Cultural Burning -Australians tap Aboriginal cultural insight to prevent "wrong fire"
A truly excellent article on 'Cultural Burning'
"To come up here, throw a match on the ground and just relax is the opposite of everything we've ever known," Martina Shelley said as she watched a group of people set small fires in a section of bushland on her family's more than 1,600-hectare property.
The fires, which fill the air with pure, white smoke, are part of a workshop led by Koori Country Firesticks Aboriginal Corporation, a not-for-profit organization reviving indigenous fire management practices, also known as "cultural burning."
The bushland management technique practiced by Aboriginal Australians for tens of thousands of years became less prevalent after European colonization when native peoples were largely dispossessed of their lands. .....
"(For) people who've lived through fire, it's like PTSD. It's scary, and you feel fear when you think about fire," Shelley, 49 said. "But now (having seen cultural burning), it's the complete opposite."
Cool fire that moves slowly through the landscape is a key feature of cultural burns. Using a cigarette lighter, Barber demonstrates how a small spot fire lit under the right conditions in dry leaves, which cover the bushland floor, burns outwards, "like a little campfire," before extinguishing itself.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/...Ra6i7VbHMW6SYpszXz6EYwezFJjjoSxZDp1E0PbEpxdXk
As summer approaches there are continuing calls for large scale 'Hazard Reduction Burns' conducted by the RFS etc. Large scale hot burns. On the last day of winter it is already heating up - temps will hit the mid 20's this week - already much of the window is being missed for Cultural or 'right burns'.
The wholesale change in philosophy needed will require much more human resourcing and costs.
But cultural burns are a time- and labor-intensive process, two things that the predominantly volunteer-run Rural Fire Service, the New South Wales community-based organization that responds to bushfires, do not have.
"We're all volunteers, so we like to get in and get out. We don't have days and days and days," said William Verdon, 52, a member of a local RFS brigade who attended the workshop with a number of his colleagues.
"What the RFS does with hazard reduction burns isn't about animals and things. ......
Foster says the difference in motivations is one of the most difficult philosophical and cultural differences to reconcile when introducing cultural burning to non-Aboriginal people and organizations.
"It's not about humans, it's not about us...it's about protecting country so that country has the capacity to protect us."
Of course love of, and protecting the country, is a holistic requirement - this is just a part. When the land is drained of water, when permanent and ephemeral wetlands are destroyed, when aquifers are cut through by mining, all for profit, then modern society is still causing far more problems than it's solving .....
Chosun :gh:
