Schizophrenic Forest Unmanagement
My blogging mentor, the Rogue Pundit, has written another perceptive essay about forests. The Rogue Pundit is a Renaissance man, interested in and knowledgeable about a vast array of topics — forests and forestry are not his sole or even primary themes. But whenever he focuses on forests, he hits the nail on the head.
RP’s latest essay is [here]. Some excerpts:
The Aborigines and Cap & Trade
by the Rogue Pundit, January 17, 2010
One of the first things Kevin Rudd did upon his election as Australia’s prime minister was sign the Kyoto Protocol. However, his Liberal government’s attempts to pass cap & trade legislation have gone poorly. Lurking behind the overheated rhetoric regarding catastrophic climate change grew a bill that was more about pork and income redistribution than reducing emissions… same as what our Democratic leaders have produced thus far.
In August and again in December, the Australian Senate soundly rejected the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). Rudd was really hoping to fly triumphantly into Copenhagen with the bill signed. However, he couldn’t even get the Greens to vote for it. …
Big businesses are perfectly willing to support a cap & trade system so long as it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. Even better, supporting the CPRS greenwashes those which will come out even or profit from the scheme. Meanwhile, those that pay will try to pass along the costs to their customers. That indirectly taxes the public while making many Australian goods less competitive on the international market. When activists claim that such initiatives will boost the economy via green jobs, they’re either ignorant or lying… higher energy costs function as a tax on the economy. And of course there’s the additional bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, most Australians have managed to ignore the fact that Aborigines aren’t particularly thrilled with the CPRS either. The legislation essentially freezes them out of the pork and income redistribution [here].
…Aborigines have no way to participate in the carbon trading because native title does not give them any control over vegetation. Generally, they have limited rights to hunt animals and enjoy customs on land shared with other interests.
Pastoralists, as well, have no means to enter the carbon economy. They do not own their land, they merely lease it from governments. Governments will be able to use the vast native title and pastoral inventories to offset their own pollution, or to trade on the open carbon market.
The CPRS will become subject to an indigenous legal challenge but not directly. The challenge will be directed at native title, specifically the Mabo case. Aborigines will argue that if Mabo found that indigenous title was never extinguished by colonisation, then indigenous rights are deeper than the right to wander and hunt. If animals and bush fruit are an indigenous asset, do they have rights to the ecosystems which sustain them? If so, they could use the bush to trade for carbon offsets.
An indigenous backroom agitator from Darwin, Tracker Tilmouth, is pushing this idea. …But Mr Tilmouth says not much Australian bush is really virgin.
“Aboriginal people have been fire-farming this land for 40,000 years,” Mr Tilmouth says.
“If you’ve been in central Australia and seen the spinifex [grass] plains of the Tanami desert, that is man-made. They burn it every year and use it for hunting kangaroos and other animals. They do it to this day.”
Most environmentalists would prefer that Aborigines stop managing the land and let it return to nature… whatever that is after 40,000 years of fire-farming. Gee, do you suppose that many of the plants, animals, etc. haven’t evolved over that time to become dependent upon man’s regular fires?
That same dynamic is at work in many parts of the U.S., especially here in the West. Anthropogenic fire has been missing here for most of two centuries now, subsequent fire suppression strategies have been schizophrenic, we’ve added some invasive species and killed off others, and on and on. Our forests aren’t returning to anything they’ve ever been.
Our forests aren’t returning to anything they’ve ever been.
That’s exactly right. Millennia of human stewardship through intentional, frequent, seasonal anthropogenic fire and the application of traditional ecological knowledge led to open, park-like forests, savannas, and prairies, arranged in an intentional anthropogenic mosaic.
Absent that stewardship we get fuel build-up, megafire, and conversion of forests to fire-type brush which infrequently erupts in return (or repeat) fires.
The ancient methods encouraged light-burning fires that allowed trees to grow to very old ages. The new un-methodology leads to catastrophic stand-replacing (or eliminating) fires that preclude long-lived trees.
Good-bye old growth, hello repeated disasters. Not smart.
