PLEA Network

22 August 2016, The Conversation, New modelling on bushfires shows how they really burn through an area. Bushfires in Australia can have a devastating impact on an environment and destroy homes and lives, so any effort to prevent them is a welcome move. But the way that we have traditionally understood bushfires and forest flammability in Australia is not up to the challenges of our changing climate. Thankfully, a new approach is making sense of the confusion by looking at the plants themselves. Unfortunately though, time is running out. Years ago I could stand on a ridge in the mountains as winter gales roared through the Alpine Ash forests on the slopes below me. There’d be black cockatoos on the wind and the first hard snow flakes rattling on my coat. It was a wildness that stung the eyes with raw beauty. Sadly those forests are dying. They are being burnt so often that they may be gone by the end of the century. Like the tallest hardwoods in the world and the thousand year old King Billy pines of Tasmania, they are places we have no room for in our fossil fuel economy. It’s not that fire is bad; our forests need it. But it’s coming so hard and fast in this changing climate. We fight the fires and we manage the fuels as best we can, but our best efforts are only as good as the science they are built on, and there are some hard questions to be asked about that science. Read More here