If all you read was the liberal press, you’d think the Australian bush fires are Mother Earth’s punishment for the heresy of allowing global warming. Reality is a little different — actually, entirely different. The current wave of wildfires running rampant across the Australian countryside certainly isn’t aided by dry weather and heat, but it’s actually the result of environmentalists’ naivete, not climate change.
The problem is the same one the United States has with forest fires: people simply not understanding how the environment works. In both cases, the countryside has evolved to deal with and prosper from frequent and low-level fires. But if these are suppressed, then the large and hot fires, taking out the canopy, for example, will eventually happen and entirely devastate the flora and the fauna.
It’s been environmentalists insisting we suppress all examples and incidences of wildfires. Therefore, blame for the current damage should be laid at their door.
The evidence is all around us. When Europeans first came to North America, they were astonished at the glades and meadows found in the land’s forests. These were created by the Native Americans’ use of fire to clear the land. This was done on a regular basis, and fires only ever touched the underbrush. Because of these frequent fires, there was never enough fuel to spark a massive fire that would damage the adult trees and devastate the whole ecosystem.
Exactly the same is true of Australia, just even more so.
Australia’s native Aborigines got there some 50,000 years ago, so 40,000-odd years before Homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait to inhabit North America for the first time. They’ve been using fire as a land management tool ever since — and 50 millennia trains an ecosystem rather well, it turns out. The land is not just adapted to fire, it depends on frequent and low-level fires to continue existing.
The move away from this approach is more than just some people doing the wrong thing. It is an example of hubris, which always is followed by disaster. Here, that end state is a wall of flames devouring towns, people, and every other living thing in its path.
The hubris is in environmentalists insisting on the management of their surrounding world without actually understanding it, to claim, as so many have for decades now, that we must suppress all fire simply because fire is bad. Disaster arrives when reality turns up to tell us different. Without that low-level burning, the fuel stock builds up — and, eventually, there will be that lightning strike, that cigarette end, that sets the entire area ablaze.
This is, of course, just Friedrich Hayek all over again and his insistence that politicians just never have enough information and knowledge to be able to plan societal matters for us. The plans that are laid go wrong when they meet the facts.
Just as one recent example, the Crescent Dunes solar plant was out of date before it was even completed. Yet the Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, happily left taxpayers on the hook for $737 million in government loan guarantees. And let’s be honest about it, the Nobel only goes to really clever people, and Chu was supported by the entire information-gathering apparatus of the federal government. And, still, even he, with that backing, got it so woefully wrong.
So it will be with the Green New Deal, Elizabeth Warren’s insistence that she can change capitalism, and all the rest. We will only see more smoke burning from any idea rooted in central government’s competence.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
