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Comment by thewizardofaus | Hacker News Reader

A bit sensationalist. Eastern states don't do prescribed burn off for bushland. Which has made a significant difference in these ongoing fires.

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Burn offs can often increase fuel. Knocking down or burning established forests will result in grass and numerous saplings shooting up in place of the limited plant life that could survive under the low light of the canopy. So it really depends on the type of forests/bushland.

There's also been a lot of talk about opposition from left-ist parties to backburning and clear-felling, when their real policies are actually based on what the science recommends, which is a lot more complicated than either do or do not backburn. (I doubt that allowing unchecked clear-felling is a good strategy either - grass fires can rip through paddocks as they do forests.)

Seen the same in the West. People build houses in the bush, then object to burnoff (which keeps the fuel levels low) because it's unpleasant and smoky. So fuel levels build up, and then their houses burn to the ground.

People forget that Australian bush forest needs to burn. That either happens with small fires frequently, or big fires infrequently. Those are the choices. Not burning at all is effectively choosing a massive fire very infrequently.

Why not just run regular logging operations if it's simply a matter of removing potential "fuel" from that environment. Burning that off seems like it might be a bit wasteful, compared to turning that biomass into a useful resource.

The trees drop huge amounts of bark, branches, leaves, etc, that don't rot (because high heat and lack of humidity), and that have to burn. It's a very different environment from Northern Hemisphere forests, there's no thick soft layer of damp, rotting leaves. It's all just sitting there on the ground waiting to burn. Bark peels off the trees in great sheets, falling to the ground where it sits there until it burns. Leaves pile up in dry drifts, waiting to burn.

You could chop the trees down, but that would leave you with no forest. It's not just mature trees that drop fuel, even growing trees do this.

If you have a forest in Australia[0], it has to burn regularly. It's not like Europe or America, where you can cheerfully build your house in the woods and it's all very pretty. If you build your house in the bush, then you have to cope with the fires.

Good to see the Guardian article talking about adaptation for once. One possible answer is to create houses that won't burn, and that are sealed from the heat and smoke.

[0] I gather that Tasmanian forest are less reliant on fire, so the situation may be different there.

Quite a lot of native Australian flora has adapted to bushfires and requires fire to drop seed or germinate. eg. seed pods that open after being burnt, dropping the well protected contents onto fresh, fertile ash.

> That either happens with small fires frequently, or big fires infrequently.

It's not like there haven't been any "small" fires in the preceding years?

I don't know enough about the specifics of the areas that are burning now to say when the last time those areas had a fire.

Every acre of bush needs to burn every few years. If it doesn't, fuel load builds up and then there's a huge fire.

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