ROSS BRADSTOCK: The notion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stop hazard reduction is a piece of fiction.
ISOBEL ROE: He says there's more pre-burning happening in New South Wales than ever, but state agencies don't have the money to do the amount of burning needed to prevent fires like those in the state this week.
ROSS BRADSTOCK: Hazard reduction will only put a dent in risk. It will not eliminate risk, because the amount of hazard reduction you would have to do to eliminate risk is beyond the financial resources of the state.
And someone from Tasmania adds (I am sure the transcript has an error here, which I have corrected):
ISOBEL ROE: Professor David Bowman works in pyrogeography, the study of wildfire, at the University of Tasmania.Update: there was more on this in The Guardian.
ROSS BRADSTOCKBOWMAN: What we're really talking about here is the tension between a command-and-control and regulating the use of fire in the landscape and a more organic, self-organising use of fire: 'the old school' way of doing it.
ISOBEL ROE: And he says, as the population grows in semi-rural areas, the harder it is to light safe fires.
ROSS BRADSTOCKBOWMAN: And they're becoming increasingly complicated because of the effect of shrinking safe weather windows and increased intensity of the fires.
But as you come down into the settled areas, the complexity of planned burning increases. As you get more land tenures, you have to have more sign-off, more regulation, more agreement.
ISOBEL ROE: Professor Bowman believes the budget for hazard reduction burning needs to dramatically increase, not just to increase burning but to develop better ways of doing it.
Factcheck: Is there really a green conspiracy to stop bushfire hazard reduction?
Short answer: "no".
2 comments:
we should always remember backburnning is under the control of a state government Agency in NSW it is the RFS.
People who allege greenies have slowed backburning are completely wrong and ignorant.
Part of the problem is that there should have been substantial funding increases for backburning but governments have ignored the fact that the fire risk obviously very much increases as each year of the drought occurs. The other problem is that the RFS is losing people, numbers of volunteers are declining. So we're in a real bind here because even if there was sufficient funding there are not sufficient people.
The Greens have to be responsible for at least some of the problems but it is governments in general that are failing. The Greens are too crazy for me. Their views on ecology are so simplistic it beggars belief that The Greens are populated by many highly educated people. Not educated, "schooled", there is an critical difference because so much tertiary schooling today is pitiful, little more than shoving information into heads without training in thinking. I digress sorry. ... However trying to sheet this home entirely to The Greens is just narrow minded partisan rubbish that highlights an ever increasing problem in information dispersion: aiming for the strongest emotional hook for the relevant constituency. Put simply it goes like this: emotions and sustained analysis are mutually competitive. So I worry about the reversal of the Flynn Effect because if it continues it will be a far bigger problem than these fires and the only solution, if the reversal isn't biologically based, is a radical re-evaluation to create standards of information and education quality that the greater majority agree upon.
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