A Burning Issue
7th November 2022
Country Squire readers will recall Australia’s terrifying Black Summer, 2019/20, when massive bush fires burned some 35 million acres, destroyed an estimated 3 billion vertebrates (perhaps driving a number to extinction), wrecked scores of irreplaceable rock paintings, wiped out 3000 buildings and, sadly, 47 people died. The tragedy may have cost Australia as much as A$80 billion.
Now research has revealed the cause of this catastrophe. In a work entitled “How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox” a number of researchers from major academic institutions across Australia and elsewhere have published their findings in MDPI, the largest open-access, peer reviewed publication in the world. This, then, is grown-up, serious, local scientific analysis of a truly dreadful event.
The reason for the ferocity and extent of the fires is now clear. Detailed findings for one of the worst affected areas found that before the 1970s there were fewer bushfires, while after the 1970s, they became more prevalent, eventually resulting in the horror of the Black Summer. So, what changed in 1970? This new research demonstrates that the pivot point was legislation, introduced in the 1970s, based on the trendy idea that –
“Nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention”