
Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn' - jweir
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-51043828
======
rayiner
> "It's the concept of maintaining country - central to everything we do as
> Aboriginal people. It's about what we can give back to country; not just
> what we can take from it."

Aboriginal practices should not be romanticized. There is evidence that it
actually had severe environmental impacts, in particular shortening
Australia's monsoon season and lengthen the dry season:
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/did-australian-
abori...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/did-australian-aborigines-
change-weather). There is also evidence that they caused the extinction of the
Australian megafauna: [https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate-
australian-mega...](https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate-australian-
megafauna.html).

~~~
lukevdp
Yep, it’s the noble savage fallacy
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage)

~~~
lonelappde
The article is about controlled burns.

What's the name of the fallacy where you dismiss something that has has been
successful for centuries or more just because it doesn't have a Latin/Greek-
derived name granted by a European?

~~~
jpz
I agree with the criticism, and disagree with your counterpoint.

There is no evidentiary record of this being "successful for centuries." After
all, there are no written records.

On the face of it, if you start a fire in a bushland which is 100s of
kilometres in breadth, how are Aboriginal people going to communicate and
control such a blaze? They don't have access to:

\- water pumps \- hoses \- irrigation \- telecommunications \- horses

There's some mythmaking going on at the moment in Australia about this.

I find it hard to take the claims at face value.

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jozzas
In general a lot of Australian forest does need to burn, we know this. Record
drought and record high temperatures over the past few years created the
catastrophic fire conditions we have seen this year. Controlled burns cannot
be carried out when conditions are dry and hot - the fire gets out of control.
Thus there have been very few burns of this nature over the last several
years.

Climate change means it's getting more and more difficult to carry out these
type of controlled burns for forest management in general. Our fire seasons
are longer, hotter, drier and more dangerous, and these types of burns can and
do get out of control.

~~~
xg15
The purpose of a controlled burn is to remove underbrush and create gaps that
an uncontrolled fire could not cross, right? Wouldn't it be possible to
archive those goals without fire? (e.g. just going through the forest and
clearing underbrush manually)

Of course some fires are still needed, e.g. to trigger fire-dependant seeds.

~~~
rasz
Perhaps we could introduce a non indigenous animal to do it for us, Australia
had some experience in this area :)

~~~
Nasrudith
The kicker is that grazing animals could do it but aren't done that way very
often in practice. Not without environmental costs of course.

~~~
amaterasu
Also, there is significant political opposition to this, specifically in the
Victorian highlands.

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rafaelvasco
No, no and no. Being ignorant is one thing. Deliberately maintaining it and
event romanticizing it is a heinous crime at best.

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carolina_33
Agreed, we have so much to learn.
[https://youtu.be/_tOkb1y7hEs](https://youtu.be/_tOkb1y7hEs)

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ColanR
This should be a much larger part of forest fire conversations.

