Sifting through the ashes for someone to blame

Like most people in Australia, and many around the world, I’ve been following the reports of the terrible fires that ravaged the state of Victoria on “Black Saturday”. I’ve watched with horror as, night after night, news reports show more awful footage of the devastation. There are burnt out hulks of cars in the road, charred homes, dead animals; people weeping as they are given the news that friends, family, neighbours are dead.

There is an awful poignancy to this website encouraging tourism to Marysville, a picturesque little village, popular with honeymooners, that has been almost completely destroyed. Contrast the photographs of charming little B&Bs and secret forest glades with what is there now: the place, which was once redolent of the Shire, now looks like Mordor.

Now the really important part starts: who, or what, to blame. Kevin Rudd is blaming arsonists, the environmentalists are blaming climate change, and the conservatives are blaming the environmentalists.

All of them are partly right. It seems that arsonists did start at least some of the fires — one has just been arrested. (The police refused to release any details about the suspect for his own safety, so the Daily Telegraph — owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — helpfully released the man’s name, along with a photograph. Curiously, the story is not on their website.) Changes in weather patterns contributed to the incredibly high temperatures — up to 48°C for days on end — experienced in south-eastern Australia as well as dangerous changes in wind direction. And municipalities refused to give permission for landowners to clear trees from around their homes or collect firewood, which in retrospect was very, very stupid.

In the end, people were killed by a combination of all of these factors. All of the testimony by eyewitnesses points to the fact that these fires were like no fires experienced before. People who thought that they were prepared died in their homes or their cars. They didn’t stand a chance because nobody could conceive of infernos like these.

It turns out that the Australian bush is a very dangerous place in summer. Eucalyptus trees release volatile oils into the air on hot days because this increases the chance that a fireball will be triggered: as in the case of many of the protea species found in South Africa, their seeds need fire to germinate. Living amongst forests of gum trees in a country where temperatures routinely climb into the late 30s and early 40s, is pretty much the same as setting up a lifestyle property on a munitions dump. Changes in weather patterns — attributed to an increase in temperature in the Indian ocean – will increase the likelihood of superfires like these happening in the future.

The chief of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority is convinced that climate change is a major contributor, and he has warned that Australians are going to have to rethink the way they choose to live in the bush.

Nature is biting back. In the week after the fires, two shark attacks were recorded in Sydney, one in the harbour itself, where a navy diver was attacked early in the morning, and one on Bondi Beach, where a surfer was attacked after sunset. Naturally, environmentalists have been blamed for this, too: by putting a stop to the dumping of industrial toxins in the harbour, the fish hunted by the sharks have returned. In this article, increased shark numbers elsewhere along the New South Wales coast are blamed on restrictions on commercial fishing. (Yes, environmentalists want sharks to bite people!)

Reading through all the accusations and counter-accusations, it’s hard not to be struck by the thought that Australian nanny-statism has reached a point where people are affronted if nature bites back. Added to this is the fact that we live in a world where, for the most part, middle income earners in first world countries are safe from the kind of dangers faced by poor people in poor countries. When large numbers of people die in natural disasters, it’s usually in obscure places like Bangladesh or the Honduras.

Not all of the communities affected by the fires were well-off, but in global terms, these people were wealthy. The images of burnt out houses and the charred remains of cars are horrifyingly compelling precisely because they remind so many of us what our own worldly possessions could be reduced to.

The conservatives blaming the greens for all of this seem incensed that people should face any danger from nature at all. It’s a strange attitude in a country filled with so many dangerous creatures, where people can, and do, die of thirst if their car breaks down. Then again, as Malcolm Knox argues in this essay, Australians have remained relentlessly optimistic about their ability to control their climate, even if that optimism is hopelessly misplaced.

After these fires, no Australian resident can possibly look at nature in quite the same way again. People who choose to live in the Australian bush must now surely do so in the knowledge of all the dangers associated with that lifestyle. And people who go surfing after sunset risk being bitten by sharks.