Eighteen million acres of Australia have burned in the last few weeks in an unprecedented and uncontrollable firestorm. These fires have drawn international attention and have alarmed Australians because of the loss of human and wild animal lives while public reaction to the fires has destabilized the Australian government and caused people to understand that global warming is already having severe environmental consequences. Both countries can learn from looking at Australia’s fires and the marked contrast in how the two countries manage wildlands and wildfires.
Most glaringly, though Australia and the US both have large areas of wildlands, Australia has very few public lands and no national land management agencies and no national wildfire service. But the US has plentiful national public lands with fire management capabilities embedded in all of our land management agencies. And though the Australian system has come up short in this year’s firestorm, American conservatives seem to yearn for the diffuse land management system the Australians employ.
In the Western US, a significant anti-federal government movement seeks to push federal managers out of public lands and turn those lands over to states and private owners. This movement wants to have “local control” of lands now owned by all Americans. Yet today people with these views staff the top Interior Department political offices in the Trump administration. Yet we only need to look at Australia where 18 million acres of land have burned in the last few weeks to see what happens when large amounts of wild land are managed without coherent national land management agencies or even state land management agencies.
In Australia there are state forests and “national” parks, but these are managed at the state level and management practices vary from state to state. Most wild areas are private lands. As in the rest of the United Kingdom, government lands are “crown” lands rather than public lands. The crown, or the royalty-based government, owns those lands and the government can exploit those lands with minimal public oversight. This is an entirely different concept than public lands in the US that are owned by the American people and managed on behalf of the people by a variety of federal agencies. Americans can criticize federal land managers through a variety of public input channels mandated by law. (Note that the Donald Trump administration is currently gutting laws like the National Environmental Policy Act on behalf of industry.)
In Australia there is no national fire service such as we have in the US. Firefighting is a state or local responsibility and though there may be a few professional firefighters in cities and towns, in rural areas state fire service personnel work with volunteers to fight fires either in structures or out in the wilds (bush). For example, in Tasmania (one Australian state) the Tasmania Fire Service has staff for fighting fires both in towns and in the bush. They have equipment and they work with volunteers who seem to provide substantial manpower for bush fire incidents.
Note that this “fire service” is not linked to a land management agency as it would be in the US. Rather it is linked to the State Emergency Services agency which handles disasters and accidents. Both refer to themselves as “corporations” rather than agencies. Also the Fire Service does light prescribed fires (fuel mitigation) so it is not purely a fire suppression organization.
In New South Wales, the area near Sydney where huge fires made international news until rains calmed them recently, there is the New South Wales Rural Fire Service which has 2100 rural fire brigades comprised of 72,000 volunteers (yes that is the figure on their website). They employ 900 professionals to deal with fires and accidents etc.
Recently these volunteer firefighters have confronted huge fires that are completely beyond control and they have spent weeks out on the fire-lines without pay and away from their jobs. Two volunteer firefighters were killed near Sydney. Facing national criticism from the Australian people the Australian national government has agreed to pay the volunteers for their work and they have mounted a national inquiry into the unprecedented firestorms that have killed 28 people and scorched 18 million acres.
By contrast, in the United States, we have four large federal land management agencies who take care of public lands that Congress designated for different uses. We have the multiple-use US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that caretake hundreds of millions of acres, mostly in the West. We have the US Fish and Wildlife Service that manages national wildlife refuges and oversees endangered species programs and we have the National Park Service that takes care of national parks and other areas of America’s most treasured lands and buildings.
All of these agencies contain professional firefighting and fire managing divisions which respond to local wildfires on public lands or are available to dispatch to large fires as needed. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho manages the national dispatch of local federal fire personnel and equipment over the whole range of public lands and these resources are available to help with hurricanes and other disasters. Most of these firefighters are career professionals who are skilled at the structured teamwork needed to deal with large scale fires.
As global heating worsens, we are seeing larger, more severe fires across the US with serious consequences for heavily urban states like California and we see large-scale fires in places like Arizona and Alaska. And while climate scientists are loath to assign climate change as a contributor to the intensity of individual fires, the upward trend in fire severity and fire size can be correlated to the hockey stick of rising temperatures worldwide.
Likewise, the recent fires in Australia are beyond anything in Australian experience in their size and ferocity.
Having a federal firefighting force available to any large or small fire on public lands may or may not be effective in controlling fire depending weather and landscape conditions. Many large fires defy containment, yet others can be corralled or at least steered away from buildings or towns. Yet having career professional available to shepherd fires or attack them when they threaten communities is something the federal government has built up over generations of land managers. Today these firefighters also put fire back on the land when conditions are right to restore the ecology of fire dependent ecosystems.
Various sciences related to land management such as biology, climatology, physics, hydrology etc. inform a whole world of fire-related science conducted in universities, and agencies which may or may not change the way fire managers ply their trade. But the existence of professional fire managers and the scientists who work with them could only exist because of our national commitment to our federal land agencies and the fire services contained within them.
Meanwhile in Australia teams of volunteer firefighters, assisting smaller numbers of professionals, have been on the front lines of huge fires for weeks. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has finally agreed to pay them for their time. Yet having fire personnel centered in volunteer fire stations among tens of millions of acres of highly flammable wildlands may not be the best model. And conservatives who want to see the federal land management agencies disbanded in favor of local management might look at Australia’s recent experience as an example of what happens when we don’t focus on land management as a national priority worthy of serious, well-funded professionals whose fire work blends in with larger land management goals.
Unprecedented tragedy in Australia. It is devastating to imagine the loss of wild lands and wildlife. Very sad!