The response of so-called ‘journalists’ like Miranda Devine and shallow ego-driven mouthpieces like Andrew Bolt to the bushfire—to blame green ideology for the fires—is not only disgraceful, it is the cheapest most intellectually barren kind of bigoted right-wing scaremongering.

In an excellent article in the latest Monthly, John van Tiggelen objectively spells out the myriad unique conditions that contributed to Black Saturday. On the scale that assesses the threat of bushfires, anything above 50 is considered extreme; on Black Saturday if memory serves (I don’t have the issue in front of me) the scale reached 150. Days of extreme heat, hot northerly winds, excessive fuel loads and so on. In other words (apart from the insanely high scale reading) the same conditions that caused bushfires at similar times of the year in Victoria in 1983, 1939, et al. Were the greens responsible for those fires?

Many of the trees that exploded on Black Saturday were regrowth eucalpyts; so forest practices in Victoria can perhaps accept some of the blame. The high death count can in part be attributed to confusion over the ‘Stay or Leave’ advice given by the CFA. Van Tiggelen—or perhaps its Thomas Keneally in his article in the Guardian—makes the point that for many, given the intensity and speed of this uniquely ferocious conflagration, neither option presented a guarantee of survival.

But for cheap slanderers like Devine and Bolt, why let the facts, or anything so inconvenient as the truth, get in the way of a chance to sully the greens? I suppose spite can play its part in selling a few newspapers now and then.

One thing I can state with some confidence; there are probably a couple of hundred families in Victoria who couldn’t care less.

Cameron, could you tell the difference between a eucalypt arising from natural regeneration, compared with a eucalypt in regenerated native forest arising from a forestry operation, if they were the same age of say thirty years?

I daresay I could not, mr worker, but that was not the point of my post. Right-wing morons were quick to lay the blame for these fires with greenies, when this is a totally simplistic and factually inaccurate response to the cause of the fires.

Cameron,
Woodworker fails to spot the deliberate mistake by Devine and Bolt, in the same way that the Timber Communities clowns fail to acknowledge the difference between burning windrowed trash for convieniences sake and real hazard reduction burns in standing forest when writing their letters to the editors. In both cases the phrase “lier, lier, pants on fire” comes to mind.

Cameron, (#4), I don’t and haven’t read either Devine or Bolt. I’m happy to ignore them. From third party reports, they sound far too right wing for me…

They probably are, mr worker, but I sometimes force myself to trawl through their groundless and bitter invective in the interests of knowing thine enemy. Gotta love Democracy.

By the way, did you see any of the pictures of the bushfire-affected areas where the burned trees were all in nice, straight rows? Now, what could POSSIBLY explain that…?