THE BURNING BUSH
Australia is no stranger to wildfires but this season has been extraordinary in scale and intensity and the summer is far from over. Since September, so far 20 people have died and over 1,500 homes have been destroyed, 480+ million animals have been lost. 15 million acres of land has been burnt. Another 28 people have been confirmed missing after bush fires tore through busy tourist hubs in eastern Victoria at the turn of the New Year. The scale of the threat is immense, and fires continue to burn. Australia’s deadly fires have been fuelled by a combination of extreme heat, prolonged drought and strong winds. The country is in the grip of a heat wave, with record-breaking temperatures over the last three months. In mid-December the nation saw the hottest day in history the average temperature was 41.9 degrees Celsius and now till today its 45 degrees Celsius.
Australians caught up in the crisis are taking to social media and pleading for help. Entire towns have been flattened as fires snaked through bush land, across highways and up mountains. . In major cities, such as Sydney and Melbourne, a dense smoke has descended over busy metropolitan areas like a blanket. Some regions of the country recorded air quality measurements 20 times above the hazardous level. Australia is a continent familiar with bush fires, bush fire management and the importance of fires in regenerating the land. The indigenous people who have lived across the island continent for tens of thousands of years have long known the importance of fire management and how it contributes to the health of ecosystems.
A greenhouse gas cannot start a fire on its own. Bush fires aren't started by climate change, but they are exacerbated by the effects of global warming. The Climate Council, an independent, community-funded climate organization, suggests bush fire conditions are now more dangerous than they were in the past, with longer bush fire seasons, drought, drier fuels and soils and record-breaking heat. There is also a horrifying feedback loop that occurs when great swaths of land are ablaze, a fact the globe grappled with during the Amazon fires of 2019. release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. The gas, which makes up only a small percentage of the total gases in the atmosphere, is exceptionally good at trapping heat. In just three months, Australia's fires are estimated to have released 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Experts warn a century or more will be needed to absorb the carbon dioxide released. Predictions suggest they will stretch well into 2020. After all, Australia is only one month through summer and dry, hot conditions persist through March and April. Much-needed rain, which would help alleviate some of the uncontrolled blazes, is still forecast to be months away.
The country’s government and conservative Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, have been widely denounced for their response to the crisis particularly the insistence that fires are nothing new and climate change is irrelevant. At the end of last year the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, said ‘raving inner-city lefties’ were stoking concerns about the climate and that fires had existed in the country since time began. Mr. Morrison decided to take a family holiday to Hawaii in December despite the infernos. There have been allegations within the Australian press and across social media that, somehow the Greens ‘a center-left party’ are somehow to blame for the extent of the fires because they prevented hazard reduction burning. This has been proven to be demonstrably wrong.
A number of organizations and volunteer services are aiding in the firefighting and recovery efforts for affected communities. Whether you want to help the firefighting organizations, wildlife or just provide somewhere to sleep.
“It’s not humanly possible to prevent these fires or put them out. We have put so much of our strategy for living in fire environments all on firefighters, all on suppression, reacting to blazes. And you know, now we are facing conditions, given climate change in particular, we can’t do that.”
