Tree canopy loss in NSW Northern Rivers from Clarence Valley LGA to NSW-Qld border by January 2020

Firegrounds post major fires which were actively burning in September 2019 to January 2020, mapped by https://geo.seed.nsw.gov.au/Public_Viewer/

Southernmost half of coastal Bundjalung National Park showing full canopy loss

Degrees of canopy loss in the Cloud Creek and Guy Fawkes region

Who is Responsible for the Australian Bushfire Crisis?

A Rational Fear at https://youtu.be/aEOBu0r47YY

Page One Images of the Week

The Daily Examiner, 17 January 2020:

Upper Clarence ecosytem buckling under stress of drought and bushfire.

The images of the river are from the Tabulam area, near Clarence River Wilderness Lodge.

The dead fish are from BIg Fish Flat, an area known for the protected eastern freshwater cod now only found in this river and commonly known as Clarence River Cod.

Open Letter from the NSW South Coast: Dear Mr Morrison

Excerpt from Nick Hopkins open letter published in The Canberra Times, 17 January 2020: 

Dear Mr Morrison,

Today I stand by the smouldering ruins of my beautiful home on the NSW South Coast. Since New Year's Day, climate change has suddenly become very personal for me.

Like thousands of others, Nick Hopkins and Heike Sutherland are dealing with the loss of their family home. Picture: Supplied

You have said you understand my grief. I have heard you are a religious man. My fervent hope is that your God grants you the humility to admit that you do not understand me at all. You have stood by as members of your party have insulted, belittled and ignored people like me when we urged you and your predecessors to take climate change more seriously.

You took no action when my Deputy Prime Minister called people like me a raving lunatic when we dared to link the bushfire emergency to climate change. By your silence you are complicit. May your God grant you the wisdom to understand that my rage at you and your predecessors is an entirely rational response to a set of present and oncoming unnatural disasters from which you have failed to protect me.

You have said you understand my suffering. My heartfelt desire is that your God grants you the ability to see how hollow and insincere that feels to me when you (and Labor) continue to promote the thermal coal industry, which is fanning the flames of intense suffering of humans and animals worldwide. Australian coal is out there in the world being burnt every day and night. Please Mr Morrison, if only for God's sake, join the dots.

If you come to console me in my time of grief, I will not shake your hand until you and your colleagues promise to refuse donations from all fossil fuel companies. I would dearly like to be consoled by you, but I am choking on the hypocrisy of your actions. Until you get serious about political donation reform, your pronouncements will always be tainted by the stench of your largest donors.

You will not earn my respect until you and your colleagues dare to take the Australian public on a journey to transition away from thermal coal mining and exports. Tobacco farmers in the US transitioned away from their industry when the link between cigarettes and cancer become public. And when the link between asbestos and mesothelioma was understood, we left all known reserves in the ground. However, now that the link between the burning of coal and disastrous weather events is well established, both you and the opposition have thrown your support behind opening up the Galilee Basin, starting with the Adani mine.....

Read the full letter here.

Groups have been knitting & sewing around the globe to help Australian wildlife in the 2019-20 bushfire season

Clarence Valley Independent, 15 January 2020:

Anna Key says of her mum Nicki, that she was knitting pouches for Australia's bush fire injured animals until her hands were red raw and there had to be a better way. The answer was social media. Why have a handful of knitters when you can have thousands... maybe even tens of thousands? Image: Fran Dowsett

It all started with her mum “knitting a Koala pouch”. For week after week the Australian population has read and viewed accounts of bushfire devastation, not just along the east coast but on the far side of the country in Western Australia and South Australia. 

Whilst most of us feel individually helpless to do anything to assist, there are those individuals who take up the challenge and put their talent to the test. 

Yamba’s Anna Key is the first to admit she has no particular ‘talent’ so far as knitting, sewing and professional bushfire assistance is concerned. However she “loves digital marketing”. 

Anna’s story started on Friday January 3. “I was sitting watching my mum, Nicki, knitting a woollen koala ‘pouch’; it was the eighth pouch she had knitted (after a call for assistance from the Country Women’s Institute at Maclean) since fires began around Yamba and Angourie some months before”. 

Anna said she thought her mum’s efforts were commendable but the process was very time consuming and she would only be able to knit a handful of pouches. “I was sad and concerned with the whole online tone of argument and general panic about the fire situation.” 

“If only our tears could put out the fires” Anna kept saying. 

“My mind clicked into gear…what if could use my social media skills to enlist the help of dozens, or even hundreds to help?” Anna searched the internet for patterns and designs for pouches to post on her Facebook page. 

“I was struggling to find anything useful and then I came across the site of the ‘Animal Rescue Craft Guild’. I downloaded the patterns from their site and posted them to my Facebook page ‘Heist Jewellery’”. 

Anna says she is friends with the wife of Brazilian heavy metal band lead singer, Max Cavalera, of ‘Soulfly’. The band has 873,610 followers on their page – so plenty of exposure. They posted her Australian animal fire rescue information on their page, helping gain traction around the world. 

“That was on the Sunday and other musicians (from members of ‘Devilskin’, ‘God Forbid’, ‘Primer 55’ and ‘Toshi Iseda’) jumped aboard and also posted the information… a movement had begun”. 

“By Monday morning I had 11,000 shares and by breakfast it was 12,000.” 

Overnight, craft groups had started in the US, Canada, South Africa, NZ and the UK. Knitters from Portugal, Belgium, Hong Kong and Singapore soon joined with children at schools in Minnesota, Ottawa, Missouri and Utah forming knitting, sewing and crocheting bees. All this within a few days! 

Anna has since started the Global Craft Movement HQ F/book page so as to centralise all the activity. Information on international drop off locations is included on the page as well as information of the bush fire situation and the effect it is having on our native wildlife. 

The online statistics which have resulted from Anna’s action are truly amazing. Since she first accessed the ARCG site on January 3, that organisation’s group has grown from 37,000 to over 200,000. The Guild have since requested a temporary pause on any new craft projects so they can complete a stock take of what has been made and access what is still needed......

Australian Bushfire Season 2019-20: Northern Rivers communities once again demonstrate that they care

Echo NetDaily, 17 January 2020:

11 volunteers headed up to farms near Tabulam last weekend to help get fences back in place following devastating bushfires in December. Photo supplied.

Having his and his neighbours farms devastated by fires in December, including the loss of one of their homes, local Byron Shire resident Bart Vanarey had put the call out for helping hands to rebuild fences on their properties. He was not left disappointed and had 11 people  last weekend and another 11 are people coming up this weekend to help get their perimeter fences re-built on the properties near Tabulam.

‘The response has been very heartening,’ said Bart.

Getting fence  farms near Tabulam last weekend to help get fences back in place following devastating bushfires in December. Photo supplied.

‘It was such a good weekend with helpers coming from all over the world (only in Byron Bay) from the Canary Islands, Ecuador, Canada, Texas and of course Lismore, Byron and Lennox.’

Even in the rain the volunteers got down to the hard yakka and kept building fences and while Bart was claiming they had managed to erect 700m of fencing he was told he was ‘dreamin’ and it was more like 400m.

The call was also heard by a tractor hire company who has donated a tractor to help with the fencing. Bart is continuing to raise funds for the materials and and has raised more money for another 170 fenceposts and 80 concrete fenceposts to be delivered to the properties....

As the black crows of the NSW logging industry begin to gather for an assault on remaining forests, this from Australian Labor Party Leader.......

MEDIA RELEASE – ECOLOGICAL AUDIT NEEDED FOLLOWING NATIONAL DISASTER – WEDNESDAY, 8 JANUARY 2020

THE HON ANTHONY ALBANESE MP
LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
MEMBER FOR GRAYNDLER

TERRI BUTLER MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER
MEMBER FOR GRIFFITH

ECOLOGICAL AUDIT NEEDED FOLLOWING NATIONAL DISASTER

The Morrison Government should convene a meeting of state and territory environment ministers and commence an Australian Natural Asset Audit, amid estimates that up to one billion animals have perished in the nation’s bushfire disaster.

The Government must also guarantee continued funding for the nation’s Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, which will cease to exist from July next year because it does not conform to the Government’s rewritten guidelines for CRCs, which favour commercial research.

Australians love the bush. Many of us live in the bush and our precious wildlife is deeply ingrained in Australian sense of identity.

With more than eight million hectares burned so far this bushfire season, we must turn to land management specialists and scientists to assess the scale of this ecological disaster and advise governments on a national approach to recovery efforts.

The Melbourne-based Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre is building disaster resilient communities across the country by bringing together all of Australia and New Zealand’s fire and emergency services authorities with leading experts across a range of scientific fields.

In 2013 the Labor Government provided $48 million to fund the centre for eight years through to June 2021 based on warnings by scientists that climate change would increase the severity and frequency of extreme weather events.

Despite its strong record of success and ongoing need for national collaboration over natural disasters, the centre is ineligible for further funding under the Morrison Government’s current CRC Guidelines.

This bushfire season, up to 26 lives have been lost and at least 1800 homes have been destroyed.

Our key focus must be to support affected communities, victims and families of those who have lost their lives.

But Australians have also been shocked by graphic and heart-rending images of dead and injured wildlife as well as farm stock.

It is critical that as part of the recovery we understand the impact of the tragedy on the National Estate, including our wildlife, and that we better understand how to reduce bushfires and protect our precious natural habitat.

As part of whole-of-government approach to rebuilding our communities, the Federal Government must act now to better protect Australia’s unique natural assets.

The bushfire emergency is a national crisis that requires a national response.

Labor is proposing:

1. An Australian Natural Asset Audit

• The Morrison Government should immediately commence Australian Natural Asset Audit to understand the true impact that these devastating bushfires on our national icons and natural assets. The audit would assess the loss of our native animal and plants species that have been wiped out an unprecedented rate during the bushfire crisis engulfing Australia, and would assess habitat loss and impacts on environmental assets.

• The Commonwealth should mobilise Australian scientists and land management professionals to immediately begin the mammoth task of assessing the ecological and biodiversity damage to Australia’s natural assets. The audit would enable the government to bring together Australia’s best ecologists and on the ground practitioners, including rangers from our national parks, local and state government environmental management staff, farmers and indigenous leaders from impacted areas.

• The audit should be used to inform short, medium and long-term recovery efforts, including urgently supporting the Threatened Species Scientific Committee on immediate actions to increase the recovery, management and protection of Australia’s threatened species, including any new listings required, and to recommend proactive measures for the next bushfire crisis.

2. Start national recovery planning now: The Commonwealth should urgently convene a meeting of the environment ministerial council to commence recovery planning now

• Immediately start recovery planning through the joint environment ministerial council with the states, to assess animal hospital services, demand and funding and short to medium-term recovery measures in key habitats for existing critically endangered species.

• The Government should also take steps to activate a coordinated national group of Landcare volunteers in an Australia-wide effort to recover and regenerate our key natural assets and to protect the economic benefits and jobs that flow from our international reputation as a natural wonderland.

3. Immediately guarantee funding for the Cooperative Research Centre

• Prime Minister Scott Morrison must provide funding certainty to the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

• The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC has less than 18 months of funding left and is currently ineligible for renewed funding under the Morrison Government’s amended CRC Guidelines.

• The Centre predicts a return on Commonwealth investment of 7:1 through reduced loss of life and injury, reducing government costs and reducing insurance costs.

For example, the town of Gracemere in Queensland was saved in 2018 as a result of science-based predictive capacity developed by the Centre.

Australia 2019-2020: "I have never been prouder of my nation. Leaderless, leaders emerged ... "

This is author Jackie French:

Jackie and her husband Bryan live in the Araluen valley, a deep valley on the edge of the Deua wilderness area. Most of their property is now a Conservation Refuge for the many rare and endangered species of the area. They live in a home made stone house, with a waterwheel Bryan made as well as solar panels to power their house, with an experimental orchard of over 800 fruit trees and more than 272 kinds of fruit that show how farming can coexist with wildlife. Jackie writes columns for the Canberra Times, Australian Women’s Weekly, Earthgarden Magazine, Australian Wellbeing and Gardening Australia. Her garden rambles over about 4 hectares, and there is never a time when there aren't basketsful of many kinds of fruit to pick.

The opinion piece below was penned by French.....

The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 2020: 

It is impossible to weep. 

I cannot weep because this is only the beginning. Logs smoulder on our ridges, a tide of injured wildlife is sweeping down into our refuge. I have been living out of a suitcase for most of the past six weeks, evacuated twice, sleeping in many different places and accepting generosity too great to count. I need to clean the pink sludge from the fridge (hint: remove watermelon from fridge before evacuating), keep putting out food and water stations, cope as desperately injured wildlife emerges from the flames, and help others in every possible way I can. 

Focus on what you can do. Don’t cry for what you can’t. 

I also cannot weep because I dare not even imagine yet all that we’ve lost. Friends have lost their houses and towns, entire communities have been displaced, the social links that make us who we are, as social beings, turned to smoke. Tourist towns have no tourists – or the heritage buildings that made them tourist towns. Businesses are bankrupt. Evacuees like me have lost months of paid work, with more lost months to come. I am OK. Many are not. 

The carefully planted local Indigenous "food larder" landscape I have loved and depended upon most of my life, and that has survived 200 years of colonisation, cannot survive fires like these. Farms and vast areas of bush already teetered on a knife-edge in the worst drought in history. Now they are ash. The Araluen Valley, south-east of Braidwood in New South Wales' Southern Tablelands, has lost much of its remaining peach orchards. Will the orchardists replant? We don’t know. 

I do know our community will support them. And that I have never been prouder of my nation.  

Leaderless, leaders emerged; the magnificent firies, but also those who defended their houses and others with nothing but hoses and determination. Our neighbour, Robyn, singlehandedly waited to defend her farm while checking on the properties of those who had evacuated, knowing that with age or injury we would now be a hindrance, not a help, on the fire front. 

I have never been prouder of my nation. Leaderless, leaders emerged ... [And] this is the comfort we must give our children: in the past weeks, Australia has been a truly great nation. We must remain one. We must not forget. 

Friends in their 70s and 80s, who would not want to be called old men, have been out for days or nights for three months with the tankers. I have seen a man, dying in great pain, still struggle towards the flames to give his wisdom on where the fire might go; I have seen wombats share their holes with snakes, quolls, possums and a nervous swamp wallaby; a fridge on the highway kept constantly stocked with cold drinks for those defending us; six firies leaning against the hospital wall, too exhausted to stagger inside for first aid. The next day they went out again..... 

Please read the full article here with its acute observations and well thought through suggestions.

Bushfire ash & debris as well as drought now killing fish in NSW coastal and inland rivers

"Fish kills are defined as a sudden mass mortality of wild fish. In NSW we are likely to see further severe fish kills across coastal and inland catchments during the summer of 2019/20....Fish can be directly impacted during fires through extreme high temperatures, loss of habitat, or be threatened from rapid declines in water quality if rainfall occurs in recently burnt areas. Run-off from rainfall events can wash large amounts of ash and sediment into rivers following fires, causing rapid drops in oxygen levels and threatening the survival of fish populations." [NSW Dept of Primary Industries]

The upper reaches of the Clarence River have been badly stressed by low water flows since 2018, so when bushfires began to eat their way through the severely drought affected Clarence Valley in mid-2019 it was obvious that the rolling impacts wouldn't stop when the fires diminished or when rain fell.

There has been a fish kill at Big Fish Flat, an area known for the protected eastern freshwater cod now only found in parts of this river system and commonly known as Clarence River Cod.

The most likely cause of this kill is bushfire ash entering a river which has all but ceased to flow - turning what water there is into a toxic brew.

At Baryulgil on the Clarence est. 1,000 fish died due to low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool receiving minimal inflows due to drought conditions.

There was also a fish kill on the Mann River, a major tributary of the Clarence which reportedly coincided with ash in the water.

Two fish kills were experienced to the north at Emigrant Creek at Tintenbar in the Ballina Shire and the Brunswick River near Byron Bay - possibly due to low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool and minimal freshwater inflows. 

Another fish kill occurred to the south on an 8km stretch of the Macleay River where locals describe the bushfire ash and burned debris turning that river's water into a thick sludge killing hundreds of thousands including Australian Bass, Bull Trout, Freshwater Mullet, Eel-tailed Catfish and Eels.

The Guardian, 17 January 2020: Results of a fish kill in the Macleay River in northern New South Wales, which locals said was like ‘cake mix’. Photograph: Larry Newberry

Similarly bushfire affected water ways in the NSW-Qld Border Rivers system appear to have been similarly affected by run-off from the fire grounds and reported fish kills there are being investigated.

All in all a total of 23 coastal and 17 inland NSW waterways have experienced small to large fish kills to date during the 2019-20 bushfire season.

And the drought continues across New South Wales....

There is no land in NSW which is not affected by drought.

CDI = Combined Drought Indicator. RI = Rainfall Index. SWI = Soil Water Index. PGI = Pasture Growth Index. DDI = Drought Direction Index

Data current to 11/1/2020 (AEDT)

Shannon Creek Dam water level continues to drop in January 2020

Against a background of continuing drought and low flows in many Clarence River catchment waterways, Shannon Creek Dam water storage continues to fall.

In early November 2019 the dam was at  97% of its total storage capacity.

By late December this had fallen  to 81% of capacity.

Currently in early January 2020 the dam is at 79% of its total storage capacity.

Water consumption now stands at 20.72 megalitres per day according to Clarence Valley Council.

Level 1 water restrictions are in place. 

However, if combined total consumption does not fall by 3 megalitres per day Level 2 water restrictions may be imposed in the near future.

#ScottyFromMarketing needs to grow up or find another job

no_filter_Yamba 

#ScottyFromMarketing is simultaneously reminding us the crisis is still occurring & recovery has begun. He speaks as though all that is needed to recover is to replace bricks & mortar destroyed by fire and livestock lost. He just doesn't understand it will take more...1/4 

..than $$$. Mother Nature isn't impressed by $$$. They do not make it rain, keep baked & exposed soils fixed to the earth, cause new trees to grow on burnt ground, keep the few healthy rivers we have left alive & free of ash pollution, clean the air or lower high air/soil...2/4

....temperatures. Even if Scotty & his climate change denying mates commenced right now to lower greenhouse gas emissions instead of just pretending to, there will be no environmental, social and economic recovery across his next set of precious foreward estimates....3/4

2020 will likely end as it began - with some of the remaining forests burning, farms still not capable of past levels of agricultural production and water scarcity still a fact of life across Australia. Scotty needs to grow up & face these facts or find another job. 4/4 

This is how the world sees Australia and Australians in January 2020

A British perspective.....

"..the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security" [TheObserver columnist Nick Cohen writing in The Guardian, 5 January 2020]

The Guardian, 5 January 2020:

There are worse leaders than Scott Morrison. The “international community” includes torturers, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers 
and kleptomaniacs beside whom he seems almost benign. But no 
leader in the world is more abject than the prime minister of Australia.

He cuts a pathetic figure. A leader must speak honestly to his people in a crisis.The sly tactics of climate change denial, the false consoling words that it’s a scare and we can carry on as before, have left Morrison’s words as meaningless as a hum in the background. Nothing he says is worth hearing.

Australian English is rich in its descriptions of worthless men: as useful as tits on a bull, a dry thunderstorm, a third armpit, a glass door on a dunny, a pocket on a singlet, an ashtray on a motorbike, a submarine with screen doors, a roo-bar on a skateboard. Morrison is all of the above, but a British saying sums him up: “too clever by half”. Morrison won last year’s Australian general election, although his conservative Liberal party was expected to lose, by slyly mobilising opinion against tax rises in general and environmental taxes in particular.

The climate change denialism he espoused is a moving target. In the 1990s, lobbyists funded by the oil industry acted as if the overwhelming majority of scientists who understood the subject were in a conspiracy against the public. They accused the authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of being guilty of a “major deception” when they discussed the human influence on climate. Many still hold to the original sin of this denialism.

Even as Australia burned last week, Tony Abbott, Morrison’s conservative predecessor, was still saying the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”. Abbott proved he was willing to make others suffer for his wilfully ignorant belief by scrapping a carbon tax when he was in power in Australia in 2014. A fallback position is emerging. It accepts that manmade climate change is real but withdraws the concession as soon as it has been made and loses it in an obfuscatory smoke.

The final fallback and the final degradation will come, I predict, in the mid-2020s when the right abandons denialism completely, admits that climate change is catastrophic, but adds it’s far too late to do anything about it, which it may well be.

Scott Morrison is hunkered down in stage two. He grudgingly acknowledges the existence of man-made climate change but hurriedly adds that other causes are at work. The climate has always changed and it’s not worth bearing the costs of challenging a polluting culture. It worked in last year’s elections, but sounds absurd today.

“By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities,” said one previously solid Morrison voter, after he had learned the truth about conservatism as his family waited to be evacuated from a New South Wales beach.

Despite its failure, perhaps because of its failures, the do-nothing Australian right remains admired across the conservative world. The 2019 election was meant to be a climate change election about the killing of the Great Barrier Reef, the extreme drought and average summer temperatures across the continent hitting 40C. Yet Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans.

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24. In Australia, the hotshots refined their technique of dumping hundreds of crude variations on the same theme on social media. They described how Labor would raise taxes and warned that a proposal to encourage electric cars threatened motorists. Labor wanted to hit “Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel drives”, said Morrison, as his propagandists targeted ads at owners of Ford Rangers, Toyota Hilux and every other popular model, saying that Labor would increase the price of “Australia’s most popular cars”. In Britain, the same team banged home the crude message in a thousand different ways that Johnson would “get Brexit done”.

Politicians and political journalists who eulogise the cunning of clever operators aren’t being wholly asinine. How a party wins a campaign remains a matter of importance. But not one of them added, after the praise for the wise guys and whiz-kids had ended, that the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security. It’s as if crime writers spent their time detailing the cunning of criminals while never mentioning the victims left bleeding on the floor.......

Read the full article here.

An American perspective.....

"Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on Earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change. It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of livable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future." [Journalist Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic, 4 January 2020]

Latest NSW Rural Fire Service summary of infrastructure losses across the state as of 1 January 2020

By 3.30pm on the afternoon of 1 January 2020 the NSW Rural Fire Service had announced that the day before 170 additional houses had been destroyed by fire in the state.

Taking the toll of houses lost to at least 1,086.

That number is expected to climb.

2020 comes with an altered landscape in many regions across Australia

Fires in the Blue Mountains NSW landscape......

Images from SKYview_Aerial_Photo @SKYview_Aerial

THE REALITY OF ECOCIDE: a truth thread from the NSW Northern Rivers. If you read nothing else between now and New Year 2020 read this

This is not an easy read. It may upset you. It will frighten you by the time its import sinks in.

It speaks both lived experience and brutal truth. 

Truth which we ignore at our peril.

Mecurius Goldstein, on Twitter, 19 December 2019:

Ecocide: A thread
---
Bearing witness at Wytaliba NSW, these photos are a response to the neverending know-it-all 💩 from armchair experts since the #NSWfires started in September.
6 weeks and 3 inches of rain later, this is a riverbed.

Here's a creek into the Mann, a tributary of the Clarence River NSW. We're +40 days and there's been rain, but nothing here is coming back. I've had to put up with endless smug woo-woo from online dipshits saying everything would be lovely again in 6 weeks after rain. Well look:

What's happening now. These roos didn't starve, they died from drinking the toxic run-off from rain. The river is full of tar, basically the ashes of hell. Our local Greens group has donated a large % of our funds to food for 65 joeys under wildlife care, but the water is toxic.

What the insta-expert smug online pricks don't get is that in fact, no, these fires aren't "good for the environment", they don't make the forests thrive, there's nothing here but the smell of death. No food, no water, no going back. 6 weeks and after rain, all is still.

A belting flash-flood came through here the last week. There's nothing to hold the water, nothing to stop it churning tonnes of toxic shit downstream. This will all eventually end up going past Grafton NSW. Gravity is like that.

And as for the sanctimonious scapegoating delusions about hazard reduction and back-burning, sit down and listen: Behind those hills a massive back-burn was instigated in September by authorised agencies, thousands of hectares. Made shit-all difference.

Also get this. In September one of those lovely slow-burning ground fires came from the top of that ridge in the back and devoured all the fuel over 3 days it took to travel 800 metres. They're supposed to help but again doesn't make a difference when a crown-fire comes through.

So this whole area that had slow-burnt at ground level in September for days on end, then explosively burnt in November in 15 minutes flat. Smug armchair fuckos think that "burning" will save us from disasters, but they're wrong and they don't know what they're talking about.

Here's but a small patch of the whole perimeter where we did a fun weekend's raking leaves in September. Whole place went up like a torch come November. The ridge in front had been hazard-burned the previous season less than 12 months prior. Do you see now? It doesn't help.

I repeat: Everything you see here had been slow-burnt at ground level not two months before the crown fire came through. Just like the textbook recommends. Just like all the scapegoaters and victim-blamers howl. Not even the large trees survived. We're +6 weeks, and it's over.

Today I realised something important about the scapegoaters and victim-blamers. They're weak and scared. They want to believe this isn't their future, because they would do it differently. They would hazard-burn and back-burn. They would be RFS. Well, that's no escape I'm afraid.

Because this is all our futures if we stay inert, complacent, inactive & disengaged. We need the natural world a great deal more than it needs us, and right now we are being forcibly ejected. Deniers won't turn back until it's too late, will you let them take you down with them?

Humans can survive just about anything, but we can't survive ecocide. It's happened in this community and it will soon happen in yours, unless you take action to stop it. I wonder if you will?