Showing posts with label fires. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fires. Show all posts

Aboriginal Cultural Burning Stops Australian Bush Fires

Global warming is a problem that no government wants to deal with. It is a scientific fact that the planet is getting hotter. With people doing nothing to combat the issue we need to look to the past to prevent damage to houses and farms from bush fires.


Aboriginals practiced a system of animal farming called cultural burning. They set fires where scrub was low. Small animals could see the fires coming so could safely flee. The patchy habitat made hunting of the animals easy for hunters.

When lightning set large trees alight they could not breach the flatter areas. Aboriginals believed that continual burning sustained life for all. Early Australian governments continued with assimilation programs moving aboriginals to towns. Thus, the cool burns stopped.

Out of control wild fires destroy ecosystems. All burnable material is destroyed as the fires burn across hundreds of square kilometers. Occupation of the land by white people particularly with their monoculture has seen once quite fertile land turned to dust.

Aboriginals have always known the truth but paternal treatment of them silenced whole communities. They knew that without controlled burning kangaroos, dingoes and lizards would diminish in number in their old lands. Hunter gatherers have managed the environment in the past. We need to listen to them.




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 Keywords: fire, cultural, burning, people, aboriginal, martu, land, fires, food, australian,

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Bushfires Cause Changes in Cave Water Below

The chemistry is altered in the cave water below a bushfire.
Raging fires on the surface of the planet affect caves that intertwine below. Research into climate history is now complicated by this finding. Australian and UK scientists analysed water dripping in cave after a fire and found that the chemistry of moisture changed.
Water on stalactites
There could be a new horizon, however. Stalagmites and stalactites store information about fires. The caves tested have clear data stretching back 200,000 years. Oxygen-16 is lighter than oxygen-18 and it evapourates quicker, so dripwater with more oxygen-18 would indicate fires or hot spells above.

Pauline Treble of the University of New South Wales found that sites in a cave only 23 meters apart had different water chemical readings. This was caused by a recent bushfire in 2005 localized to one of the cave sections.
 
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El Niño Predicted a Year in Advance

The world is in a crisis of bad weather. Extremes of climate are becoming regular phenomena. While coastal eastern Australia is getting unprecedented levels of rain. inland there is a drought. We have a drought even though El Niño has not been in effect for years. It could be said that the rain on the coast is caused by La Nina. This does not explain "the dry" inland. Where once weather could be clearly predicted by the El Niño/La Niña cycle, this is no longer the case.

Improvement in weather forecasting now helps in knowing a year in advance whether El Niño or La Niña will be dominant. An El Niño is due. The US would be pleased to get some relief from damaging drought and fires. Australia's last drought was severe. The Queensland government invested heavily in water catchment and storage. When La Niña arrived the government was condemned and even ridiculed for "wasting" money. At the time the investment was deemed necessary by government and constituents alike.

Knowing what will happen a year in advance and preparing for the consequences are not ordinarily done. We usually take action after the fact. There is a lot of inertia out there. People have short memories. When El Niño arrives grass pastures will turn to dust and water rationing will return as well. Australia has historically experienced climatic extremes. This will not change.
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