Time to learn from Indigenous wisdom on reducing fuel for fires

A NSW inquiry into the Black Summer bushfires (“Clear land, cut bushfire risk”, 8-9/8) concluded: “Hazard-reduction burns should be greatly increased.”

What a breath of good sense. If there is no fuel, there can be no fire.

The inquiry also urges a return to Indigenous fire management. Indigenous people burned anything and everything, at any time, for any reason. They had no water-bombers and seldom tried to put fires out, but they did understand back-burning. Their land management created the vast and productive open forests and grasslands that supported large populations of marsupials and birds.

But tree huggers never support this. They prefer scrub, weeds, pests and occasional fierce wildfires.

Viv Forbes, Washpool, Qld

The intensity and frequency of fire in the forests along Australia’s east coast have been made much worse by 200 years of logging. Almost all of the huge ancient trees along the east coast have been cut down and replaced by regrowth forests that have much greater tree density, a lower canopy and crucially are much drier as the regrowth sucks up all the moisture. Solutions that enable these forests to return to something like their original form with only four giants per hectare is needed, not clearing around houses that should never have been built and burning that creates a toxic haze for months.

Andrew Humphreys, Narrawallee, NSW

In your article “Clear land, cut bushfire risk” it states that increased fuel-reduction burning closer to towns is being advocated as a partial solution and notes “that in some cases this was not done because of the inconvenience of smoke haze”.

There is another option that can reduce forest fuel level around communities and that does not generate smoke. More than half a million hectares of fuel-reduction thinning is being done annually in the more fire-prone US federal forests around communities to reduce the impact of fire. It is done with input from communities and to reduce the net costs the material taken out is used where possible for heating of schools, hospitals, aged homes, industry and homes.

Research done in the US and elsewhere shows fuel-reduction thinning reduces fire intensity and crowning and so reduces the risks to life, property and biodiversity.

Andrew Lang, president, Farm Forest Growers Victoria, Lismore, Vic

Awkward questions

It seems the people of Beirut prefer their former colonisers to their own government (“Army moves in as Beirut embraces Macron”, 8-9/8), which begs the question: “Were some countries better off under their colonial rulers?”

Interestingly, it’s a question that was posed in an article, “The Case for Colonialism”, by Bruce Gilley in Third World Quarterly (2017). In a blatant example of cancel culture, that article had to be withdrawn after the reaction to it included death threats to the author and threats of violence to the editor.

Clearly there are some conversations that we’re just not allowed to have. Yet the list of problems faced by developing world populations is endless and ongoing. Almost every African country has seen a regression of capacity since independence. This is despite billions in aid and huge advances in technology.

So it would seem prudent at least to acknowledge that there are governments incapable of running a country, that their people are suffering and that there might be a better way. Does the question of the benefits of colonialism raise too many awkward issues? Does it offend contemporary sensibilities? In avoiding this discussion, are we condemning yet more generations to squalor and hardship? Maybe it’s time to revisit Gilley’s article.

Jane Bieger, Brisbane, Qld