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.

The paper does not address the health impacts associated with low temperature combustion in the context of post-colonial settlement. Neither does it adequately address the impact of fire in the landscape prior to human occupation.

Microscopic particles (PM 2.5) 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. But there is no reason to suppose that indigenous people did not face environmental health problems like the rest of humanity.

Indeed, a good deal of what is written about Aboriginal health and life span before 1788 seems to be conjectural. The paper refers to a “reciprocity between Australian Indigenous people and the world around them, and this reciprocity is fundamental to the health, lives and livelihoods of Indigenous Australians.”

Indigenous people had intimate knowledge of their country and strategies to survive the climatic and weather extremes that have always been a feature of this continent. However, 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. Additionally, the environmental impacts of colonisation included deforestation, mining wastes, dry land salinity, soil erosion, sodicity, acidification, nutrient decline and eutrophication of waterways and lakes.

It is well documented that terrible crimes did occur in Southeastern Victoria and elsewhere. By inference, “massacres of Aboriginal people committed by invaders and colonists” led to depopulation and the loss of traditional land management resulting in catastrophic bushfires. However, there is evidence, such as fossil charcoal in soil and sediments, that wildfires were a feature of the pre-European era in southeastern Australia, even before the arrival of Indigenous people.

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 in the paper “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 plant succession to occur without human intervention.

The paper suggests burning “by strict cultural protocols” but the protection of human health is neglected. Furthermore, it is apparently assumed that cultural land management capability exists within contemporary Indigenous urban communities, despite grievously unjust and tragic attempts at cultural annihilation. Traditional land management must be taken into account, but it cannot be expected to rectify problems beyond the experience of the traditional owners.

“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’.