Antinuclear

Aboriginal forest management better than today’s efforts

Aboriginal Australians Managed the Forest Better than Europeans Care 2 by s.e. smith March 6, 2014 Australia’s notorious bushfires are often international news, but close to home, they’re less newsworthy than they are terrifying for Australians with painful memories of homes and lives lost. Much of the country can become a tinderbox thanks to its location and climate conditions — and don’t jump to assume climate change is only reason, because evidence suggests that fire has played a critical role in the ecological history of Australia for thousands of years……..

Australia has also been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. These humans clearly had a functional relationship with the fires that raged across the continent, or they wouldn’t have been able to survive. How did they do it? Australia’s Aboriginal community, and the historical record, provide the answer: controlled burns. They employed a careful forest management practice that included burns to create open pastureland for hunting, as well as to protect their communities.

When Europeans reached Australia, they encountered a highly managed landscape, but they didn’t realize how managed it was, and how important that management had come to be, until it was too late. Members of the Aboriginal community were killed, driven away from their land and forced out of areas they’d been caring for over the millennia, in a tragic repetition of other encounters between Indigenous people and Europeans. As they retreated from their ancestral lands, though, fire licked at their footprints, because Europeans allowed trees and shrubs to grow wild, creating Australia’s famous bush……..

As with other Indigenous people, the Aborigines shaped the land around them……
The high temperature firestorms that fixate the globe and worry Australians aren’t natural either, after all: they’re the result of fire suppression combined with uncontrolled growth in the bush, much like the severe wildfires the United States struggles with.< It’s clear that Australia needs a better forest and fire management policy, because while climate change isn’t the root cause of the region’s terrible fires, as the global climate shifts, Australia’s fire situation may become more dire.  http://www.care2.com/causes/aboriginal-australians-managed-the-forest-better-than-europeans.html#ixzz2vIipLPKL

March 7, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized