Confront the burning issue of fire management

Fires are the real killer in our bush, writes Geoff Burrowes

OUR bush has been ravaged year after year by fires that have burnt hot and wide.

Nothing escapes when these fires really get going.

They annihilate our wildlife. They devastate our alpine areas, our forests and valleys. They pollute our waterways and the very soil on which recovery depends and they wreak havoc on our rural communities.

You would expect a monumental nationwide effort aimed at mitigating wildfire.

Yet all we hear about in the media is logging, brumbies and feral pigs. We have got it so wrong.

Our energy and smart thinking and, above all, our ground work have to focus on far better fire management.

We clearly are not able (and will never be able) to control mega-fires.

So better fire management must focus on stopping small fires from becoming large fires.

We can’t control the weather, we are decades away from being able to reverse a warming climate, and lightning will always be available to create a spark.

If governments persist with more of the same, if management and the media focus on logging, brumbies and pigs then nothing will have been done to stop next year’s small fires from developing into a holocaust.

And so on it will go, until there is nothing left to burn.

The only means of limiting the intensity and spread of fire is wide-scale fuel reduction.

This is the real issue facing us.

We cannot continue to kill millions of our wildlife and destroy catchments and hurt our people like we are.

It is perverse to continue along a path that has resulted in so much devastation.

It is doubly perverse to do this in the name of conservation.

● Geoff Burrowes is Howitt Society Inc. president

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