Fires and Fireflies
Fires and Fireflies
Three Moons Later
my roof
A constellation of fireflies glides through the undergrowth before me, and behind me the hills are ablaze with fires of a far more destructive kind.
September 11th is a date with particular local meaning and resonance, one that predates the notorious events of 2001 by precisely one year. On that day in the year 2000 the remote valley where I’m writing this little screed was engulfed in a massive bushfire for the first time in nearly a century. Hundred foot high candleflames roared upward from massive ancient hollow-stemmed old growth trees like a vast satanic birthday cake, feeding choking black smoke into a Mordor-like cloud which hung low over the forest, lit from below by mad orange belchings and luminous flashes.
I toted a heavy backpack full of water about for days on end, spraying out small fire fronts and spot fires that the overworked brigades couldn’t keep up with, and batted out flames on the wooden walls of various houses and buildings just as they broke out.
Now some dimwit has lit up a small blaze in a patch of forest over a ridge in the next valley (torching a stolen car in the forest), and the fire brigades have taken their cue to light up the entire side of the forested valley opposite my home along a ten kilometre front in a ‘preventative backburning operation’.
westward from home
Many consider such behaviour a good idea, and in many places they may be correct; but around here, where a mosaic of recovering rainforest is interspersed with ridges of gum trees, regular burning simply decimates the fire-retarding rainforest and encourages the pyrophytic (fire-loving and fire-tolerant) plants. Without burning, the rainforest – which once covered all these lands in a massive unbroken canopy of water-retaining Old Growth - will grow to predominate and ultimately stop any massive fires from forming in the area, just as it has for millions of years. When the forest is burnt too regularly or fiercely – as it just about always is by ignorant and well-intentioned or perversely driven pyromaniac human beings – we’re just setting ourselves up for bigger and more disastrous fires in the future.
In other places where drier forest types predominate, prescribed burning makes a lot more sense – but even there the soil structure and microfauna are usually obliterated and the diversity is denuded by regular torching of biomass. The CO2 emissions barely bear considering!
As I write, the koalas whose spring mating calls have just begun to be heard again (for the first time since the last man-made fires of two years ago) have been silenced once more. They and a multitude of other endangered species with which you are probably less familiar are being burned, choked or driven out of the only areas in which they can possibly survive.
Almost all the fires I’ve witnessed in this area a have been started by human beings, with the exception of a single lightning strike whose resultant spot fire was put out by the accompanying and subsequent deluge. Every fire leaves the ecosystem and soil structure in a worse state, less resilient and less capable of recovering from drastic destruction – just like most of the rest of the planet. The threat of climatic catastrophe oft pales to insignificance before the daily reality of human-induced change, which amounts to nothing more than rampant destruction of the web of life that supports us all.
Meanwhile, as the firemen of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 imaginings are made all too real - actually incinerating the leafy pages of the book of life while imagining they’re doing the right thing - killing tens of thousands of endangered nesting quolls, glossy black cockatoos, lyre birds, koalas, phascogales, bandicoots, possums, various gliding marsupials (ranging from thumb-sized Feather gliders to huge Greater gliders), raptors, macro and micro-bats, a myriad of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects (including this magnificent display of fireflies) and unheard-of unique plants, the world burns before my eyes while I water the tree nursery and mulch the rainforest plantings and vegetables. And continue to pull pyrophytic weeds like lantana (introduced by the last two centuries of Eurosurpers, so like and unlike me) that are growing under the forest canopy out by their roots, so they don’t wick any flames into the sensitive rainforest.
Life goes on, after a fashion – but on the surface, everything seems to recover; how can anyone who hasn’t seen what’s been obliterated possibly know what was out here?
When last I wrote in these pages (before being locked out of this site while its hosts overhauled the entire system for three months) the floodwaters were licking at the banks of my front yard, and had blocked all roads to the outside world. Let’s see what happens next, hmm? It’s likely that there’s about to be some noteworthy volcanic activity on the Pacific Rim.
Time to go see how the neighbours over the river are holding out; one couple who are building a house and three particularly vulnerable and currently vacant dwellings, whose owners have moved into town. No-one even informed any of them that their land, trees and sundry property were about to be burned in this ‘controlled backburning operation’.
The more things change…
- R.A.
Images - author’s
For further enlightenment see –
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
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