Cultural burning

A paper by Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher et al. (2021) titled: “Catastrophic Bushfires, Indigenous Fire Knowledge and Reframing Science in Southeast Australia” suggests Indigenous cultural burning practices as a potential management tool for mitigating climate-driven catastrophic bushfires in Australia.

However, the paper does not address the health impacts associated with low temperature combustion in the context of post-colonial settlement.

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.

It is well documented that terrible crimes did occur in Southeastern Victoria and elsewhere. “Massacres committed on Aboriginal people by invaders and colonists” is the explanation given in the paper for Indigenous depopulation in the region. That is a simplistic and loaded statement leading to the inferred conclusion that traditional land management ceased due to massacres and “catastrophic bushfires have been recurrent events in this region since the 1850s.”

However, East Gippsland rainfall is notoriously ‘peaky’ and unpredictable. It seems reasonable to expect that the extreme variability of summer rainfall in the region would have been taken into account “to adequately address the potential for Indigenous fire management” and “to inform policy and practice in managing Southeast Australian forest landscapes.”

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 have been to clearly define the fire problem in terms of its contemporary impacts and then proceed to develop solutions capable of achieving the desired outcomes.

It would be as a breath of fresh air to hear something from the environmental champions and saviours of the planet about the human health impacts of low temperature combustion.

The health and safety of firefighters and affected communities cannot be adequately protected on the basis of practices appropriate to an utterly different way of life, dare I say ‘culture’.