Firestick Ecology: Fairdinkum science in plain English
Vic Jurskis
Foreword by Professor Peter Attiwill, Melbourne University
ISBN: 9781925138740
Paperback, 370 pages
Retail Price: $34.95
Aborigines came to Australia and burnt out most of the trees and bushes. The megafauna starved whilst eucalypts, herbs, grasses and mesofauna flourished. The ancient culture survived an ice age, global warming and hugely rising seas, forging economies in woodlands and deserts. Europeans doused the firestick, woodlands turned to scrub, mesofauna perished, megafires and tree-eaters irrupted. Foresters rekindled the firestick and greens stole it. Megafires and declines are back with a vengeance whilst ecologists dream-up reasons not to burn. Ecological history shows that we must apply the firestick frequently, willingly and skillfully to restore a healthy, safe environment and economy.
From the book
* Ecologists lacking knowledge and experience of fire behavior, have hijacked Australian fire management.
* Even the mildest sceptic would rightly discount the Angry Summer of 2013, contrived by discarding all temperature data collected prior to 1910.
* Disasters will continue while ever we’re doing research instead of burning.
* Climate hysteria conveniently absolves green academics with a wilderness bent from culpability for the human, environmental and economic disasters that they have visited on Australia through their bad advice to governments on fire management.
* A century after red gum forests came into being, wilderness fanatics from the cities began campaigning to save these ‘iconic natural forests’ from the communities that had created and maintained them.
* River red gum and cypress forestry turned environmental problems into socially, economically and environmentally sustainable industries.
* Australia is currently suffering socioeconomic and environmental chaos because greens and academics have stolen the firestick from pragmatic scientific managers, and they don’t know how to use it.
* The real environmental crisis in Australia is lack of mild fire or grazing or thinning in native vegetation. Megafires, chronic eucalypt decline, pestilence and loss of biodiversity are the consequences.
* To conserve biodiversity and live safely, we need to apply the firestick willingly, frequently and, with practice, skillfully.
* It is certain that man cannot control climate. However, man can eliminate megafires, enhance biodiversity and restore ecological resilience by using the firestick pragmatically and scientifically.
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