For many Aboriginal leaders, the crisis facing Australia reveals the failure of blind land management.
..... Member of the Bundjalungs, original guardians of the northern coastal area of New South Wales, Oliver Costello cowardly, not without bitterness: "We have been telling people for a while that big fires are coming. No one listened to us. ”The aboriginal populations, the first known human beings to have populated the mainland of Australia, learned to manage and calm the risks of mega-fires thanks to a specific knowledge of local ecosystems and burns reasoned and carefully controlled.
“Before colonization, the tribes followed the law of the land by managing the relationships of local plants and animals, which have their own identity and their own behavior, with fire. When you burn the right way, you get the right animals, the right plants, and the right people in the right places. When you burn badly, you disrupt these relationships, ”said Oliver Costello, head of Firesticks, an organization that ensures the conservation of Indigenous fire and land management practices.
..... Unlike Western techniques, cultural burning takes a holistic approach synchronized with the seasons, the gestation periods of the animals, the sowing and planting periods. Westerners call this an "ecosystem"; Aborigines use the word "kinship". It is a complex system that determines how living things interact with each other and their roles, responsibilities and obligations to each other and to the earth.
Less effective Western techniques
The destructuring of old management practices has made vegetation more flammable and populations more vulnerable. Already in 1990, researcher Phil Cheney, member of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) published a scientific article on the current management of forest fires in Australia: twenty years have been entrusted to the management services of the parks which have little experience of fire management, the possibility appears to see in the future large fires more frequent and probably more destructive. The public at large is deprived of the skills of fire management which have been painstakingly and painstakingly acquired for over a hundred years. "
..... Respect for the seasons is another fundamental element. With colonization, the Gregorian calendar became established and the year was divided into four seasons. However, the European notions of summer, autumn, winter and spring are totally inadequate to classify the Australian seasons, which are very diverse. For example, on Wardaman land, west of Katherine town in the Northern Territory, it is currently Yijilg, a late summer marked by heavy precipitation. Some territories see six different seasons per year, others more, others less.
“Westerners use dates and fuel conditions to know when to burn. They do not use the values, the kinship, the cultural laws which govern the territory and very often end up applying the wrong type of fire, deplores Oliver Costello. Often the fires are too hot. They damage and burn the canopy. The ground is therefore found naked, plagued by sunlight. This speeds up the regeneration of shrubs that crowd out grasses, grasses, ferns and other terrestrial species, and allows more combustible material to grow. ”It's a vicious circle.
http://www.slate.fr/story/186341/connai ... -incendiesExciting article that pulverizes certainties, "science", beliefs and Western superiority.