( - National Library of Australia)
We should adapt to the Aboriginal way of managing country, using science and coming to grips with this Australian landscape and its ecologies
Enabling Indigenous Innovations to Solve the Australian Bushfire Crisis
For thousands of years, the Aboriginal people of Australia systematically managed land and fire. Our question is how can we combine traditional practices with modern technological tools to make Australian land resilient.
Background
Australia is not new to bushfires. In dry periods, large swathes of land are engulfed in bushfires and grassfires. Between 1967 and 2013, major Australian bushfires costed several fatalities and A$4.7 billion in direct and indirect economic losses. The latest bushfire incident in 2019-20 was etched in our memory as one of the worst bushfires in recent history. More than 97,000 square kilometers (18 million football fields) of land experienced multiple large-scale and intense fires, predominantly in the southern and eastern part of Australia. Moreover, the 2019-2020 mega-fires pushed many species towards extinction, and several others are highly vulnerable. The latest evidence suggests that climate change has aggravated the bushfire risk, and it will continue to intensify along with record-breaking droughts and heatwaves. The rising temperature and dryness will be lengthening the bushfire season.
Climate change, drought and existing land-use management will continue to threaten and exacerbate the Australian bushfire crisis. To minimize future damage, fatalities, economic losses, and biodiversity losses, we need to rethink how we manage our land and fire. For thousands of years, the Aboriginal people of Australia systematically managed land and fire. They used fire across Australia, and in some areas, this created expansive grassland on good soils that in turn encouraged kangaroos to come and were later hunted for food. Historians and researchers believe selecting what areas to burn, when, and how often, was part of Indigenous knowledge of the land. The result was a mosaic of trees and grasslands that meant the highly combustible Eucalyptus forests were not likely to create intense bushfires.
Our story
Challenge
For more than two centuries, indigenous practices were dismissed as primitive and pushed into the margins. Thanks to the scholarly work of Bill Gammage, Victor Steffensen and others, many academics, activists and policymakers started to realize the benefits of indigenous land management practices.
Across Australia, there are a number of groups that encourage farmers and Indigenous people to work together to adopt land management practices closer to those used by Australia’s first inhabitants. While the use of fire is not the only tool, it is one the Indigenous community can share.
The interesting question here is: how can we combine traditional practices with modern technological tools to make Australian land resilient? What’s the role of new technologies in enabling aboriginal governance to solve the Australian bushfire crisis?
