The Curse of Conservation: Empirical Evidence Demonstrating That Changes in Land-Use Legislation Drove Catastrophic Bushfires in Southeast Australia

Abstract

Protecting “wilderness” and removing human involvement in “nature” was a core pillar of the modern conservation movement through the 20th century. Conservation approaches and legislation informed by this narrative fail to recognise that Aboriginal people have long valued, used, and shaped most landscapes on Earth. Aboriginal people curated open and fire-safe Country for millennia with fire in what are now forested and fire-prone regions. Settler land holders recognised the importance of this and mimicked these practices. The Land Conservation Act of 1970 in Victoria, Australia, prohibited burning by settler land holders in an effort to protect natural landscapes. We present a 120-year record of vegetation and fire regime change from Gunaikurnai Country, southeast Australia. Our data demonstrate that catastrophic bushfires first impacted the local area immediately following the prohibition of settler burning in 1970, which allowed a rapid increase in flammable eucalypts that resulted in the onset of catastrophic bushfires. Our data corroborate local narratives on the root causes of the current bushfire crisis. Perpetuation of the wilderness myth in conservation may worsen this crisis, and it is time to listen to and learn from Indigenous and local people, and to empower these communities to drive research and management agendas.

Reconnecting Fire Culture of Aboriginal Communities with Contemporary Wildfire Risk Management

“…Western fire suppression policies and Aboriginal peoples being prohibited from cultural practices of fire and land management are at the origin of scrub encroachment, grass ecosystems degradation, invasion of non-native species, and fuel load accumulation [1,36]. That led to a radical change in landscape structure and fire regimes [27,108,109]. Apart from fire agencies' requirements and the trauma of dispossession and forced removal from the Country, Aboriginal fire practices are facing the challenges of transformed landscapes.…”

“…Western fire suppression policies and Aboriginal peoples being prohibited from cultural practices of fire and land management are at the origin of scrub encroachment, grass ecosystems degradation, invasion of non-native species, and fuel load accumulation [1,36]. That led to a radical change in landscape structure and fire regimes [27,108,109].…”

“…The increasing concern with wildfire risk and strategies for mitigation in Australia, particularly in Victoria, has resulted in extensive scientific literature over the past two decades [1][2][3][12][13][14][15][16][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Recent research has tended to show the importance and significance of cultural burning and the challenges associated with its reintroduction for land management and bushfire risk reduction [4][5][6][7][8]11,26,27]. The Australian 2021 State of the Environment Report also aligns with scientific studies to recognize that cultural burning reduces the risk of bushfires [28,29].…”

“…This is one of the first papers to integrate the challenges that are currently facing both Victorian fire government agencies and Aboriginal communities, looking from Fire 2023, 6, 296 3 of 29 different angles to converge at some critical points. Previous research on Aboriginal fire has largely overlooked the role of fire in pre-colonization landscapes [41], only a few studies have investigated the recent connection of cultural burning with bushfire management [6,7,26,27,30,37,38]. According to Christianson, "few social science research projects worked with Indigenous communities to examine contemporary wildfire management" [42].…”

Restoring landscape burning is compatible with conservation and livestock production in a southeast Australian grassland fragment

“…These socioecological traditions have been disrupted in temperate grasslands following the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands by European colonists and the rise of intensive farming. For example, in southeast Australia, mosaics of lowland temperate grassland and grassy woodland that were shaped by millennia of Indigenous fire use (Gammage, 2011;Jones, 1969) and subsequently burnt by European colonists (Laming et al, 2022;Romanin et al, 2016) have been widely converted to improved pastures and cropland, leaving only scattered fragments of the original vegetation; many of which are used as rangelands for sheep grazing (Fensham, 1989;Lunt, 1991). Though burning is still routinely used as a management tool in some areas, there are many fragments where intentional fire-use is very rare or has entirely ceased (Mariani et al, 2022;Price et al, 2021).…”