Clive Hamilton has an article in Crikey on some of the silliness emanating from the media in the wake of the (still burning) bushfires - Fires spark a new front in the culture wars.

The fierce debate over the role of fuel-reduction burning in preventing bushfires has exposed a deep divide in Australia over attitudes to the natural environment.

Over the last three or four decades the dominant attitude to the environment has shifted away from seeing the bush as hostile and in need of taming towards an understanding of it as unique and deserving protection. Instead of transforming the bush for human benefit, the new attitude privileges the natural over the modified and values biodiversity and natural areas for their own sakes. Human impacts should therefore be minimised and reflect an ethic of care rather than of domination.

Forty years ago if you passed a snake on the road it was almost a duty to run over it because it posed a danger to humans; today that is seen as wanton killing of wildlife. Forty years ago we killed sharks that came anywhere near a beach for the same reason. Today, the father of a man taken by a shark will typically declare that he does not want the shark hunted down and nor would his son, who loved and respected the sea and its creatures.

This huge shift has been due largely to the work of the environment movement. Landmark campaigns over the Franklin Dam, old-growth forests, the Barrier Reef and Kakadu have been victorious because they captured the public imagination and governments were compelled to act. So environmentalism has brought a sweeping and irreversible cultural change; wherever they live, most Australians now look on the landscape with new eyes.

However, at every stage the revolution in values has met staunch resistance from those wedded to the old view. Led by an older generation of foresters, "bushies" and their political spokespersons, the old attitudes have seen a resurgence in response to the Victorian bushfires, especially over the vexed question of fuel-reduction burning.

Those who hold to the old view believe that it reflects the true nature of the Australian bush, the one that the pioneers learned the hard way. To give their argument more authenticity they even claim that the use of prescribed burning is a continuation of the practice of Aboriginal fire-stick farming.

The old school believes that, despite its apparent foundation in the new science of ecology, the new view is based on ignorance and softness and could be held only by latte-sipping urbanites. But increasingly marginalised, the old school’s resentment and anger has simmered, especially among those affected by restrictions on forestry and land-clearing.

The cultural split has now boiled over under the pressures and stresses of the Victorian bushfires. The conflagration spurred those of the old school to declare that they had been right all along and that if the authorities had listened to them and taken control of the bush then the devastation could have been avoided.

On the Tuesday after the worst of the fires former CSIRO bushfire expert David Packham launched a ferocious attack on environmentalists, blaming them for the deaths because, he said, they opposed widespread fuel-reduction burning. He wrote that the “folk of the bush have lost their battle to live a safe life in a cared-for rural and forest environment, all because of the environmental fantasies of outraged extremists and latte conservationists”.

Packham’s attacks were carried in The Australian newspaper whose editors could immediately see the opportunity presented by the fires to extend their long-running culture war. Environmentalists had replaced communists as the principal enemy in neo-conservative demonology after fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Venting the rage felt by the old school, Packham followed up two days later with the claim that environmentalists "are behaving like eco-terrorists waging jihad against prescribed burning and fuel management". (Packham was one of the instigators of the much-criticised “leave early or stay and fight” policy.) ...

In fact, no-one has argued for a blanket ban on prescribed burning. But the experts are divided on the timing and extent of it. Some fuel-reduction burns get out of control, scarring the landscape and causing unnecessary damage.

This was cruelly illustrated by the case of Sam the koala, who last week became an emblem of the devastation in Victoria. A photograph picked up around the world showed a yellow-jacketed fire-fighter in a burnt-out forest giving a singed and shell-shocked koala a drink from his water bottle. It was a touching image of human-animal unity in the face of the terrible power of nature. The problem was that the picture had in fact been taken a few days before the inferno in the course of a fuel-reduction burn.

It may be that the Victorian fires lead to some sort of accommodation between the old and new understandings of the Australian landscape, a merging of respect for the bush’s natural integrity with a greater respect for its dangers.

Certainly, some tree-changers planning to leave the cities for the romance of bush-living will have pause for thought, and greens on local councils will be on the back-foot for a time. But it is hard to see any significant unwinding of four decades of environmental awakening.

Crikey's Guy Rundle has a look at The Australian's disgracefully politicised coverage of the bushfires in Victoria - What has Black Saturday taught us?.

However inured one is to the havoc wreaked by bushfires, to the horror and waste of life, to how things could have been otherwise, the "Black Saturday" fires can cut through any amount of world-weariness -- from the burnt out collided cars on the road, to the stories of young girls going back for their horses, to the man handing his one daughter over to others as the skin fell off him ... it is obvious that something of quite another order has happened in the country.

When the Ash Wednesday bushfires took eighty lives in 1983, it had been forty four years since an occurrence of similar magnitude, the "Black Friday" fires of 1939, an event buried under the war that immediately followed it, lost to history. In the inquiry that followed the '39 fires, it became clear that the whole practice of fire and land management were so chaotic that the fires had been a disaster waiting to happen. One problem testified to was that Victorian farmers were ready to burn-off at the drop of a hat, in conditions where fire could quickly get out of control.

Whether the improved practices did anything to stave off a large-scale disaster for two generations or whether it was just luck, we can never really know. The previous big fires had been 1851, 1898, and 1926. In the last analysis, what looks from the ground like a reign of death is also, in the last analysis a weather system, and weather systems are chaotic in the literal sense. Without surrendering the notion that we can dramatically improve our reaction to fire, a little circumspection about easy answers might be the least we owe to the dead.

Not according to sections of the right it would seem. With the embers still flying the fire has been put into service as yet another item in the culture wars and the endless attempt to paint anyone of a greenish hue as a social fifth column. And it all depends on a few twigs.

For fire management specialists, the issue of forest fuel -- the detritus that accumulates on the forest floor -- is one of the most contentious and complex aspects of land and fire management. As summarised by Bill McCormack in a 2002 report numerous bushfire commissions and inquiries have considered the issue of reducing the amount of forest fuel. It would seem obvious that this would reduce the intensity and occurrence of bushfires, but the issue is more complex.

For a start, the back burning required to reduce forest fuel is best done under the same conditions -- dry and hot -- that maximise fire danger in the first place, a fact which turned out to be one of the causes of the 1939 disaster. Secondly in an ecosystem where fire plays an important role in regeneration, a level of burning back will cause a successively more dense regeneration of material. As Claire Miller and John Schauble found in a 2003 report for The Age, most experts found a bewildering series of arguments for and against burning off forest fuel, with no one clear guideline as to whether or nor burning off should occur in any given condition.

But comes the hour, comes the mendacity. The Australian managed to find an expert who was less interested in ambiguity. David Packham regards forest fuel levels as the determinant of catastrophic bushfires, despite the fact that virtually identical fires have occurred across vastly different land clearing regimes from 1851 to the present. Why are we ignoring this plain common sense? Because some dastardly people want "high-intensity fires" with "resulting mudslides" that "spread nutrients", because these "secure uninformed city votes" of "latte conservationists". Oh come on, you remember the great mudslide debates of the last decade don't you? It was all the talk at the film festival.

Packham's article seems to be setting a few academic scores and has about the same measure of probity as Wilson Tuckey's intervention, the iron-barred one arguing that a lack of roads and development in national forest areas had contributed to the spread of the fire. Given that the bulk of these fires have occurred in working, developed land and that the one picture dominating the media is the place where the fire has shown roads to be no barrier -- ie where people have died in their cars -- you would think that even Tuckey would be circumspect.

But in any case Packham's argument was good enough for The Oz which went way further in an editorial, tsking the Packham thesis as given and painting anyone who thinks that fuel management is not the be all and end all as supporting the "the misguided goal of agglomerating pristine-like bushland that is largely excluded from interventions such as bushfire management -- just so we think forest in pre-human conditions is there".

Forest fuel levels have nothing to do with the severity of fires like on Black Saturday, which had sufficient force to blast through all forest burnt back and unburnt alike. In 2002, the least burnt back part of the state burnt up in bushfires -- the fatalities? None. The main killer in this week's fires was the extreme speed. The effect of fuel on fire-speed? Zero.
One can only agree with The Oz's urge that everything has to be re-examined. But they have no real interest in that. They're primed with a single oversimplified idea -- that Greens are anti-human and the root of all suffering -- and they bang it out like a bunch of shopworn Stalinists on every occasion. Even the dead do not shame them into a deal more circumspection. It would be pathetic if it were not so malign.

IT IS only a couple of years since scientists first told us we could expect a new order of fires in south-eastern Australia, fires of such ferocity they would engulf the towns in their path.

And here they are. The fires of Saturday were not "once in 1000 years" or even "once in 100 years" events, as our political leaders keep repeating. They were the face of climate change.

They were the result of the new conditions that climate change has caused: higher temperatures, giving us hotter days, combined with lower rainfall, giving us a drier landscape. Let's stop using the word "drought", with its implication that dry weather is the exception. The desiccation of the landscape here is the new reality. It is now our climate.

People are comparing last Saturday to Ash Wednesday and Black Friday. But this misses the point. We should be comparing these fires to the vast and devastating fires of 2002-03, which swept through 2 million hectares of forest in the south-east and raged uncontrollably for weeks. They have been quickly forgotten because, being mainly in parks, they did not involve a large loss of human life or property. But it is to this fire regime, the new fire regime of climate change, rather than to the regimes of 1983 or 1939, that the present fires belong.

Saturday's events showed us the terrifying face of climate change. The heat was devastating, even without the fire.

Wildlife carers reported many incidents of heat stress and death among native animals. This means that out in the bush, unreported, vast numbers of animals were suffering. We can all see the trees and other plants dying in our gardens and parks. Our local fauna and flora have not adapted to these extremes. With wildfire, heat death becomes a holocaust, for people, for animals and for plants.