In a few fora, I have had the (presumably well-meaning) response to these fires of ‘it will grow back’.
It is *not* that simple. This article is a good primer for why. Short thread. theconversation.com/some-say-weve-…
It is *not* that simple. This article is a good primer for why. Short thread. theconversation.com/some-say-weve-…
Yes, Fire is normal in the Australian landscape, since humans first arrived and stared using it. Yes, many Aussie landscapes are fire adapted and fire tolerant. But the baseline conditions under all that are shifting fast.
The fires this year are remarkable in length of season, size and also types of environments that have burned. If they burn again in anything up to several decades from now, complex forests will not, cannot grow back as before. It will be something different.
We have to consider this: what might actually happen is environments transition to new environments. Rainforest to dry forest, tall forest to small forest, forest to scrub, scrub to arid. Some biomes are just lost.
The trend in that scenario, valid also for SE Asia, Amazonia etc, is toward natural environments that hold less carbon in plant and soil than the environments that preceded them. We are not looking at a ‘carbon neutral’ scenario at all.
I love, respect, delight in the resilience of natural environments and how they respond to the opportunity to recover. But we cannot delude ourselves about what we might be losing right now.
We really might be on a path to lower variety, lower complexity, lower carbon natural environs. If we think we want something else, a massive global decarbonisation effort must be matched by determined local land management and conservation. End.
