Reducing fire the Aboriginal way
Traditional practices attracting new attention as Australia burns
COOINDA, AUSTRALIA — At a time when vast tracts of Australia are burning, Violet Lawson is never far from a match.
In the woodlands surrounding her home in the far north of the country, she lights hundreds of small fires a year — literally fighting fire with fire. These traditional Aboriginal practices, which reduce the undergrowth that can fuel bigger blazes, are attracting new attention as Australia endures disaster and confronts a fiery future.
Over the past decade, fire-prevention programs, mainly on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, have cut destructive wildfires in half. While the efforts draw on ancient ways, they also have a thoroughly modern benefit: Organizations that practice defensive burning have earned US$80 million under the country’s cap-and-trade system as they have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the north by 40 per cent.
These programs, which are generating important scientific data, are being held up as a model that could be adapted to save lives and homes in other regions of Australia, as well as fire-prone parts of the world as different as California and Botswana.
“Fire is our main tool,” Lawson said as she inspected a freshly burned patch where grasses had become ash but the trees around them were undamaged. “It’s part of protecting the land.”
The fire-prevention programs, which were first given government licenses in 2013, now cover an area three times the size of Portugal. Even as towns in the south burned in recent months and smoke haze blanketed Sydney and Melbourne, wildfires in northern Australia were much less severe.
“The Australian government is now starting to see the benefits of having indigenous people look after their lands,” said Joe Morrison, one of the pioneers of the project.
“Aboriginal people who have been through very difficult times are seeing their language, customs and traditional knowledge being reinvigorated and celebrated using Western science.”
In some ways, the Aboriginal methods resemble Western ones practised around the world: One of the main goals is to reduce underbrush and other fuel that accelerates hot, damaging fires.
But the ancient approach tends to be more comprehensive. Indigenous people, using precisely timed, low-intensity fires, burn their properties the way a suburban homeowner might use a lawn mower.
Aboriginal practices have been so successful in part because of a greater cultural tolerance of fire and the smoke it generates.
The country’s thinly populated north, where Aboriginal influence and traditions are much stronger than in the south, is not as hamstrung by political debates and residents’ concerns about the health effects of smoke.
The landscape and climate of northern Australia also make it more amenable to preventive burning. The wide open spaces and the distinctive seasons — a hot dry season is followed by monsoon rains — make burning more predictable.
Yet despite these regional differences, those who have studied the aboriginal techniques say they could be adapted in the more populated parts of the country.
“We most certainly should learn to burn Aboriginal-style,” said Bill Gammage, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Last week, Victor Cooper, a former forest ranger in northern Australia, lit a wad of shaggy bark to demonstrate the type of fire that burns at temperatures low enough to avoid damage to sensitive plants that are crucial food for animals.