traditional burning
Oct. 22nd, 2006 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eWaiting for Background Briefing on the radio this morning I heard a news item that Cape York Aboriginal groups want to re-establish "traditional burning" of forests to "protect against weeds and extinction".
That is a bit of a sore point with me. I've always felt that the Aboriginal practice of burning the land over the last 60,000 years is largely responsible for the poor soil quality and flammability of plants here. Topsoil -- humus -- never had much chance to develop because organic matter was burned off every year. As a result we have very weak, acidic soils. And eucalypts, which were a minority species before the Aboriginals first came here, were able to spread like crazy because they love fire and encourage it by being extremely flammable. Fires eliminate the eucalypts' competition.
But more recently, organic farming has produced marvels here. You only need to spend a little while composting and returning nutrients to the soil to find that our land can become quite rich. Imagine if that had been done instead of the easy way of farming: burning.
Bear in mind that I'm not blaming the aborinals for this. They did what they knew, and they managed the landscape quite well, given the tools they had. Reading the accounts of the early white explorers you notice they often remark that the country was like a park. That was quite intentional. The aborigines deliberately maintained it so.
What we normally think of as "natural" bush, isn't. I've heard aborinines refer to it as uncleaned scrub. It is a tangle of dry, flammable stuff -- a disaster waiting to happen. The last 60,000 years of maintenance by fire has made it work that way.
My point is that we should know better now. We understand the cycle of materials. We should not be considering the re-introduction of "traditional burning". It helps to make the bush more flammable and keeps the soil weak. We have better ways. We can clean the bush and maintain a variety of ecosystems while enriching the land. We just need to plan for the future, not fall back on the past.
That is a bit of a sore point with me. I've always felt that the Aboriginal practice of burning the land over the last 60,000 years is largely responsible for the poor soil quality and flammability of plants here. Topsoil -- humus -- never had much chance to develop because organic matter was burned off every year. As a result we have very weak, acidic soils. And eucalypts, which were a minority species before the Aboriginals first came here, were able to spread like crazy because they love fire and encourage it by being extremely flammable. Fires eliminate the eucalypts' competition.
But more recently, organic farming has produced marvels here. You only need to spend a little while composting and returning nutrients to the soil to find that our land can become quite rich. Imagine if that had been done instead of the easy way of farming: burning.
Bear in mind that I'm not blaming the aborinals for this. They did what they knew, and they managed the landscape quite well, given the tools they had. Reading the accounts of the early white explorers you notice they often remark that the country was like a park. That was quite intentional. The aborigines deliberately maintained it so.
What we normally think of as "natural" bush, isn't. I've heard aborinines refer to it as uncleaned scrub. It is a tangle of dry, flammable stuff -- a disaster waiting to happen. The last 60,000 years of maintenance by fire has made it work that way.
My point is that we should know better now. We understand the cycle of materials. We should not be considering the re-introduction of "traditional burning". It helps to make the bush more flammable and keeps the soil weak. We have better ways. We can clean the bush and maintain a variety of ecosystems while enriching the land. We just need to plan for the future, not fall back on the past.