Fires in Australia: an Alternative fire regime

The Aborigines have fire experience with the Bush and put her in a targeted manner. Some plant species have to wait almost to the flames. 10.10.2019, Rappvill

Fires in Australia: an Alternative fire regime

The Aborigines have fire experience with the Bush and put her in a targeted manner. Some plant species have to wait almost to the flames.

10.10.2019, Rappville: A cow stands on a burned field in New South Wales photo: Dan Peled/dpa

For years, thousands of flying foxes fall in the Australian summer of dead from the trees. In the autumn and winter months, the fires begin every year, fumes over the country. In January, you could expect the beginning of the monsoon and tornadoes. But still, the Bush fire from spreading and firefighters are overwhelmed. War ships should help to save from the fire Included. "For many, the only escape over the sea remains," was the headline in The world.

More than 20 people have already died, half a billion animals are burned, suffocated, or on the run in a barbed wire died. These images are spread worldwide such as those of the Australians, the rescue injured Koalas and kangaroos. At all the pictures of the catastrophe that some scientists compare with that of Chernobyl, especially half-burned animals that exist only in Australia, but also dead cattle, sheep and wild horses.

Other experts believe the estimated number of dead animals is exaggerated. Others have, on the basis of the scarce water reserves of the continent ends, we calculated that Australia turned to the middle of the century in a "desert landscape", if everything go on as before (for the growth of two and a half Avocados, for example, one needs 1,000 litres of water). The canadian water activist Maude Barlow writes in her book "blue future" (2014): "The global trade of food is on closer inspection a trade with the water."

At the "Mount DROMEDARY" gathered in mid-December, the United tribes of the Aborigines for a great "healing ceremony". As a Westerner, you may doubt and hope that it helps. Your thousand-year-old experience with the Set of controlled Bush convinced fire but more and more, while the climate deniers will always be a small louder. In Australia, it remained often until, in the 1920s, with impunity, to kill an aboriginal.

in the Meantime, however, cooperation and networking is needed. While in Germany the continuation of imperialist power relations in another form as a "post-colonial" criticism, suggests that in Australia, the "post-colonial" on something to Overcome, to a happiness in prison that is perceived to break. And, of course, all know that the internal combustion to increase the fertility of the soil contributes, you have to be able to keep the fire under control. Controlled Bush fires to reduce the uncontrolled!

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There are plants, which are a Bush fire does nothing, and others that need to fire, even. "Already 3 to 4 weeks after the fire, the first trees, such as Messmates and Mountain Grey Gums – eucalyptus species – are showing the first signs of life. Other trees and shrubs, such as Silver Banksia, regenerate from underground roots, the buds up to the light send. Prior to the new leaves of the trees send shoots with the flowers that are in bloom now unrivaled, fruit and seeds.

The seeds of Acacias, whose capsules after the fire aufplatzten, start to sprout. "The ash bed provides ideal growing conditions," according to an Australian in an Internet forum on the question of which trees need a bushfire to propagate itself. Famous is also the grass tree is. He needed "the smoke gases in the air, to be able to its seed capsules open. Then it blooms and sheds its seeds by the ash of freshly fertilized the ground for the undergrowth is now not a competitor any more,“ says geo.de.

At the International garden exhibition (IGA) in Berlin, in 2017 the Australian landscape designers Taylor, Cullity and Lethlean (T. C. L) from Melbourne presented a garden "Cultivated by Fire", in which a few live plants fire grew with Bush. Already in 2001, Helen Verran, a feminist historian of science at the Charles Darwin University in the coastal city of Darwin in the North of the Northern territory, the Yolngu can move aboriginal Community, had to invite some environmental scientists to a Workshop to discuss their different experiences with the Bush fires. There are two methods of thrust wise, "two-Sciences" would Lévy Claude-Strauss say to each other.

And then the environmental scientists and aboriginal people should work together also. The former had been created in a square meter experimental fields, the plants in it are determined and counted, then the squares burned, and then the plants that were there came out a restart, determined, counted, and so on.

you are in the Tradition of Linnaeus and Darwin, and called themselves genealogically to you – in your Bush to Put out fires, writes Helen Verran in her essay "A postcolonial Moment in science studies: Two Alternative fire regimes of environmental scientists and aboriginalen land owners" (in: "Science and Technology Studies", 2017).

aboriginal people used the Fire to "in order to create paths through the thicket and most expensive hotel in town shrub, to promote existing crops and to initiate new growth, to create hunting opportunities and to gain useful plants for direct consumption or for cooking, for heat recovery, as well as for spiritual purposes. The use of the purpose-fire followed certain rules, which were based on the vegetation history and the needs of the aboriginal people,“ the white Wikipedia.

In the discussion of the Aborigines and justified its action with an old connection of their territory with the Clan and family history, whereby they understand under the law of the Land not property within the meaning of the German or Roman law of property. The Australian law recognises, in the meantime, your "other" legal relation to land ownership.

1.1 million square kilometres of Land were awarded from 1966 to 1991, the aboriginal people, or about 15 percent of the land area of the Australian continent. The fire set the aboriginal cover in the landscape throughout the year. Most of the fires are of relatively low intensity and burn only small areas, uncontrolled Bush fires on a large scale arise hardly. Part of this is that ring, gathered around the fire, everything (yams), harvested (snails) and hunted (kangaroos) is. Then this is divided among all clan members – measured by the proximity or distance in the relationship. Sometimes, a bird of Prey, a fire bird called grabs a burning branch, which he places somewhere else to fire, to prey animals, startle them.

The Australian garden artists, TCL, the aboriginale brand approach, called the "Fire Stick Farming" is easier to understand than the natural scientists, whose analysis is not to be despised devices, however, also to.

The biologist Margaret Lowman investigated, for example, the mysterious death of the Australian eucalyptus forests. The local conservationists have made the destruction of the environment, the land owner is responsible for ensuring, conversely, the Farmer of herbivores were, where you thought either of Koalas and beetles. Finally, the roots of the trees was algae attacking of fungus is the main cause discovered: "He was with the tractor wheels-adherent earth from Malaysian avocado pickled farmers unknowingly been to Australia dragged on," writes Margaret Lowman in "The woman in the trees" (2000).

Date Of Update: 08 January 2020, 16:00
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