ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Today, I’m trying something different.  The Yarra Valley Writers Festival is online today, and I’m going to try to report on each session as it comes along.   There may be more typos than usual, and I’ll apologise now for any mistakes in reporting on-the-run.  (Feel free to correct me in comments if necessary.)

I’m listening to Michael Veitch doing the welcome as I type this, and before I start I want to say a heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s made this festival happen.  In its original form we would have been enjoying all the delights of the valley and its beautiful surroundings.  But what was meant to be the very first #YVWritersFest had to be reimagined because of COVID_19, and I congratulate the entire team on making the festival happen in its current form.

The keynote address is from David Lindenmeyer, AO,  Regarded internationally, he is an Australian scientist and academic. He is an expert in landscape ecology, conservation and biodiversity, and he has made the Yarra Valley his area of interest as well…

Lindenmeyer is keen to ‘inject an understanding of science’ into our understanding of fire. He’s been studying this for a long time, not just our most recent catastrophic ones, and he says its important to study different environments in different places.  But he’s also a ‘people person’ and he showed us a slide of his own mother-in-law and her experience in the recent fires.  So it’s personal for him too.

Our recent fires damaged 12 million hectares, 12 times the size of the Amazon.  It was unprecedented.  Professor Lindenmeyer shared a slideshow which I’ve attempted to capture here, but it’s too hard to multitask in this way and I found myself losing the thread of his argument.  But what I clearly understood was that climate change is a key driver of fire behaviour because the background temperature, influenced by CO2 in the atmosphere, influences fire behaviour.

As we could see from the slideshow about the densely wooded valley at the beginning, hazard reduction burning is a complex issue.  It needs to be done in remote areas, and despite what the shock jocks say, that means more hazard reduction burning doesn’t help with the risk of house losses.

The rate of regeneration in old forests is much greater than in young forests, and that creates implications for logging areas.  There is a much greater risk with fires close to the logged area, and there is greater risk of canopy fires.  (And by definition, there are communities near logging areas.)  And ‘salvage logging’ i.e. logging damaged forests after burning is disastrous, it is the most damaging form of logging.  It damages the environment, and it increases the risk of more disastrous fires.

Studies show that some of the areas burnt last year were earmarked for logging in the future, and the economic implications of that is that the money generated from logging is reduced.  So it’s not so profitable as to make it worthwhile, especially since a lot of it goes overseas for the woodchip industry, and doesn’t do much for jobs here in Australia.  We need to transition to using only plantation timber and rethink what we do with our natural assets.  (And plantations are much easier to defend than the bush).

As usual, the shock jocks and the tabloid media peddle simple solutions.  They appeal because they’re simple, but they don’t work.  Lindenmeyer listed a range of strategies that will make a difference, all of which come from long-term monitoring of the situation, i.e. from science.  The enduring campaign for cattle grazing in alpine areas, for example, is countered by the science which shows unequivocally that it increases fire risk. And yet the LTER (Long term environment research, I think) was axed in 2017.  [Note the dates, it tells you which federal government did that.]

The point that I take from all this, no matter where we live in Australia, city or bush, these critical issues are matters where public opinion and votes, matter.  So it’s very important that we educate ourselves and others about the science that lies behind our knowledge of fires.

Phew!  Next up Fire & Climate, with Tony Birch, Alice Bishop, Tom Griffiths & Michael Cathcart.

PS I haven’t got time to proof read this!