Australia/California Fires Have Even More Similarities

Australia Fire February 2009

Hat Creek/Pit River Fire June 2008

A couple of days ago I talked about the similarities of California’s Li’l Smokey and Australia’s Sam being rescued from forest fires. (see here) Now there is another link between Australia and California that doesn’t have such a happy ending. It seems the same kind of  enviro-nut mentality that helped burn down much of California’s forests last year had a hand in the Australian disaster this year. To the Greenies, aka the Global Warming Cult, a tree is worth more than a human life. Or 300 human lives so far…. They are a sick bunch indeed.

It wasn’t climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn’t arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of “prescribed burning”. Also known as “hazard reduction”, it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.

In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.

“Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire … since … about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic.” God help him, he was right.

Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake – at the epicentre of Saturday’s disaster, where at least 147 people died – during a smaller fire there in 2007.

“The contractors were out working on the fire lines. They put in containment lines and cleared off some of the fire trails. Two weeks later that fire broke out, but unfortunately those trails had been blocked up again [by greens] to turn it back to its natural state … Instances like that are just too numerous to mention. Governments … have been in too much of a rush to appease green idealism … This thing about locking up forests is just not working.”

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We had the same thing happen last June/July in California, though thankfully without as many people being killed. In California they even started talking about thinning the undergrowth in the forests and allowing more logging of the smaller trees. But it’s all talk now with Obama and Pelosi in charge, the Greenies will keep on saving the world, humans be damned.