A Season of Ashes - by Mike Adamson
Smoke over Lobethal: a sight no Australian ever wants to see.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin
Australia may once have been referred to poetically as “The Burning Land” for its intense heat, its red-oxide sands, and the merciless eye of the summer sun. But the term has taken on a sinister connotation as 2019 becomes 2020, as Australia suffers the most intense wildfires in recorded history.
Maps of Australia, thermal images from space, have been compiled to indicate what has burned out and what is still on fire, and the areas are appalling. In December, the area burned in the New South Wales and Victorian blazes alone, if squared and overlaid on a map of England centered on London, stretched from Cambridge to Brighton (around 121.8 miles squared), and from Reading to Canterbury. Weeks later, the area is far larger.
At time of writing, they are ongoing, so this is not an ‘out of the ashes’ story. It is not an optimistic declaration of ‘we will rebuild.’ It is witness to an ongoing tragedy whose outcome cannot yet be predicted—though its origins can be examined in some detail.
Smoke over the rooftops of Lobethal SA., December 20, 2019. This was the Cudlee Creek fire, which spread towards nearby Lobethal.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin
Australia has an ultra-conservative government which operates in close cooperation with the fossil fuel industry and the Murdoch media. This is not the place to discuss the politics of the matter, but to consider their outfall, which in practical terms has been to ignore and frustrate the efforts of departments, services and the public to affect the trajectory of events which has contributed to the severity of the event. [1]
Fire service chiefs have been refused planning meetings with government, their requests for equipment turned down. The Country Fire Service of South Australia and the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales are volunteer organizations, and by New Year some fire fighters had been away from their jobs over 100 days. They are under-equipped, not even supplied with breathing equipment, to allow them to do their jobs effectively. Those fire fighters who are unemployed have had their welfare payments cancelled, because “fighting fires is not an approved activity.” [2] This is bureaucratic insanity, but also a matter of record. Water-bomber aircraft are leased from overseas rather than locally owned, and when the fires began none were available. [3]
Near Lobethal, and typical of millions of hectares all across Australia, a great blackness has come upon the land.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin
And it cannot go unsaid that the Australian conservative government, in power now six years, has an international reputation in the gutter for its stance on climate. Three quarters of our domestic electricity is still coal generated [4], while we remain one of the leading coal exporters in the world. The government officially does not believe in anthropogenic climate change, so there is a certain irony that the dire consequences of inaction should first manifest here. A report some twelve years old forecasted the current situation [5], but was not acted upon, and we are paying the price — the ordinary Australians, that is, and the defenseless animals of this continent. The politicians responsible for both collectively ignoring the science and declining requests for equipment are untouched. Senior members of parliament, including the Prime Minister, were conveniently on vacation overseas as the crisis unfolded. [6]
The price of this inaction can be rendered in the numbers. It is estimated, for example, that on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island alone, a small island off the shore of South Australia known as Australia’s Galapagos Islands (but around half the size), the fires have killed 100,000 sheep and cattle, and perhaps 25,000 koalas in the wild, and remain unstoppable. Estimates continue — in total, throughout Australia, well over 2000 homes lost, over 12 million hectares burned, 25 human lives and counting, hundreds of thousands of farm animals, and a death toll among native wildlife thought to have exceeded one billion individuals and rising daily.
The remains of Bushland Park, Lobethal.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin
Then there is the human price, not simply in lost property, as heartbreaking as it is to lose one’s every possession, family heritage and every stroke of backbreaking work invested in a home and land perhaps over generations. There is the other cost, the mental anguish of seeing a world in flames, and the emotional kosh of coming to grips with the brutal realities thereof. Consider the shooters who work a day through euthanasing wildlife too burned to be saved. Apiarists who went to check their hives spoke of “a forest that was screaming,” the cries of untold numbers of horribly burned animals not yet dead. And this was in November. [7]
The image of red skies, both reflected firelight and the spectral shifting of sunlight through particles suspended in the atmosphere, has become part of the Australian identity, a garment we wear with horror, for only the insane ever wished to see such a thing. Towns were evacuated and left to burn: Mallacoota, Cobargo and Bega on the Victorian coast all suffered considerable damage, and the image of their populations huddled on the beaches, their backs to the sea, with their pets around them, is stamped into the national consciousness. [8] The Royal Australian Navy has performed evacuations, while a cruise ship is standing by to evacuate the population of eastern Kangaroo Island should the fires reach Kingscote, Penneshaw, American River and other centers. Meanwhile, the still raging fires west of Sydney are conjoining — three fires linked up on the 6th to become a half-million hectare mega-fire. A day later, the arrest toll for arsonists has reached 83, though other sources say only 24—some Australians incinerate their own land for their own perverse reasons, just as others have attacked and vandalized fire stations to hamper their response. [9] Mental illness (pyromania) is responsible in some cases but by no means all, and the psychology of arson is a complex subject. Vandalism of fire service assets is another related issue, and suggests a malicious gratification in the fires burning unchecked, but the issue remains complex. The same pattern has been seen in California.
Blackened trees after fire swept through Lobethal Bushland Park.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin.
While evacuation for the human population is a matter of course, animal evacuation is another matter. Shelters and veterinary hospitals provide temporary refuge for domestic animals, but large-scale movement of farm stock away from danger would seem impractical, and there seem no provisions for wildlife whatsoever, save emergency treatment after the fact for a comparative few—and resources are strained to breaking point.
The traditional fire season of Australia lies some way into each new year—bushfires were once called the “February Dragon.” The apocalypse Australia is enduring began in December, and there had been no shortage of fires as early as October. If the fire season lasts an equal period after its old peak point, fire danger could extend as late as April. The belly-deep fear is that such a once-in-a-generation holocaust will become the new norm, and, even worse, that the public will normalize it, accept it and drive on. They may have no choice about ‘driving on,’ but normalization of this inferno cannot be allowed to take hold. The world must be seen as malfunctioning, and conscious effort must be directed toward both survival of the conditions now imposed, and understanding the mechanisms driving it.
The urgency of the moment captured here, as Lobethal's hills burn.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin.
The Federal Government has allocated two billion dollars for disaster relief, but so slowly, almost reluctantly, that journalists have observed that this government does nothing until it is shamed into doing so [10]. The figure may seem large, but it is less than half that set aside as a subsidy to a notorious foreign-owned proposed coal mine in Queensland. There is as yet no acknowledgement of responsibility much less culpability, and relations between Canberra, the capital of Australia, and the fire services are tense to say the least.
The public has been far quicker off the mark, with numerous charities collecting considerable sums, over $140 million to date of writing. But on a sour note, fake charities sprang up overnight to siphon off private funds. Some 86 fraudulent charities had been identified by police as of January 9th — surely as crass a thing as can be imagined. [11]
Blackened countryside near Woodside, SA. where fire was stopped at the roadside on December 21, 2019.
Photo by Jen Downes.
Survival is very much on the minds of many Australians at this time, and the future is an uncertain place. No long-term plans have been mooted as yet, no grand strategy to face the remainder of this fire season, much less the next, and the next. The cost of the 2019-2020 season to the insurance industry is likely incalculable as yet, but on past performances claimants can wait twenty and thirty years for pay-outs, and if such infernos come with greater frequency it must be expected that the industry will either suffer collapses or will find ever more creative ways to avoid paying out, passing the entire responsibility to the individual. One more imperative for survival has emerged as of the 7th of January, when it was reported that the Royal Australian Army has been given the task of burying the hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle now lying dead across three or more states, declared a “bio-security threat,” on a seven-day deadline to avoid possible outbreak of disease. [12]
By January 9th, Victoria upgraded from State of Emergency to State of Disaster, and roads into the state from South Australia were closed to traffic. To say the scale of the event is ‘unprecedented’ is an understatement.
Fire effects have been impacting the wider community for the last month and more, as power outages in rural areas resulted in vast quantities of milk being flushed away as waste. The tremendous loss of livestock will also inevitably impact the community in terms of food shortages and escalating prices for what remains. This situation is likely to be long-lived, as it is not simply a question of re-stocking when the fires have gone by, but of time to re-vegetate farmlands.
Lobethal, SA this is how close the flames came to homes.
Photo by Lisa Grapentin.
A month ago I would not have believed I would be writing this commentary, but we are all overtaken by events. Those in a position to know best say these fires are not normal [13], and the fire services are woefully inadequate to combat them. An opposition Member of Parliament has proposed a form of national service, in which all school-leavers serve one year, not in the military but in civil emergency response [14]. If properly organized and administered, this seems a promising notion, yet it is also a symptomatic treatment. Only a fundamental reversal of government policy will begin to address the root causes of intensification of the wildfire mechanism.
Surviving the immediate conditions comes first, of course, but any full and proper response to this situation cannot continue to ignore the salient point: climate change has arrived, and, the clear fact emerges, it’s just getting started.
The burned-out remains of tractor in a farm near Lobethal, SA.
Photo by Rick Kearsley.
All images are from local non-photographers in the area. This is an issue people are seeing as they drive down the street and living in their homes. Please help.
Reputable Charities:
http://theconversation.com/how-to-donate-to-australian-bushfire-relief-give-money-watch-for-scams-and-think-long-term-129445
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/bushfire-crisis-how-can-i-donate-and-help/11839842
References:
4. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/basics
6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50879850
8. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-03/navy-starts-bushfires-evacuations--in-mallacoota/11838424
9. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/10/australia-bushfires-arson-psychology
12. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-06/dead-animals-bushfire-biosecurity-emergency/11843428
