America has much to learn from Indigenous strategies of fire control

So far, some 23 people have been killed and more than 12,300 structures destroyed. It’s a similar picture to Australia’s catastrophic 2019-20 bushfire season, which resulted in 33 deaths and more than 3,000 homes burnt. 

In each case, a landscape transformed through thousands of years of Indigenous fire agriculture has proven deadly to a modern society more averse to burning vegetation.

There’s just one crucial difference. The Australian fire season lasted five months and burnt 24 million hectares. The damage in California has taken place over a smaller time and area—one week and 16,500 hectares. Are there lessons from the far side of the world that could have reduced the catastrophe in the US?

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A wildfire is unpredictable in its effects and Australia’s experience may have been as much a matter of luck as strategy. 

Its Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 killed 173 people within days. 

At the same time, in a world where wildfire is becoming more frequent and devastating as a result of climate change, there are lessons to be learnt from how other countries handle the same combustible mix of parched vegetation and dry windy weather.

One thing Black Saturday taught Australia was that evacuation is better than the then-common strategy of staying behind to defend your property. 

If it had followed the example of California, where around 500,000 people were ordered from their homes during a 2007 fire disaster, more lives might have been saved.

Here are three examples that could be applied to avert future disasters.

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Find geographic similarities: Australia and the US have a lot in common. 

The two are roughly similar in size, and eastern Australia and the western US are both fertile densely-populated strips of land sandwiched between the ocean and a more arid interior. 

Los Angeles is far drier than any major Australian city, with about half of Melbourne’s rainfall and one-third of what you’d expect in Sydney. 

But vegetation in both southern California and Australia is dominated by sclerophyll plants—adapted to hot dry weather, they often depend on wildfire to germinate and spread.

There are historical similarities, too. 

In both countries, Indigenous populations practiced a form of fire agriculture for millennia before Europeans arrived. 

Verbal accounts and paintings by early colonists in both countries are quite consistent in their description of a landscape reminiscent of the parklands around an 18th-century English country house—widely-spaced trees, separated by grassy expanses. 

Those practices were largely stamped out in the 19th and 20th centuries as emergency departments focused on suppressing fire, rather than working with it.

Harness Indigenous know-how: Australia’s history of bushfire disasters helped it learn the lessons of Indigenous fire control early. 

Government inquiries into catastrophes in the mid-20th century enshrined the idea of managing rather than eliminating fire, by deliberately burning off undergrowth during cool, damp parts of the year to get rid of the fuel that infernos feed upon. 

These ‘prescribed burns’ mimic the Indigenous practice of ‘cultural burning,’ and are far less damaging. 

A wildfire can easily hit temperatures sufficient to melt aluminium and move faster than a person can run, but a well-managed prescribed fire is slower and cooler, causing less damage and releasing less carbon into the air than intense blazes that inevitably break out under a fire-suppression regime.

The US is moving towards prescribed burning and using Indigenous expertise. 

But progress is slow—not least because a warming climate is reducing the number of cool damp days when it can be done. 

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Over the six most recent years for which we have comparable data, Australia conducted planned burns over three times the area seen in the US. A more proactive approach has improved matters in the Southern Hemisphere. Others should follow.

Pay it forward: Managing a wildfire over a vast landmass is beyond the ability of professional emergency departments. 

In Australia, volunteer fire services are key local institutions outside big cities, with nearly 190,000 people giving their time to such agencies—roughly 5% of the rural population. That helps manage fire in sparsely-populated areas.

The US has similar organizations. 

About two-thirds of its firefighters are volunteers. 

But recruitment is weak, with numbers falling about 17% between 2015 and 2020. A third of firefighters in communities of less than 2,500 people are aged 50-plus. 

They’re the first line of defence. America needs more of them. ©Bloomberg