With the loss of some 3 billion animals, the country is still recovering — and learning about the deadly, evolving force of wildfire in the age of climate change. Click the link to learn more. Wildfire DiscoverMagazine
It was Australia as few had seen it before. Apocalyptic images beamed around the world of Sydney’s shimmering cityscape enrobed in heavy smoke against a sci-fi-orange sky. The harbor’s soaring white Opera House was silhouetted, sharply defined against dark clouds. For more than half a year — starting before July 2019 and lasting until March 2020 — bushfires raged indiscriminately across the landscape, marching beyond the distant bush toward tidy suburbs and teeming subdivisions.
Across the country, old timers can tick off the names of historic, deadly fires on their fingers like rosary beads, reciting the details from memory with a mixture of reverence and awe. But Australia’s flammability has made a virtue of necessity. With 76,000 members, NSW Rural Fire Service is the world’s largest single body of volunteer firefighters. Few nations have studied wildfires like the Australians, whose settlement history is punctuated by devastating bushfires.
The events that unfolded over the Black Summer were too consequential to wait for a break in the pandemic, though. The federal government convened a pandemic-modified Royal Commission, generally called only to investigate matters of acute public significance via public hearings. One of the Australian commission’s findings could have resonance in the American West. The authorities called for a clearer and more robust system for evacuating people caught behind fire lines, and a hard look at where and how Australians are building. The two issues are often connected. Fire professionals around the world speak in unison about the wrongheadedness of local policies that allow more and more people to build in fire-prone areas, making evacuations frequent and chaotic.
So when images of singed koala bears and kangaroos running for their lives began flickering on screens across the globe, international concern for the plight of animals quickly made itself known.
Hordes of mammals, reptiles, birds and frogs were killed or displaced, the report found. Wildlife experts could not think of another single event in modern times that had such a profound impact on a nation’s animal species. Don Hankins is a pyrogeographer at California State University, Chico, and Plains Miwok traditional cultural practitioner. Hankins has worked extensively in Australia, studying Aboriginal fire practice and its many applications.
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