[Taildragerdriver]

Cedars:

Your information makes some good points. You note the natural variation across the world in wildlands that have large fires. The management needed on each of these has to be locally tailored.

I some cases prescribed burning is a vary valuable tool in fact it is used a lot all over the US and World Wide. But in many cases prescribed burning is not feasible and treatments including timber harvest are required to reduce the fuel loads and create fuel discontinuity so if a wild fire starts it is easier to contain and is of acceptable intensity. This is where the current situation creates an untenable longterm condition for the future if we can't remove commercial size trees we can't reduce the stocking enough to reach desired conditions. This is the the problem the current laws in the US create and will need to be changed if we want to improve conditions in the future.

Also we can't afford to put the large amounts of smoke into the air every year so we need alternatives to burning.

Some new ideas for biomass use are also needed for bush type landscapes such as described in the first post and your sites. Lots of work to do and all the methods need to be available.

Taildragerdriver

[Michaelangelica]

Thanks for the pics from Victoria. My computer seizes up when I run Google Earth so they were appreciated.
I have a friend in Beechworth who says she can barely breathe with the smoke.

The Victorian fires were started by lightening strikes. The pyromaniacs don't get going until the school holidays (in two weeks time)

I heard yesterday that the fires may be linking up to an area of 600,000sq Hectares

Some say that pollution helps cool the planet. So could bush fires be helpful?
Fires also produce some little charcoal which can sequester CO2 for thousands of years.
Australian soils are deficient in phosphorous which the ash provides

The Australian bush has been burnt by Australian Aborigines for 60,000 years. Many native plants cannot propagate without fire.

Where Aboriginals have been given back control of their land such as around Ayes Rock they conduct regular controlled burns. They see grassland that has not been burnt as "neglected" and "unkempt" just as we would see an un-mown lawn. They protect rain forest areas containing native fruit trees by burning fire breaks around them.
The fires encourage new growth which provides food for kangaroos (and therefore dinner).
Coastal walking tracks also used to be kept clear by burning.
Cook in 1776 remarked on the fires he saw up the East coast of Australia.

Fire Authorities in Australia do do "control burns" in Winter; but conditions are rarely right and safe enough for this to be done on a large scale.

Areas that have not been burnt for along time (3+ years) often have cataclysmic fires that kill many animals and destroy native plant seeds with intense heat

PS
Aboriginals had one other interesting use for fire. They would often "hollow out" gum trees with fire providing nests for native animals- possums etc. They would then come back, some time later, and trap and eat them. These 'slow burns' do produce a lot of charcoal (see terra preta thread).

PSS acording to Stephen Joseph who spent some time in NT with aboriginies, they start "cold fires" on days that are still and cool and the fire burns slowly and probably produce more charcoal to nourish the soil. A 'hot' fire on a windy,dry day produces a lot of ash which is blown away.

[Jay-qu]

Cool info, thanks

I know they are an essential part of nature and stopping them completely is not only impossible but unnessisary BUT its just terrible when whole towns must be evacuated and peoples houses get razed to the ground!

[Taildragerdriver]

Jay-qu

This is great Michaelangelica has an understanding of how fire can be both good and bad. It like all things in nature almost all natural processes produce desirable and undesirable outputs, at least as far as humans are concerned.

So the discussion around Terra Preta offers some great opportunities to utilize biomass around human habitation to create better more productive farm soils and reduce the fuels in areas we don't want to burn.

So we have an opportunity today to learn from aboriginal peoples on the role of fire and wildland fuels to see how we can produce a world which has a healthy natural environment but gives modern human populations firesafe zones to live in.

These are new concepts that are still being developed but these ideas could produce reduced dependence on oil for fertilizers on farms and spur production of biofuels from farm product the opportunities substantial.

How this concept is moved forward is still difficult but possabilites exist.

Thanks

Taildragerdriver

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

BUT its just terrible when whole towns must be evacuated and peoples houses get razed to the ground!

Busfires are VERY SCARY.Even from adistance.
To loose you life, colleceted in a house over decades, would be devastating

[Cedars]

Originally Posted by Taildragerdriver

Cedars:

Your information makes some good points. You note the natural variation across the world in wildlands that have large fires. The management needed on each of these has to be locally tailored.

I some cases prescribed burning is a vary valuable tool in fact it is used a lot all over the US and World Wide. But in many cases prescribed burning is not feasible and treatments including timber harvest are required to reduce the fuel loads and create fuel discontinuity so if a wild fire starts it is easier to contain and is of acceptable intensity. This is where the current situation creates an untenable longterm condition for the future if we can't remove commercial size trees we can't reduce the stocking enough to reach desired conditions. This is the the problem the current laws in the US create and will need to be changed if we want to improve conditions in the future.

Also we can't afford to put the large amounts of smoke into the air every year so we need alternatives to burning.

Some new ideas for biomass use are also needed for bush type landscapes such as described in the first post and your sites. Lots of work to do and all the methods need to be available.

Taildragerdriver

Agreed on the locally tailored approach to wildfires.


What laws/current procedures are being suggested for change and why? I am curious to see if I agree with them. Having traveled a few logging roads in N. Minn and W. Wisconsin, (and other western states to a lesser degree) I have both appreciated the access (allowed me my first moose sighting) and been dismayed at the loss of everything taller than my knee for what seemed miles and miles.

[Cedars]

A few more maps for reference.

Fire area map with roads, town names and some topography:
Map of Australia

Topo map of Australia:
Digital Elevation Model of Australia (2001, Geoscience Australia)


Links to more maps (the geology map is pretty detailed):

Geoscience Australia: Maps of Australia

[Taildragerdriver]

Cedars:

The first issue that we need to make the distinction is that many people and possibly yourself don't really distinguish between land owned by private individuals and public lands owned by either state of federal agencies.

In most cases if you are on private lands they may be owned by timber companies. They want to make money as does any company. The way to do that with forest land is to cut the trees down as soon as they are of some value and start over and do it again. This produces a forest condition which is not very pleasing to most people. Interstingly these lands are not likely to burn because fuels are very discontinues and it is easy to control fire.

If you are on public lands we went through a period where congress mandated we make money too (this was great for congress because they could get money to spend without taxing people). The Environmental Movement came to be interested in forests because the public didn't want our public lands managed like industrial forest lands. So now we have the other extreme we have made it so hard to do anything that we are simply letting the vegetation grow with no managment. This creates huge areas of continuous fuels. So now we see massive wildfires which have some beneifts but because we have lots of people living in or near the woods it is not natural either. We stop the fires when they get close to any human delvelopment. This is very expensive and creates a continued cycle of burn and dense forest and burn again.

The native populations figured out thousands of years ago that even they didn't like living in this kind of environment. So we have an opportunity to learn from them. There is good evidence that the native americans produced a kind of mangment that developed open park like forests over most of the US prior to Europeans coming into the North America.

We on public lands are starting to make the point we could possibly create a better model that could be desireable to the public and create and environment where we have low intensity fires if they happen at all near human development. This could greatly reduce the cost to the taxpayer for fighting fire as well.

So there is a bit of movement in the federal laws to open the doors a bit to demonstrate the value of this kind of management.

The main problem is there is a lot of resistance to this by the environment community. The only way to get this work done is to make it possible for forest products to be sold to make money doing this to pay for the work. The taxpayers now have to pay for this work to be done. It is very expensive so we can't do enough to make a differnece. If we could make some money from the products we could pay for it to be done on a larger scale.

It is understandable that the environmental community is concerned about these agencies getting back to making an income because they think congress would again push to have our public lands be money makers. We all have to work to make sure that doesn't happen but we need to find a way to manage the land and let the results pay for the work.

Hope this expains it a bit.

Taildragerdriver

[Jay-qu]

Originally Posted by Cedars

Fire area map with roads, town names and some topography:
Map of Australia

See the little town berwick, just to the east of melbourne, thats me

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

(yes we have EPA)

What's the NSW then?