LONDON: Australia’s largest fire has so far scorched 65,000 hectares of bone-dry forest and farmland near Singleton. But Australians were learning the hard ecological fact that what is happening is not only a natural and regular phenomenon, but almost impossible to prevent in extreme conditions.

The fires may be monumental in scale, but they are by no means the worst Australians have faced. New South Wales is in the most fire-prone corner of the most fire-prone continent in the world. Its tinderbox environment has been shaped by and now depends on regular fires, whether started by lightning or man. Ecologists say controlled burning of eucalyptus forests in the state occurs over about 5per cent of the land each year. In semi-arid areas, land is burnt probably every 20 to 100 years. Grasslands burn at intervals of one to 20 years and forests every five to 80 years with varying intensity.

The silver lining is the certainty that the land will recover and be rejuvenated. Many seeds lie dormant for years until they germinate with the heat of the fires. Seeds from the fruits of the oaks, hakeas and banksias which burned days ago will now have dropped, and the trunks and underground stems of other plants scorched by the flames will soon shoot. In a few months’ time, much of what now looks like devastated bush will be green and by next year the land will have mostly recovered. It is all part of the ecological cycle. The arguments are now raging as to how Australia can best live with fire. As city suburbs expand further into unmanaged bush, accidental or deliberate fires will happen more frequently and continue to threaten more communities.

Extreme weather which can spark major fires is also becoming more common. Phenomena like El Nino and long unseasonal droughts induced by global warming are turning relatively moist forests around the world into drier habitats that burn more easily. The fear is that man is creating a vicious circle of destruction, where increased fires are not only a result of changes in the weather but also a contributory factor to these changes.

Many were deliberately started not by young vandals as in Australia but by corporations wanting to clear forest to plant cash crops or to release land for development. Once a forest has burned, speculators find it easier to get planning permission for new homes. The relationship between deliberate fires and natural forest ecosystems is becoming more and more dangerously unbalanced, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. Many forests are now burning more frequently than ever before and in contrast, management programmes are preventing land from burning naturally, leading to ecological problems and more intense fires in the future.

A battle is now on in Australia between environmentalists who argue that the bush should be left unmanaged to encourage wildlife and preserve the natural landscape, and homeowners who want more management of the bush and the lighting of controlled, preventive fires. Ecologists have been attacked by some fire experts this week for discouraging, for conservation reasons, the traditional controlled burning of the brush wood and undergrowth which builds up in the bush and which critics say provides the fuel for the fires. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.