Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

This forum–focussing on the West Central district–was held in Castlemaine on December 11 for a disappointing attendance of only 8 community members, outnumbered by DEPI officers. The West Central district covers the area from Geelong to north of Bendigo, and from west Melbourne to Avoca.

The forum appears to be part of an effort by DEPI to communicate its efforts to get a more precise understanding of the effects of fire on the community and the environment.

Wewak track, Castlemaine Diggings NHP: the draft environmental scan contradicts itself on the matter of the ‘fire dependence’ of our forests.

The information tabled at the meeting seemed heavily dependent on computer modelling. Questions were asked at the forum about ‘ground truthing’ of this modelling, and community representatives present were unconvinced by the answers.

Participants at the forum were presented with a draft environmental scan of the area which outlined the challenges and complexities of fire management. This document confirmed what we have often commented on: that DEPI confronts serious contradictory demands in its fire program. One example: winery owners prefer spring burning to autumn burning, because of the risk of smoke taint to grapes. Ecologists and apiarists dislike spring fire because it interrupts flowering and breeding processes. Unfortunately DEPI too often resorts to glib phrases like ‘trade offs’ to explain its activities, which more often than not sacrifice the environment for economic activity. Conservation organisations have consistently hammered the idea that we should aim for a better result for everyone—for example, by more detailed management of much smaller burns.

The evidence is piling up that the crude target of burning five per cent of public land every year [no matter how much land is burned in bushfires] is environmentally damaging and does not improve public safety. For that reason any process that contributes to a clearer understanding of the issues is good.

There were, however, a few unsettling blips in the info presented at the forum. A map on page 11 of the draft environmental scan shows that forests in the Mount Alexander region are ‘fire dependent’. This is NOT the case—as the text of the same document points out on page 9. Further, the scan appears to blandly accept the continuing development of housing in dangerous areas (page 20). This is not a simple matter, and the draft tells us that ‘new land use criteria will be developed as a result of the Bushfires Royal Commission.’ In our opinion these criteria are already overdue.

The forum was part of a process leading to the planned release of a new strategic bushfire plan by June 30 2014.

The Castlemaine Forum was given a summary of the bushfire risk profile developed by DEPI in cooperation with various research bodies. The profile is a working document rather than a set of conclusions, and is about risk to human life and assets: no way has yet been developed in this system of assessing risk to the environment in current burning practices [p 7]. 

According to DEPI computer modelling, risk to people and property has been reduced by 40% since 2002 by a combination of major bushfires [mainly] and controlled burning. The report adds:

Continue reading →

It’s been a good Spring for weeds, and one of those doing best around our district is Wild Oats, which is flourishing on roadsides and street reserves, along Forest Creek, and in some bush areas.

Poverty Gully water race, November 12: patches of highly flammable exotic grasses have sprung up in the 2012 fuel reduction zone.

Interestingly, wild oats has sprung up abundantly in parts of the fuel reduction zone burned in Poverty Gully by DEPI last spring. The weed is also rampant along Forest Creek, burned by DSE in 2011. This illustrates one of the complexities of the use of fire to reduce fuel: it’s not always easy to say what will come up after the fire—although clues can be found by looking at what’s there before you burn.

And here’s a question: have the fuel reduction burns actually increased fuel? Weeds like wild oats carry about six times the fuel load of native grasses like Kangaroo and Wallaby Grass—so any increase in their extent will automatically increase the fire danger.

Wild oats can be controlled by targeted use of management fire: but there’s an important matter of timing involved. Fire has to be used before the grass sets its seed—that is, in late winter. If an area is burned after that, seed in the soil causes the grass to extend its range significantly.

This point illustrates the difficulty faced by DEPI. Already, the number of days the Department can burn is limited; on top of that, if burns are too indiscriminate serious damage can be done to the seeding and breeding patterns of native flora and fauna.

It would be too easy to blame the Department entirely for the proliferation of dangerous weeds like wild oats, because they’re all over areas which haven’t been burned, like township land. But two things are clear.

First, if DEPI didn’t have to spend a lot of time burning remote areas of bushland, it could put more resources into the careful, detailed management of fire prone vegetation close to settlement—including use of methods other than fire, like slashing.

Second: DEPI is theoretically obliged by its Code of Practice and Royal Commission directive to publish the results of its burn operations, both in fuel reduction and ecological effect. It does not do this. By refusing to release details of its burn plans, and of its monitoring of burns, DEPI gives the impression that it has something to hide. If it was more transparent about its operations, people like us might be a bit less critical of them.

We’re getting tired of Government officials boasting about how much land they’ve burned: what we want to know is: has this burning made us safer?

Flammable Widl Oats, Forest Creek track, November 2013. This area was burned in 2011. DEPI’s Code says that ‘the achievement of the burn aims will be monitored and reported.’ If they were, we would have a better idea of how the Department rates its reduction burns.

The bushfire season is well and truly on for Australia,  as witness the destructive fires raging in NSW. The fires will no doubt be followed by discussion about prevention of such disasters. Readers interested in the subject could do worse than look at two articles from the website The Conversation this weekend.

The first, ‘Sydney fires caused by people and nature’, by Ross Bradstock, canvasses the bushfire problem generally—the nature of our landscapes, vegetation patterns, climate change, interaction of people and nature. It contains a good general overview of the problem. A sample passage:

‘The fires yesterday didn’t start in remote areas and move into developed areas; rather they’re actually fires that started in developed areas. For example the fire at Springwood seems to have started close to property, and similarly the fire at Lithgow.

‘These fires are a combination of natural and human factors. Without pre-empting the authorities, its likely that some of them are human-caused (directly or indirectly) rather than originating from lightning.

‘We know from spatial mapping of ignition patterns over the past few decades that most fires start close to human development or human transport corridors in the Sydney region. The way people live in the landscape now is influencing the fire regime, and that pattern is overlaid on additional natural ignitions from lightning.’

The second, ‘We know what starts fires, are we brave enough to prevent them?’ by Janet Stanley, deals more specifically with questions of prevention, in particular of arson. Here’s a representative passage:

‘Of the up to 60,000 bushfires which occur in Australia annually, it is thought that close to half of these are deliberately lit.

‘Arson is used here in a broad sense – about 30% are known or suspected to be deliberately lit; about 20% are accidental fires, often arising from reckless behaviour; and a large 42% have an unknown cause.

‘Indeed,  recorded incidents of arson have grown 2000% since 1974, doubling every eight years since 1964.’

About 40 % of arson events are caused by adolescents, Stanley claims: and a concerted effort at understanding the reasons for this would be one constructive approach to bushfire prevention. ‘Our knowledge about arson attacks and about how to prevent them is extremely poor.’