The Canberra fires of 2003: a pine planataion on the edge of the Brindebella Ranges ignites
Credit: SMH
Recently Scott Mooney, a palaeoecologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, studied charcoal in lake sediments at Jibbon Lagoon in the Royal National Park, just south of the city. He showed that concentrations of charcoal were lower before the arrival of Europeans in Australia, in 1788, than they were afterward.
Furthermore, Mooney found, the number of fires increased dramatically after 1930. He asserts his evidence proves that Aboriginal people did not conduct regular burns in the land now encompassed by the park. In addition he notes that his studies in the nearby Blue Mountains have shown links over the past 14,000 years between fires and previous episodes of climate change; the Aboriginal contribution the fires was marginal.
The problem with many popular accounts, Mooney contends, is that they simplistically assume that all Aborigines lived the same kinds of lives. "The last Aboriginal people to live traditional lifestyles," he notes, "lived in desert communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and they did use fire. But to apply this to all landscapes and to all Aboriginal groups in Australia is ridiculous."
In a final twist, Neville Nicholls turns the argument that Aboriginal practices created a fire-prone Australia on its head. In a 2002 paper, Nicholls suggested that Australia's highly variable, drastic climate swings may have made permanent agriculture less attractive to Australia's hunter-gatherers. Rather than changing the landscape with fire to suit their needs, the Aborigines, Nicholls argues, were forced to remain hunter-gatherers by their climate's drastic swings and the fires it caused.
If so, then even today climate change is far more important in regulating the frequency and intensity of wildfires than people are. Setting regular, low-intensity ground fires can burn off excess fuel and diminish the frequency of explosive fires. Such fire-management practices certainly may help save individual homes, sheep stations, and businesses. But fire management alone cannot address Australia's long-term bushfire problems, for the simple reason that such burns can do nothing to ameliorate the climate.
If the hot, dry, fire-prone climate of Australia moulded the lifestyle and behaviour of Aborigines, then modern Australians, too, may have to adopt a lifestyle more in keeping with a hot, dry ecosystem. That means growing crops that are less water intensive and developing technologies that consume less water and produce less greenhouse gas. People may have to rely on rooftop water-collecting tanks, which were once common in the outback. In place of air conditioners, they may have to use shaded porches; in place of fossil fuels, solar panels; in place of lush English gardens, plants suited to a dry environment.
The more arid regions of the United States, and many countries, including Portugal and Spain, may be glimpsing a part of their own future in Australia, a future in which water restrictions, drought, and more intense, longer-lasting, and deadlier fire seasons become a way of life.
Governments would be prudent to start planning now for worst-case scenarios, especially in areas settled in wetter times: where water was once plentiful, it may become scarcer.
How 20 million people on the world's largest island and driest liveable continent cope with changes to their environment could well be a harbinger for what is to come elsewhere. It will either be a success story for the rest of the world to emulate, or a cautionary tale to warn others. "We're in the hottest decades in history," Thomas Swetnam declares. "It's gonna get warmer, it's gonna burn better and we're gonna see more fires."
Dan Drollette is a science writer and photographer in New York who fell in love with Australia on his first visit on a Fulbright fellowship in 1995.
