Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Fire in Spring Creek

Our summers were always home-based to keep the seasonal food gardens happening, as well as allowing us to be prepared to stay and defend the property in the face of fire. 

The 2019 summer proved to be drier than any of the years of the Millennial drought, and Spring Creek was dry for more months in a row than it had ever been. When a fire started in Elevated Plains, it threatened to cross the creek and burn into Hepburn township. For the first time in over three decades of planning to ‘stay and defend’, we prepared to do so, while most local people followed the advice of the authorities and evacuated. Favourable weather and the massive fire-fighting power the state can muster (when there are no other serious fires demanding resources at the same time) prevented the fire from reaching Melliodora or any other residence in Hepburn. It did however refine our sense of preparedness and focus on bushfire, with tweaks to our Fire Plan. It also brought the realisation that in a serious fire, Melliodora now included so many assets to defend, it needed more than two able-bodied persons in their 70s. Luckily those same housing assets were then supporting three semi-autonomous households with residents committed to the ‘stay and defend’ strategy (see ‘Reflections on Fire – February 2019’)

Blue Gum harvest?

Inevitably, one of the things up for review following the fire threatening Melliodora was the Blue Gums (see Part 8 of this essay series). Thirty years after we planted them, I concluded my rash experiment in microclimatic modification had worked as intended: the shelter was quick and effective, and the absence of any lifting of the street pavement suggested the roots did do what I thought. I think the shelterbelt contributed to the amelioration of frost, and has perhaps boosted available light and heat to our fruiting trees. It had certainly yielded firewood and poles from the thinned trees and resulting coppice, even if the work of cleaning up the fire hazard of bark and leaf fall has been an all-year-round job. The bee and bird forage and habitat have been a bonus from the trees which have become some of the largest ecostructures at Melliodora, and are a significant contribution to our probable net sequestration of atmospheric carbon, although I have never emphasised that justification for, or benefit from, tree planting.

But the regular assessment of the tree condition had identified a very slight lean on one tree towards the Teahouse. Jacob, a young arborist from Vermont, with us doing expert work in exchange for being a student on our Advanced Design Process course with Dan Palmer, took down the first of the big trees, ably assisted by Melliodora resident Mick Crear as spotter. With our Toyota Stout truck, we snigged the two 5 meter logs down the Olver St lane in preparation for portable milling. We also had some smaller Melliodora-grown Blackwood and Casuarina logs, which had been pruned over a long time period to facilitate timber production. 

The results we got from those later small logs were more or less as expected: small sections of visually attractive stuff. With the larger Blue Gum logs, I hoped we could get some decent structural timber, nothing special, but with all the family sawmills that once worked the Wombat Forest closed, the options for green hardwood framing timber were few. The sawn ‘6×2’ and ‘4×2’ structural timber, free of knots and faults over the 5m length, were impressive. The offcuts, used as 2 x 2 tree guard stakes, proved to have more interlocked grain, giving them more resistance to splitting and crushing with a sledgehammer than our slow-grown, dense Box wood stakes from Fryers Forest. While these qualities were good enough to change my mind about the salvage timber prospects from the rest of the Blue Gums, the big surprise was as a direct result of the interlocked grain that resisted splitting and made producing firewood from the massive tree heads hard work. 

The interlocked grain produced the fiddleback feature that furniture makers polish to reveal a three dimensional depth to finished cabinet work. Because fiddleback is more a product of individual trees and their growth history than it is genetic, I wondered if our careful management of all the trees might give similar prospects. In countries with more mature timber markets than Australia, the value of that number of fiddleback logs would tip the salvage of such large trees in an urban area from a net financial loss to a profit. 

I also started to see my journey with trees, although much more focused on managing the native forest abundance (of Fryers Forest), had, almost by accident, followed Rowan Reid’s story of carefully curated trees producing fine furniture wood that he so beautifully recorded in his book, Heartwood. 

Reflection

The remaining trees are still standing, and each year I review which ones might still stay after we harvest most of the remainder, or whether it makes sense to take them all down and allow the more modest Oaks and Spotted Gums in waiting to fill the space. Their harvest would definitely require street closure, a travel tower plus tree climbing and permits from the council, all factors that have me stalling. However, it is also my awe at these twelve massive eco-structures that keeps me stalling, with their multitudinous solar panels photosynthesising and storing somewhere in the order 50 tonnes of biomass (which is about 50% carbon) without much sign of slowing down. And if we harvest the trees, a lot become carbon neutral firewood, another amount will turn to compost over a few years, a substantial proportion in the stump and roots will coppice and can stay alive for decades, while the several cubic metres of sawn timber has the potential to sequester carbon in a building for a century or more. While such prodigious productivity cannot be replicated in extensive plantations across open country, surely trees trump solar panels in their multiple gifts and abundances. Better management of existing forests and plantations, let alone future plantings, would improve those gains and gifts more than trusting that schemes to cover the landscape with solar panels and wind turbines will be subject to some energy system version of Moore’s Law of improvement in computing power and speed.

The Black Summer 

The summer of 2020 was a benign one for us, but on the east coast of Australia from East Gippsland to Southeast Queensland, was the Black Summer: the most extensive and pervasive bushfires in modern Australian history. This event rekindled my motivation to try to draw together a vision of a national response to bushfire from threads of truth that I saw in two prevailing narratives following the fires. 

The first and most obvious narrative was quite widely amplified by the mainstream media and predominant in the comfortable suburbs of Sydney, Canberra, Newcastle and other urban areas over which the great smoke pall hung for weeks. It promoted Black Summer as the face of climate change for all to see, which would surely galvanise a whole-of-society response to rapidly decarbonise our economy and work to lead by example, influence and help other countries do the same to stop and reverse the climate emergency as quickly as possible. To an extent, there was an adaptation element in this narrative, but it was mostly about getting people out of the bush and, by implication, back in the cities and larger defendable towns.

The second narrative was an older one, mostly circulating amongst rural residents closer to, or adversely impacted by, the fires. It spoke of a long overdue recognition that the fires were so difficult and extensive because of a lack of management to reduce fire hazard and enable more effective fire control, especially in the public forests. Some saw the fires as a result of failure to maintain the adaptations settler culture had made over the preceding 200 years to a country with a propensity to burn, which was not necessarily anything to do with supposed climate change. Sometimes this story was reduced to a need for much more hazard reduction burning in the public forests. As someone who had for decades been critical of the ecological downsides of fuel reduction burning, I could be accused as one of those greenies who the more extreme advocates of burning blamed for the bushfires (as if we had somehow had much influence on public land management). 

Another version of this narrative was the idea that for tens of thousands of years, a much smaller Indigenous population had managed fire without our current powerful technology, infrastructure and communications. Maybe Indigenous land management could be at least part of the solution. In the language of the climate change discourse, all of these responses could be classed as adaptation strategies. 

In ‘Bushfire resilient land and climate care’ I laid out a case showing how careful, small-scale thinning of forests was the missing element in forest management. If undertaken around our settlements, where 90% of the loss of property and life occur, it could reduce the likelihood of severe crown fires and consequent losses. While the ecological and amenity benefits of thinning are real, I emphasised the potential for community-scale dispatchable wood power feeding a grid under rapid transition to renewable sources. Wood was the missing dispatchable power to complement hydro in providing power when solar, wind and other intermittent sources couldn’t. In this way it could make a much larger contribution to a viable renewable energy grid than the amount of megawatts generated would suggest. It could be part of people engaging in managing their local commons, as well as opening up our dense regrowth bush to allow mild Indigenous cultural burning to again be an integral part of managing our landscapes. 

My aim was to articulate how both the climate and the land management stories could be fulfilled through a holistic response to our environment with employment and cultural benefits. 

While I found the simplistic calls for more intense hazard reduction burning very frustrating, increasingly I became alarmed by the climate catastrophe porn from the media and the propaganda to scare people about climate change. I was amazed to see the way in which the media, especially the so-called progressive media such as The Guardian and the Australian ABC were particularly committed to highlighting the climate change angle on the endless cycle of extreme weather stories, which have always been grist to the mill for the mainstream media.

I started to regret, and even feel guilty about, how nearly two decades previously, I laid out the Machiavellian logic for doing so, even if forcing psycho-social shift was never something I favoured. My articulation of Climate Change was similar to my articulation of the consequences of Peak Oil, a fairly blunt and clear estimation of the risks but mostly focusing on integrated, holistic, no-regrets permaculture strategies to build resilience in the face of uncertainty and change. 

Bushfire dissidents

Following the 2009 Black Saturday Royal commission I had become disillusioned about public policy going in the wrong direction. The ‘stay and defend or leave early’ mantra was abandoned in favour of ‘leave and live’. It seemed to me when speaking about design and planning for bushfire on tours of Melliodora that prior to 2009, my message was not so different from that given to the public by the authorities (in Victoria, the Country Fire Authority – CFA). As a dissident thinker and actor in most matters this was an unusual experience, but that changed after the Royal Commission. While I was not asked to speak to my submission to the Royal Commission, when Joan Webster was not called to speak to her extensive and authoritative submission either, I thought it was a sign of the result having been stitched up from the beginning. 

Like me, Webster didn’t question the climate story that bushfires would become more intense and common in the future, but rather that climate change was not a reason to throw away decades of science and lived experience about planning for fire and saving houses, other assets and lives during natural disasters. We both rejected the prevailing logic of leaving the job to the professionals implementing ‘command and control’ management from the top.

As the climate change driven disaster meme grew stronger, Webster’s fantastic work communicating bushfire common sense was increasingly sidelined. Some might interpret this as just about someone in their 80s being out of touch with changes in their field of expertise. I certainly didn’t see it that way, and when CSIRO Publishing decided not to reprint Webster’s Bushfire Safety Tips, her summary book that every Australian household should have, we at Melliodora Publishing decided to do so. Webster was meticulous in wanting to tweak points and reference new information in the new edition. I have no inside knowledge as to why CSIRO decided to drop a successful book but I suspected her work was no longer seen as following ‘the science’ by the majority of experts working for, or funded by, the government could have been a factor.

As a dissident in most things, I suppose for many years I just took it all as business as usual with self-reinforcing groupthink doing what it has always done. However the crossover between this relatively mild constriction in willingness to consider divergent perspectives generally, the rising concern about misinformation on the internet, and in social and alternative media, and the gradual hardening of the orthodoxy around the climate story were starting to ring alarm bells. 

Covid and its climatic discontents

Covid and the official responses of globally coordinated lockdowns, masks that don’t work for viruses, ruthless suppression of proven safe ‘off label’ treatments, censorship of highly credentialed and senior experts, along with a mass rollout of mandated novel treatments under Emergency Use Authorisation, making billions for some of the most criminal corporations in the world, really did shake my last vestiges of trust in scientific institutions. Not that my critique and resistance were automatic and all at once, as documented in my essays over 2020 and 2021 on the subject.

At the start, I noticed climate change was part of the projected narrative about zoonotic spread of the virus from bats. Even a modicum of history about biowarfare and vaccine development, the ban on gain of function research, and the spread of Level 4 labs, including the newly certified Wuhan Institute of Virology just down the road from the demonised local ‘wet’ (fresh food) market, should have raised suspicions of human rather than natural factors. A lab leak, if not deliberate release or biowarfare attack, were more likely from the start. I thought the way the lab leak story (and by implication any more nefarious acts) was denigrated by corruption and/or incompetence in the highest-level peer review science journals was not a good look for trusting ‘The Science’. That Anthony Fauci, the person who most personified “The Science” was the highest paid public official in the US government was, I thought, strategically significant.

Reflection

I am not going to launch into a dissertation on Covid and its many ‘discontents’, other than to say it fitted perfectly into my Brown Tech Future Scenario (driven by rapid onset of climate change and slow decline in oil). More specifically, from the Brown Tech perspective, Covid provided the perfect testbed for how the climate emergency, or any other crisis, would be addressed: in bad faith, to the advantage of the rich and with collateral and/or deliberate damage to people and nature, creating more disaster capitalism, all justified by abstract data and KPIs that would never pass the pub test. 

Some of the ongoing efforts to cover the increase in known adverse effects of the vax including myocarditis and myriad other ailments affecting the heart, especially in young otherwise fit and healthy adults, have been particularly bizarre and only further discredit the climate change narrative. To see claims that the increase in such issues as athletes dropping dead on the field is due to climate change driven increases in heat stress would be laughable were it not tragic. I don’t know how such stories are concocted in the media, but I imagine some well-meaning, or maybe just cynical, journalist who understands climate-related stories are good for the planet and their career, asks a medical expert whether heat stress can cause heart issues, and then asks a climate scientist whether there has been an increase in hot weather, puts two and two together and hey your favourite sportsperson or nephew, who is now in a wheelchair or dead, was a victim of climate change. 

In the course of becoming a public resister to Covid policies and mandates, including mandated vaccination, I recognised that I too would logically become at least a supporter of those who would inevitably reject and resist any climate emergency mandates that were likely to emerge from the very same systems that delivered Covid and it ‘discontents’ onto the global public. At the time, only a few years ago, I was still agnostic about the dominant theory of GHG emissions driven climate change, but I was convinced that the solutions being rolled out by governments and corporations would have so many adverse effects on nature and social justice, but at the same time they would fail to achieve the objective of absolute reductions in GHG emissions.

Without a deep truth and reconciliation process around Covid, it was inevitable that I would consider any acceleration of the climate emergency meme beyond voluntary action to command economy mandates as doing more harm than good. I started to imagine in hard economic times, some disenfranchised rural battler in our community setting fire to the Teslas of the tourists using the fast charge station in front of our town hall. 

Disaster response dysfunction

The emphasis on climate catastrophe porn and propaganda in the media had certainly moved up a notch, even if overshadowed by Covid. Some might reasonably point out that natural disasters have been the bread and butter of mainstream and alternative media forever, something I am all too familiar with in the coverage and repetition of myths in relation to bushfire. Others would argue the stronger focus is because natural disasters are on the increase, so the media is just doing its job in focusing more on the events and their likely causes, including climate change. 

In my essay ‘Bushfire resilient land and climate care’ I made a genuine effort to see and acknowledge the truth in both the climate change and land management sides of the debate about how the country should respond to the Black Summer. One outcome of that work was being invited to a regional review of the bushfires, and natural disaster response more generally, in the Northern Rivers region. The excellent community-based facilitation brought together all the agencies and diverse stakeholders. My role, along with colleagues Daryl Taylor and Olli Costello, from Jagan Alliance Aboriginal Corporation and founder of the Indigenous Firesticks Alliance, was to be provocateurs bringing outside perspectives. 

My big learning and feedback from the two-day event was built on what Daryl Taylor in his summing up on the second day called “A Coalition of the Otherwise”. I identified three subcultures present in the event. One was the local Indigenous mob, if I can be so crude as to label them a subculture. The second, not directly represented but present in the Rural Fire Service brigades and other emergency workers, including the cops, were what I might call the ‘rednecks’. These ‘true blue’ Aussies, were often fourth or more generation local, and connected to the land and practical livelihoods if not professionally, then still through non-monetary self-reliance. They typically see themselves as ordinary Australians even if they are a declining minority, both ethnically and culturally. Finally, the group that would most likely accept the label subculture: the hippies who represented the countercultural concentration that created the Rainbow Region’s back-to-the-land heritage. The common message I heard from people who could be classified in one or other of these camps was a deep sense of alienation from the mainstream ways of communicating, decision making and action, even if many of them were active and apparently efficient at working through the maze of red and green tape that shaped and constricted their work, community and personal lives. Certainly, in relation to disaster preparedness, response and recovery, there was a sense of deep dysfunction constraining people from common sense responses to situations as they unfold, and a power imbalance between remote, mostly city-centred controllers and the folk on the frontline.

My conclusion was that reform of action inside the tent of the consensus reality shaped by the bureaucratic zeitgeist may be impossible. The new endlessly articulated woke agenda of diversity, equity and inclusivity, while being founded in some sound ideas (and of course expressed in the permaculture ethics and design principles), was potentially making the situation worse. Inclusivity, as I saw it practised, was an invitation into the consensus tent to participate in processes that were already defined. The rules of engagement, like the much trumpeted ‘rules based international order’ of the empire, were already set, and not up for discussion beyond window dressing.

In my report back to the organisers I suggested that the members of these three alienated subcultures held most of the answers on how best to prepare for, respond to and recover from bushfires and other natural disasters. Most exciting of all, there were people at that event and around the country who had one foot each in two of those camps and I even know some rare individuals who span all three in personal history, culture and practice. 

As a thought experiment, I wondered if all three groups walked out of the metaphorical tent, found a patch of common ground and sat down in the dirt to come to agreement about what to do, both practically and conceptually, then they would fairly quickly come to a common purpose. If the average Aussie punter, whether from the inner city, the suburbs or the country saw these three subcultures working in unison, then that would be good enough leadership for the majority to follow with support or even participation. Only with that established did I believe it possible to go back and reform the processes inside the tent of institutional systems.

Before the outcome of that two-day event could make much headway in the bureaucratic system, the community organisers involved were thrust into the swirling waters of the next natural disaster to hit the region, the floods of 2022. The Mullumbimby Civic Hall where that bushfire review event was held became the headquarters for the spontaneously organised community disaster response. In the midst of the crisis, the authorities turned on these community organisers, kicked them out of the venue, accused them of bullying senior bureaucrats and attempted to take credit for what the community was doing itself. The impact on the community leaders involved was personally devastating and they left the region to recover on the other side of the continent. The dysfunction was more extreme than usual, and following many media follow-up stories, the recently minted bureaucracy to co-ordinate disaster recovery, Resilience NSW, was disbanded. 

The treatment of the community leaders who organised the event we spoke at and the flood disaster response mirrored Daryl Taylor’s own experience as a survivor and community organiser at Kinglake following the Black Saturday bushfires a decade earlier. Both were textbook cases of Rebecca Solnit’s ‘elite panic’ which she documented following American natural disasters. The thesis is that of those who directly experience a major disaster, about one quarter become psychologically disabled, almost catatonic, about half are impacted but functioning, and about one quarter become super-empowered by the experience. In the free-floating social space following a large disaster, no institutional systems are functioning, and all the social barriers, property rights and other constraints on society are gone. Instead of a dog-eat-dog world, people self-organise led by the super-empowered, and collectively they manage to care for the psychologically disabled. Returning authorities find this anarchic community a threat and quickly re-establish the old systems, while treating the super-empowered as needing counselling, if not psychiatric control. Solnit found that following Hurricane Katrina, poor black urban communities were not as good at self-organisation as traditional, socially conservative, white, rural communities that were able to define and demand what they needed to support their own processes.

Djaara land management and cultural burning

One of the hopeful signs on the land management and climate adaptation horizon is cultural burning as part of a cultural resurrection of Indigenous ways of relating to land. The formal processes and funding reflect changes in the wider society, including the acknowledgement of Indigenous science and culture in academia (often as a result of Indigenous people working within the parameters of these institutions). The creation of Indigenous corporations is to manage public funding, take responsibility for public land management in some curious dance with the Crown Land bureaucracies, and provide work and career pathways for Indigenous folk who have previously been at the bottom of the rural Australian socioeconomic pecking order. 

Over the last few decades watching the emergence of this process, I have been hopeful that the interventionist (albeit small and slow solutions) nature of recovering Indigenous knowledge and management of Country would act as a balance to the conventional conservation land management orthodoxies. I regularly characterised these orthodoxies as still stuck in ‘terra nullius’, meaning land where natural ‘edaphic’ factors were believed to determine Australian ecosystems and landscapes, while cultural management factors were seen as minor influences.

Since the publication of historian Bill Gamage’s tome The Biggest Estate on Earth, ecologists and conservation land managers have been in retreat, and increasingly acknowledge cultural factors as important, if not dominant, in the modern evolution of Australian ecosystems and landscapes, at least over the last 10,000 years of the current interglacial climate, if not the last 100,000 years of the last global glacial cycle.

As these changes in academic research and teaching have started to influence applied land management, there has been a parallel process in environmental activism, where political association with respect for Indigenous culture and land rights has become stronger over the years. As the articulation of Indigenous perspectives and opportunities to actually work on Country have increased, the green ideologies have been challenged.

In our own neck of the woods, on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, these issues have involved complex dynamics with Wilderness Society activists criticising very modest trials by the Dja Dja Wurrung corporation of ‘forest gardening’ in our clear felled, regenerated and cut over local Gum- Messmate and Box-Ironbark forests. Other local elder activists such as Cam Walker of Friends of the Earth have facilitated respectful listening on Country to those actually engaged in how to not just recover lost traditional practises, but to evolve sensitive management in the context of change, whether that results from 200 years of colonial culture and introduced species, or emergent climate regimes. 

While I have lots of colleagues, both locally and further afield, who have been directly working with Indigenous mob on Country, my own experience has been more limited and indirect. However one of the spinoffs from the creation of Fryers Forest has been a substantial connection that has developed through several of the long-term residents, of avenues for management of Country that reflect the coming together of Indigenous and permaculture thinking. I don’t want to say too much about those activities, partly because I think too early a promotion of emergence events can kill off rather than nurture them. 

I could critique my own hopeful expectations that resurgent Indigenous land culture will incorporate and validate many permaculture inspired approaches as just another example of how I see Australian society in general: investing so much hope in Indigenous land management being our saviour from challenging climate futures. Most especially in relation to the bushfire land management challenges, I see many naively imagining that somehow Indigenous folk will rise from under the yoke of 200 years of colonialism to save us all from climate catastrophe if only we show some overdue respect and throw some money in their direction. Could this be just one more burden that white Australia is dumping on the shoulders of a minority of Australians who are struggling to find their place in modernity when that very culture may itself be crumbling?

However, my hopes lie in new cultures of place that I think will emerge from the fusion of those three subcultures I saw present at the Northern Rivers event: Indigenous, redneck and counterculture. My own bias is of course that permaculture represents the best of that counterculture contribution, but itself has threads of influence from the other two strands right from its inception. And for all three of these subcultures, I increasingly see the overt and covert influences of bureaucratised machine-like modernity with its ideologies and AI as the greatest threat to achieving practice and wisdom rooted in landscape and climate. 

Bushfire Dissidents Footnote

Joan Webster’s funeral in Castlemaine in March 2024 was an opportunity to reflect and learn from the life of a remarkable woman. While bushfire awareness was just one string in her bow, the person speaking to that subject was none other than Phil Chaney, eminent retired CSIRO bushfire scientist from Canberra. After the proceedings, I introduced myself and our discussions turned to how Webster went from being the doyenne of the field of bushfire response awareness, to being sidelined after the Black Saturday Royal Commission change of policies. Phil confided that even he was now a dissident following the Black Summer of 2019–2020 in which he asserted there were only three ‘bad blow-up days’. The rest were all reasonable conditions for fighting fires. He related how he flew in a commercial flight over fires in territory he knew near Grafton and confidently noted that they would have it under control in days. On his flight back a week later, to his horror, the fires were enormous. There had been no firefighting. According to Chaney, the scale of the fires was primarily due to lack of firefighting. When added to the widely acknowledged loss of knowledge in the forested territories after the closure of timber industries in many regions, a general lack of maintenance of access tracks, a desire to limit recreational four wheel drive access, and limitations or difficulties in fuel reduction burning and other practises, it looks like the position I put in ‘Bushfire resilient land and climate care’ written four years previously may have been too generous in attributing as much of the severity of the Black Summer to climate change.