-replacing fires are simply part of the natural order. It is the elimination of fire that should be more rightly termed a disturbance."
They say this raises many questions. What are the social and biological aims of forest management? What levels of disturbance are biologically necessary, and what levels can be socially tolerated? Can we accommodate fire and destruction within the management regime of a national park? And why prescribed burning? Does it achieve its aim of producing specified management goals such as reducing fire risk and encouraging biodiversity?
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