When you reduce the land use issues facing Tasmania to their basic arguments, a single message emerges: we must manage our landscape carefully and from a firm understanding of both history and science.
Managing landscapes with a view to long-term viability and sustainability rather than short-term gain and irreparable damage is what Tasmanian farmers do every day.
The challenge we face, both as farmers and as Tasmanians, is to manage our landscape so that we can use it and still keep the things we love in perpetuity. This is not rocket science. So-called primitive peoples had worked it out 40,000 years ago. They managed this landscape through the use of fire. Not only did fire replenish the forests but it created a less dense landscape for hunting.
One of the great unspoken truths in the forest debate is that, if you lock up large tracts of forest in national parks or World Heritage areas, you must be able to manage those forests or, eventually, they will be destroyed.
In his book The Private Life of Plants, Sir David Attenborough explains why even the world’s tallest flowering plant, the Tasmanian swamp gum (also known as the Victorian mountain ash) cannot survive without fire:
“The threat to the survival of the spectacular forests of noble mountain ash is not, in fact, fire. It is the absence of fire,” he wrote.
“If the great trees die from old age before flames have cleared the ground for their seedlings, then they will leave no successors.
“Paradoxically, such a forest will not survive unless much of it is first destroyed.”
Bill Gammage, a respected historian who is an adjunct professor at the Australian National University agrees. Quoted recently in an article in the Weekend Australian, he said the landscape needs to be burned back to a better natural balance – one that does not lend itself to regular catastrophic bushfires.
Gammage’s most recent book, The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines made Australia, has picked up a swathe of awards, including the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian history, and the Queensland literary award for history. An amalgam of history, philosophy and ecology, the book describes how Aborigines not only lived with the land, but shaped it with constant burning to ensure continuity, balance, abundance and predictability. It sends a clear message – and a challenge to the idea of ‘pristine wilderness’ – that not all environmentalists want to hear.
Max Rheese, executive director of the Australian Environment Foundation, agrees. In the same article, he says Aborigines would never have allowed national park ‘wilderness’ areas to grow into such profusion and would have regarded this as intensely threatening.
After the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, the Royal Commission recommended that prescribed burning be increased to 5% of forests annually. The foundation advocated an increase from 120,000ha to 390,000ha a year, but received little support from other environment groups. The Victorian government has doubled the burn area since 2009 and is progressively raising it to 390,000ha a year.
Research tells us that the private forest estate alone adds about 10,000 tonnes of firewood, plus the branches and leaves/volatiles to the Tasmanian bonfire pile every day. Without fire breaks, and without management of fuel loads, the threat of wildfires on a huge scale is significant.
If the state government is considering locking up locking up additional forest then it should not do this without getting some very good advice first.
This advice will confirm that scientists know forests need active management and/or disturbance to thrive. It will confirm that historians tell us this is what the indigenous peoples did. It will confirm that our own experiences is show that, where active forest management occurs, biodiversity is greater than where forests are locked up and left. It will even confirm that much-touted Forest Stewardship Council management guidelines recognise that high conservation forest will be actively managed.
Other places around the world have found to their cost that locking up such forests doesn’t work. In places like California and Canada, they had catastrophic wildfires that damaged people and property and did great environmental harm because they were hot fires. Governments in these places have since reversed their decisions to lock up their native forests and are now harvesting forest produce to remove fuel and are using it to generate energy though biomass.
The landscape is the canvas upon which we all paint. However, we’re not starting with a blank canvas – this canvas is largely already completed. Our surrounding landscape is not only for us to sit back and enjoy. While it is the backdrop of our life, it is also the medium for us to create food, shelter and the other necessities of life.
It is long past time that all Tasmanians recognised that we live in an altered landscape and simply locking it up is a recipe for disaster. It is also long past time that all Tasmanians recognise they have a role to play in ensuring that what we do preserves and enhances the picture we have inherited, without destroying its essence.
