We all know that academia has long since become little more than a taxpayer-funded circle-jerk for people who’d rather collect PhDs than actually work for a living in the real world. To some extent we could live with that: if only the onanistic eggheads kept their furious masturbation to themselves.
But ivory tower jacking-off has real-world consequences, often dire. At its worst, the Marxist pseudo-scientific gobbledegook of Lysenkoism contributed directly to, not just the wrecked careers and destroyed lives of honest Soviet biologists, but the deaths of tens of millions in the famines caused in part by crackpot “Marxist biology”.
Transgenderism is another instance of academic self-abuse causing vast real-world harm.
Then there’s the garbage spouted by “fire ecologists” who’ve spent bugger-all time fighting fires but still regard themselves as the world authorities on bushfires.
Decades of hard-won wisdom from people who spend their entire lives in Australia’s forests, not to mention Aboriginal practices tens of thousands of years old, are discarded in favour of greens-pleasing academic bullshit.
Our national capital was devastated and five million hectares were burnt by wildfire in 2003. The chairman of a parliamentary inquiry, which produced what came to be known as Nairn Report, stated ‘The committee heard a consistent message right around Australia:- there has been grossly inadequate hazard reduction burning on public lands for far too long; local knowledge and experience is being ignored by an increasingly top heavy bureaucracy.’
That view was not universal, however. A dissenting report from a Greens member quoted Professor Robert Whelan of Wollongong University, who asserted that broad scale hazard reduction is threatening biodiversity conservation and must therefore be avoided by land managers and resisted at a political level.
The devastating absurdity of all this was starkly demonstrated last year by related reports from Green-Left Central, the ABC. First, the ABC glowingly reported on the efforts of “conservationists” in Victoria’s Gippsland region who had successfully campaigned against planned fuel-reduction burns, on the grounds of – you guessed it – “threat to biodiversity”.
Just a few months later, the ABC was hysterically blaming bushfires which ripped through the region on “climate change”.
In the years since 2003, Professor Whelan has made quite the career for himself as an ardent campaigner against fuel reduction burns.
The Council of Australian Governments set up another inquiry in 2004. It was headed by a former fire chief and two academics. One of them was Professor Whelan. The COAG report questioned the effectiveness of prescribed burning and emphasised ‘education’ in the cause of “learning to live with bushfire”. Since then, more than 200 people and countless millions of animals have been needlessly killed by wildfires.
Whelan has gone on to set up the “Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires”, with Dr Ross Bradstock, who has overseen research funding of nearly $20 million. Bradstock also set up the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub with $4 million in government funding. Bradstock is supposedly the authority on “fire ecology in Australia and internationally”.
Professor Bradstock’s books and papers have perpetuated the dichotomy between experienced land managers and academic ecologists/emergency managers. The academics lack experience of sustainable land- and fire-management. They seem not to understand basic eucalypt ecology. The emergency managers compete very successfully against land managers for scarce resources. Escalating environmental and socioeconomic disasters have been the inevitable result, with massive increases in funding for emergency response. Foresters, pastoralists and others living and working with the bush are gobsmacked by the idea that mild fire can threaten biodiversity in a landscape safely maintained by Aboriginal burning for 40,000 years. The hypothesis is that supposedly fire-sensitive, non-resprouting trees and shrubs will be eliminated if we burn too often, because successive fires will kill new seedlings before they reach sexual maturity.
It’s a beautiful theory – just pay no attention to the evidence.
This strange idea overlooks the simple fact that mild fires in a healthy landscape don’t kill mature trees and shrubs. A classic example of a fire-sensitive, non-resprouting tree, offered by distinguished academics such as Professors Ross Bradstock, David Bowman, David Lindenmayer and Dick Williams, is mountain ash – Eucalyptus regnans.
But way back in the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Howitt FGSL, FRAI, DSc (Cambridge) noted that the common name for E. regnans was “blackbutt”.
The name “blackbutt” came from the fact that the bases of the trees were distinctively blackened by Aboriginal burning practises.
In 1851, less than two decades after the Aboriginal firestick was effectively extinguished in Victoria, five million hectares exploded in the Black Thursday holocaust. Like our Black Summer nearly two centuries later, it had nothing to do with any influence of human activities on climate[…]
By the mid-Twentieth Century, Australian foresters had realised that trying to suppress fire was not merely futile but counterproductive. Eucalypt forests require mild fire to maintain their health and safety.
Quadrant
But what would a bunch of rednecks who spend their every working day in the forests know? They have no idea about ecological theories: they only know what works.
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