Indigenous knowledge can combat fire
After the Ash Wednesday bush fire event in Victoria and South Australia I volunteered to help with the clean-up on weekends. Our team operated in five areas over a period of eight weeks. While there I noticed that some homes had not been affected much whilst others around them were either badly damaged or destroyed. I am not a gardener, but noticed that the saved houses all had the same kind of vegetation around them – thick, dark leaves and I wondered then if it was this which saved them. Little appears to have been done about this until recently.
Cédric Haverkamp, the terrestrial program manager for Conservation International in New Caledonia, is leading an initiative to plant thousands of fire-retardant trees on the south, east and west coasts of the French territory.
“We noticed there’s one tree that seems to be able to stop fire — or at least reduce the speed of the fire — that’s the sea hibiscus,” he said.
Sea hibiscus typically grows near water, but researchers are trialling planting the trees in drier inland areas to act as green fire breaks.
It’s a native species endemic in New Caledonia, as well as Australia and other parts of the Pacific.
The trees commonly grow near water, but the teams are trialling planting them in drier inland areas.
“It works like a green wall, so it will stop the heat from the fire and reduces the risk of fire propagation,” Mr Haverkamp said.
“Because it’s very thick and dark, there is no fuel growing under the trees, so when the fire comes to touch this tree, it will just stop burning.”
But he cautions this strategy may only be effective against small blazes. Trees carrying lots of water in dense leaves could help decrease fuel for fires.
“If it’s a big fire, it will burn — it’s a tree,” he said.
“But with slower-moving fire, it will slow the fire and stop the heat and because there’s nothing growing under the tree, there’s no fuel to burn.”
Lessons for Pacific amid El Nino forecast
Planting sea hibiscus, Mr Haverkamp said, was knowledge passed down from Indigenous elders, and could be used in conjunction with other measures to mitigate the risk of fires.
Aboriginal Indigenous fire practices — such as cool and cultural burning — are also a source of knowledge in combating fires in Australia by managing the landscape. Cool and cultural burning are Indigenous fire management practices.
Dr Bowman highlighted other methods, such as encouraging animals to graze and deplete flammable grass, while their hooves can help break down potential fuel.
“You can use irrigation to grow green firebreaks [and] plants that are non-flammable,” he added.
He said village layouts and house designs are also important to reducing fire risk, and said people need to be aware of how hot and dry weather conditions can lead to rapid wildfires.
“People need to understand what dangerous fire weather is, understand what to do in dangerous fire weather, and have strategies to avoid lighting fires — and also strategies to escape fires or shelter in place,” he said.
Rick McRae, from the Bushfire Research Group at the University of New South Wales, said drier weather clearly had an impact on the Pacific.
“If the soil is barren [and] dry, it’s a one-way exchange — the soil helps dry out that fuel, which means the fire comes along and the fire intensity is potentially higher,” he said.
It’s also a growing concern for the region, with warmer El Nino conditions predicted.
“If all [the] waters warm, then that can add heat into the air. And if the moisture in the air happens to be somewhere else, then you can get the potential for these flash droughts to pop up,” Professor McRae said.
Alan Stevenson spent four years in the Royal Australian Navy; four years at a seminary in Brisbane and the rest of his life in computers as an operator, programmer and systems analyst. His interests include popular science, travel, philosophy and writing for Open Forum.
Max Thomas
September 2, 2023 at 10:10 am
I question the logic of expecting traditional Indigenous land management to restore highly modified ecosystems to anything like their condition prior to European settlement.
Advocates of Indigenous ‘cultural burning practices’ as a potential management tool for mitigating climate-driven catastrophic bushfires usually do not address the health impacts associated with low temperature combustion.
PM 2.5 and smaller particulates are inhaled around Victoria and elsewhere every autumn by citizens who have a right to expect common property such as the atmosphere to be safe.
Bushfires, especially ‘cool’ burns are known to contain toxic and potentially harmful substances, including TCDD (Dioxin). It has been estimated that bushfires may contribute at least 20-30% of the total release of dioxin-like compounds to the environment in Australia but the health effects are not well understood.
Therefore, the impact of low temperature combustion products on the health of indigenous people prior to colonisation is also unknown. Indeed, a good deal of what is written about Aboriginal health and life span before 1788 seems to be conjectural.
No doubt people with such intimate knowledge of the country would have developed strategies to survive the climatic and weather extremes that have always been a feature of this continent.
The arrival of ecocidal European settlers – many of whom had themselves been dispossessed and had suffered grave injustice – with their exotic animals and diseases had a cataclysmic impact on indigenous culture.
However, does it necessarily follow that wildfires have been more prevalent since ‘traditional’ land management ceased?
East Gippsland, for example, has a history of wildfires but assumptions concerning traditional land management tend to be tenuously based on the undeniably appalling treatment of the Indigenous people of the region.
But the extreme variability of summer rainfall in the region is usually not considered by non-indigenous champions of traditional land management.
It is certainly true that health and environment are inseparable. But serious questions arise when one or the other is set aside, apparently for ideological reasons or for political convenience.
I question the logic of preferring one form of human intervention to another when both result in landscape changes, designed either to favour nonextant hunting and gathering, or to allow natural forces to prevail as would be the case in the absence of humans.
Does regulation of burning “by strict cultural protocols” include the protection of human health? There is no reason to suppose that indigenous people did not face environmental health problems like the rest of humanity.
Reframing science to conform with preconceived ideology is unlikely to produce a durable and widely accepted solution. A more scientific approach would be to clearly define the fire problem in terms of its contemporary impacts and then proceed to develop solutions capable of achieving the desired outcomes.
The human health impacts of low temperature combustion must not be disregarded for ideological convenience.
The health and safety of firefighters and affected communities cannot be adequately protected on the basis of practices appropriate to an utterly different culture.
Max Thomas
September 4, 2023 at 7:17 pm
Photochemical changes to vehicle and industrial emissions mixed with smoke from bushfires, dust and pollen etc, can be expected to produce a harmful cocktail unfit to breathe.
The law protects us from passive cigarette smoking but we seem less concerned about the health risks and ‘nuisances’ caused by bushfires, especially so-called ‘cool’ burns.
What happens when particles from different sources mix? What is the effect of lightning and humidity on particle surfaces exposed to a range of reactive pollutants? Research is urgently needed to answer these and other questions in the Australian setting.
European scientists have begun to classify airborne particles according to their physico-chemical properties in addition to particle size and density. This work might be expected to produce health and safety criteria directly related to risk.