Planned burns? Loophole logging? Forest protection, law and science updates

Protecting Victoria’s Forests with A/Prof Philip Zylstra and Natalie Hogan, EJA

 

Fire scientist and forest ecologist A/Prof Philip Zylstra shares stories of cultural burning for food, and shows us results from years of scientific data that show that widespread fuel reduction burning makes fire worse for anything than the short term. Chapter point links are in bold below. 

• Video highlights – A/Prof Philip Zylstra takes aim at planned burns, includes retelling Uncle Rob’s beautiful story of cultural burning for food supply
• Download A/Prof Philip Zylstra’s slideset here
• Check Phil Zylstra in a video short explaining how fire spreads and how it is not really related to fuel loads

 

Senior Lawyer Natalie Hogan from Environmental Justice Australia looks at forest protection in Victoria from a legal standpoint, tracing where we have come, why native forest logging is still going on and looks at what can be done about it.

• Download Natalie Hogan’s slideset – What can we do about logging loopholes here

 

Lighter Footprints acknowledges the concerted efforts of the Forests Working Group and the support of supporters, allies and stall holders including The Wilderness Society, Environmental Justice Australia, Environment Victoria, Victorian Forest Alliance, ACF Boroondara, Victorians for Nature, Koyoongkoot Alliance, The Tree Project, CoPower Boroondara, Reconciliation Boroondara and for Julian Meehan for his wonderful images.

• Watch the presentation again on YouTube Live
• Check through Facebook Album images for expert links and quotes
• Find out more about topics and research on our forests info blog here
• You are welcome to download the Online Agenda here including links

We live on stolen land whose forests and woodlands were protected for thousands of years, and now, more than ever, given Treaty is under threat in November, we must continue the work of reconciliation and stand as firm allies to Victoria’s First Peoples.

 

Does Burning Really Work?

What if we have been doing it all wrong?

Burning causes an intense pulse of regrowth that can drive crown fires. A/Prof Philip Zylstra traces the history of the current approach to fire management, and details the increase in flammability that occurs after a very initial reduction, well detailed in many studies.

However what is not so well known is the reduction in flammability once the undergrowth matures and the forest is restored.

Introducing A/Prof Philip Zylstra

Julia Croatto, Lighter Footprints Committee and Forests Working Group introduced Philip Zylstra: “Phil is the Adjunct Professor at Curtin University, visiting fellow at the ANZ Business School”, synthesising his experience as a remote fire fighter with extensive research into the factors that influence fire behaviour. Phil has developed a peer reviewed fire behaviour model for Australian forests. 

“I have developed a process-driven model that gives detailed, dynamic fire behaviour predictions by calculating the capacity for flame to ignite new leaves, branches or plants across the spaces between them, as determined by the leaf traits of the component plants.”

A/Prof Philip Zylstra, Research Gate

 

Saying thanks to the Rainmaker

Uncle Rob’s story of cultural burning

Philip Zylstra explained that he referred back to First Nations knowledge, “not because I see myself as any sort of expert, but because people have been generous enough to tell me some of these things over the years”.

“You look at the trends of things, you look at, what works and what doesn’t work. And you adjust course over time. And the more data points you’ve got there, the better the line you’ve got. And when you’ve got 65,000 years of data points, you’ve got a pretty good line put together.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

Uncle Rod’s family would climb up the NSW coastal escarpment camp in spring, and dance in this little clearing, in the rain country, in the shadow of the rain maker mountain Dillagumbra. Everyone has got kinship, kinship with a plant or an animal. People who had kinship with common wattle – Acacia dealbata – would watch.

 

“And when the flowers dropped, they’d come back into the group and say the flowers have dropped. And then the men who had kinship with rain, with Dillagumbrah they would watch Dillagumbrah for the day that he got cloud on his head.”

“And when that happened, they’d leave the campsite, walk up the hill, and they’d call out “You know your country’s great Dillagumbrah”. And they’d thank him by throwing a fire stick out into the bush and walking away.” 

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Knowledge and kinship

In a distributed knowledge system, you need the person who has kinship with the wattle, the person who has kinship with rain, and the person who has the stories of the land. “And once all of those threads come together, then what you have is a story that says it’s only this specific time of the year when the flowers are dropping off Acacia dealbata and it’s only when you’ve got an easterly that is pushing this wind up the escarpment and forming that cloud on the top of a 1200 metre high mountain, and there’s the dew point and it’s the exact dew point.”

“So now we’ve got an exact burning prescription, and that is we throw this fire stick out with a single point ignition on the top of a hill, and then in half an hour, that wet wind from the coast blows across and puts this fire out.”

 

“And so you get a patch burning. Just a tiny little patch that’s burned. That’s your burn program for the year, for that site.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Uncle Rod pointed out shrubs that were not found elsewhere, and in autumn, “when we got back here, we’d eat it and spit the seeds out for 10,000 years.” Uncle Rod’s family were counting on “the fact that we’ve got a thick sward of shrubs growing all around this site here, all full of that fruit. They’re ready to feed us when we come back in the autumn”.

Here cultural burning is used very carefully in a small way to free up some light and nutrients. “And so if you burn it, you free up some of those nutrients. You get some ash into the soil and you stimulate those seeds to germinate.” If it was burnt the wrong way, too much or too little, then the burning would not maintain the dense layer of food bearing shrubs that were needed.

“Can you hear how clever that is? Just how much information is contained in those few simple stories?”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Kinship and respect

Like the lyrebird, we should take only what we need, and not dominate but respect other beings.

“You see a lyrebird at work, lyrebird moves through Country and digs up a little mound and they’re working that patch of Country. But what they’re not doing is digging up the whole landscape. They’re digging up the bit that they need.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

We should work in with others “we don’t need to alter this whole landscape to suit us. I’m just going to take my little bit and I’m going to share it with the others because I have kinship with these other species.”

 

What drives forest flammability

A/Prof Phil Zylstra referenced A. G. McArthur’s original graph, stating fuel load drives fires, which has underpinned fuel reduction burning for decades.

“The buzz word is active management. We’ve got to be active. We’ve got to be seen to be doing something. Taking a firm hand, controlling things.

 

Where did this idea come from? That more fuel means more severe fires? This graph is the basis of Australian fire management. It’s nine data points in a leaflet that says if you double the fuel load, you double the rate of spread.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

 

McArthur and authorities point to litter, and the need to control it. “There is no experiment that has supported McArthur’s idea that doubling the fuel load doubles the rate of spread.”

Forest fire spreads structurally

Fire spreads both horizontally and vertically. Watch A/Prof Zylstra’s explanation in a one minute short video here.

“It doesn’t matter what the weight of those leaves is, what matters is that it’s able to jump from branch to branch and get up through that forest there.”

 

More recent experiments in WA have “come out saying it is not about the weight of the fuel, it’s about the height and the cover of the understory.”

 

Ecological Control Theory in forests

A/Prof Phil Zylstra discusses how intact forest resists fire.

Professor David Bowman had described the idea that forests can self-organise to be fire resistant as a dream. However, it has been observed that, over time, forests that have been burnt or logged will heal and increase fire resistance.

The top window shows a patch of young regrowth which is very flammable. The bottom window, with undisturbed dense canopy, stopped “98% of the fire edge”.

Succession increases fire resistance. “So that by the time you got 80% cover you got about 10% likelihood of fire burning through that patch there.”

 

Mature trees reduce wind speed

“If you’ve got a lot of shrubs, you get a lot of flames.”

“The plants in the background, the trees aren’t burning. But they’re involved in that fire because they’re slowing the wind speed down underneath them.”

“The more vegetation you’ve got up there slowing the wind, the slower the fire is, the more vegetation you’ve got down here feeding the fire, the faster it is. Give it some time, and those shrubs turn into mid story plants that outcompete the plants underneath them.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

“We made the bushfire problem”

Historically, there are clear accounts that burning the bush increases flammability. The Inspector General of Australian Forests stated that the reason for the Black Friday fires in 1939 was because the bush was more flammable “because people are burning it”. The Rodgers family who were running stock in Wulgulmerang said “we burn it all the time. And we made the bushfire problem. We can see that we did that stuff.”

“And if we stop burning that forest, that understory will clear out.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Measuring trends after bushfire

After burning there is an intense pulse of regrowth

Explaining what happens after a fire, A/Prof Zylstra took us through several stages.

• Firstly, most of the growth is at the top with little understory, and the forest is resistant to fire.
• After a burn, flammability initially decreases, but then the shrubs regrow rapidly.
• As the shrubs grow, flammability rapidly increases, so much so that they can even set the canopy on fire.
• Flammability peaks at 10-20 years but then decreases as long as the bush remains undisturbed, suppressing undergrowth.

 

“You get the shrubs regrowing, and now you can get to a point where those shrubs are so big that they can even catch the canopy on fire. So the canopy is not slowing fire down anymore. Now the canopy is becoming more likely to become part of a ground fire. 

 

But the good news is that if you leave it alone, the forest will eventually return to its original state.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

Crown fires

 A/Prof Zylstra explained that “crown fires only happen in country that’s been burnt in the last 30 odd years”. Tragically, many of these fires have been planned. “You burn it and then you produce this pulse of increased flammability, increased likelihood of fire. David Lindenmayer, Chris Taylor and others measured this during the Black Summer fires around the Sydney Blue Mountains Illawarra area.”

The smoke and mirrors rectangle

Many reports just ignore older data and focus on the upwards peak, the main reason why all this is not understood in current fire management practice. If you look at the older data then you seen flammability decreases as the shrub layer matures and suppress growth below it.

 

“It’s the smoke and mirrors window. You only look within that patch. You say the burns that happened just really recently help to stop fires. But at the other side of that rectangle, the fires were hard to control, and you ignore everything out of it. You make it look as if the burns are a solution, when they’re actually the thing that caused the hump.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

Zylstra and colleagues examined the Project Vesta WA data in a similar way to the Alps study and found similar results: “more fire right in that regrowth period in the middle, less fire in the oldest forests.” 

“They came back saying, look, you should get rid of the oldest records because they’re a little bit faulty… I said, well, by your criteria, it’s only 1.6% of those records. So what if I just get rid of those? And when I did that, it happened that it actually fit perfectly with the expected trend from the shrubs.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

Official records, official responses

What about the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry? The inquiry into bushfires supported the protective effect of burning, however it wasn’t a study: “This is testimony from the Victorian government about their policy. Trust us, our policy worked really, really well.”

 

With the Walwa fire, there was fire within ten years of burning, at the point of maximum flammability, on a day that was hot, but not wild and windy

“They had primed that country for crown fire which created that fire tornado. So if you only focus on the really short term effects and exclude all of the long term bad effects, you exclude what is happening because those burns replaced long unburnt country that wouldn’t have burnt and they made a fire tornado.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

The path ahead for forest protection

Bad thinking

A/Prof Zylstra argues that the idea of spending less per hectare by not putting out as many firefighters to put out early spot fires is bad thinking – instead of fighting the fire when it is small. 

“It costs a lot to send out a helicopter with a few of us just for a little fire like that. You know, it costs a lot to winch us in to put out an individual burning tree. If you spread that out per hectare, it’s a big price. But what we also know is that … if you catch it while it’s small, it costs less.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Skimping on firefighting externalises the costs onto householders and the community

Also these numbers are missing the real costs. “They are not showing the cost of your house being burnt down. They’re only showing the cost of firefighting.”

 

“That cost is externalized onto you, onto your insurance bills. It’s externalized onto wildlife. It’s externalized onto the climate, which means it’s fiddling the books.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

Is it too late?

Judge Stretton, 1939

Are we locked into a perpetual cycle of burning? A/Prof Zylstra notes Judge Stretton’s comments from 1939 “He could see we had created the problem by burning the bush back in 1939. And he said, there’s a lot of country that is dense regrowth. That horse has bolted. All we can do is keep burning it”. He called this “a cycle of destruction”. 

In my opinion, that is defeat. If we say that, then we are just saying that’s the end of those forests. We are giving up on those forests.”

When Zylstra ran the numbers for WA, where he did most of his analysis, he compared it with a mild climate change prediction to 2100 and a worst case scenario.

Spend more on rapid attack, stop broadscale burning – this will cut out half of the fires

Instead of giving up on these forests, we should “stop the broad scale burning, and focus back on rapid attack and suppression”, which would reduce fires by 50%, or less than today even in the most pessimistic scenarios.

“If you stop the broad scale burning and you focus back in on rapid attack and suppression, you can immediately cut out nearly half of the fire, which has escaped prescribed burns and fires made larger by backburns, the whole way through, even by 2100, under a worst case climate scenario, you can have less wildfire than you have today.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

“I haven’t run the numbers for here, but I’m hopeful.”

“I think we can still claw our way back out of this.”

A/Prof Phil Zylstra, Curtin University

 

 

Natalie Hogan, Environmental Justice Australia

Forest Protection: What can we do about logging loopholes?

Julia Croatto introduces Natalie Hogan with a ringing endorsement:

“We also wanted the presentation to explain the confusing legal landscape that’s allowed industrial logging to continue in Victoria, despite its official end in 2024. When we asked around which legal expert we should invite to speak on that topic, everyone nominated our second speaker, Natalie Hogan.” Natalie is from Environmental Justice Australia and represents forest activists in court.

“She works across a range of legal matters and helps communities and environment efforts to defend or regenerate ecosystems and advocate for stronger environmental protections.”

Natalie Hogan began by providing a history of the legal landscape around forest protection, and then went on to look more closely at loophole logging and what we can do about it.

• Download Natalie Hogan’s slideset – What can we do about logging loopholes here

Natalie’s presentation commences at the 29:30 mark of YouTube Live

Following the money

Natalie highlighted EJA’s recent report Following the Money: The unfinished transition away from native forest logging and the ABC’s Four Corners report Timber Turmoil which exposed the ongoing native forest industry in Victoria.

Released alongside the ABC Four Corners episode: Timber Turmoil, the EJA’s Follow the Money report raises serious questions about why more than $1.5 billion in public funding was spent on a transition away from native forest logging, but native forest logging and processing is still happening in Victoria through regulatory loopholes and interstate supply chains.

“Our investigation raises serious questions about the scale of public subsidies, the complexity of funding arrangements and, most importantly, why forests previously allocated for logging still lack the permanent protection that was promised.” EJA Follow the Money

Recommendations

The report made the following five recommendations.

Logging loopholes

The loopholes described in the report are:

Audience Questions

The audience questions commence at the 46:45 mark of YouTube Live.

The audience asked questions about the veracity of research that supports burning, what legal avenues are available and the lack of effective court challenges, what would a science based approach look like and what the future holds.

 

 

Message from Bob Brown

Lighter Footprints was delighted to screen a personal message from forests legend Bob Brown.

 

Ray Peck introduced Bob Brown’s message explaining that these were Bob’s personal views, in the context of a meeting organised by Lighter Footprints, a non-partisan organisation that “is not aligned with any political party.” Ray said, “What we do do is aim to persuade every member of each political party or organization for the need to protect nature strongly and take action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

Bob’s message can be viewed at 1:14:28 on YouTube Live

Here is the full text of his message:

“G’day, Bob Brown here. I wish I was over there with you because I love the Victorian forests. Who wouldn’t, they’re an icon, not just for Victoria and Australia, but the whole world. Somewhere over there, over a century ago, was the tallest flowering tree in the world and the tallest tree ever recorded on the earth, but it’s been blitzed.

What’s great is that people are now campaigning to keep what’s left, and they’re campaigning against the odds, against the Labor Party, against the three right wing parties, against a whole big corporate establishment backing the logging industry. But the polls show that 80% of Australians want our forests protected. That’s because they want the wildlife protected as well, the koalas, the black cockatoos, the Leadbeater’s possum, the helmeted honeyeater.

That little Leadbeater’s possum, which is the faunal emblem of Victoria, was once thought extinct. But now back, hanging on because the forests are hanging on, and because people are hanging on to the idea that they should be protected. Where is the Great Forest National Park that Labor said would be implemented. How come they’ve gone to water over it?

Well, it’s just so wonderful that there are people campaigning for it.  There’s an election coming up that can change the odds. I think it will change the odds. It’s going to be a different parliament after that election in November. And there’s Greens, Independents and other people who are going to make the stand for the forests and are going to fight for the forests in the Parliament, which in a democracy is the place where decisions are made, not just by the Government, but by the Parliament.

Give those folk the balance of power in either, or better, both houses of Parliament, and there’ll be a stand for what’s left of Victoria’s magnificent forests and for a Great Forest National Park, but really, the protection of all the forests that are left.  

That means better water, that means more wildlife, that means cleaner air, that means a hedge against global warming. And that means keeping our spirit and our hearts with the forests from which we come. All strength to you forest campaigners, may the next few months go brilliantly for Victoria’s forests.”

Protecting Forests: Thanks to our supporters and audience

 

Lighter Footprints is grateful to the Boroondara Council for its urban greening work and for protecting Boroondara’s urban forest.

Participants spent valuable time before and after the event engaging with the stallholders – larger organisations like The Wilderness Society, Environmental Justice Australia, Environment Victoria, ACF Boroondara and the Tree Project and local organisations like the KooyongKoot Alliance and CoPower Boroondara.

Lighter Footprints thanks Patagonia for supporting A/Prof Philip Zylstra’s interstate travel to this and subsequent events and to the speakers for the generous amount of time they spent before and after the event engaging with the audience.