Conservation Agendas and the Denial of History. Reply to Penna, I. and Feller, M.C. Comments on “Laming et al. The Curse of Conservation: Empirical Evidence Demonstrating That Changes in Land-Use Legislation Drove Catastrophic Bushfires in Southeast Australia. Fire 2022, 5, 175”

1. Introduction

This is a reply to the comments of Penna [1] and Feller [2] on our paper “The Curse of Conservation: empirical evidence demonstrating that changes in land-use legislation drove catastrophic bushfires in Southeast Australia” [3]. Penna [1] and Feller [2] present a series of critiques of our data and narrative that we summarise under two central themes: 1. Misrepresentation of the Land Conservation Act (1970) [4] and its authority, the Land Conservation Council; and 2. Data interpretation and representativeness, and conflicts with the existing literature.

2. Responses

2.1. Misrepresentation of the Land Conservation Act (1970) and Its Authority, the Land Conservation Council

One of the main critiques from Penna [1] and Feller [2] is our assertion that the Land Conservation Act (1970) [4] sought to eradicate and prohibit the use of fire on public land, such as the Snowy River National Park where our study is located. Penna [1] and Feller [2] assert that the purpose of the Land Conservation Act (1970) was to legislate the creation of the Land Conservation Council, and that the Act did not have any legislative powers to prohibit burning. This is correct, and we sincerely apologise for our error and any harm it has caused. However, the Land Conservation Act (1970) was the instrument through which the Land Conservation Council came into existence in 1970, with the mandate to “conduct investigations, assessments and provide advice as requested by the Victorian Government relating to the protection and ecologically sustainable management of the environment and natural resources of public land” [4,5].

It is our contention that, from its inception in 1970 through to its cessation in the 1990s, the Land Conservation Council sought to suppress and eradicate fire from public lands in all but the most prescribed and exceptional circumstances. Indeed, we argue that so deeply held was the fire-suppression narrative within the Land Conservation Council that it successfully sought to amend the Victorian Forest Act of 1958 [6] to allow fires to be banned within forests on public lands. Thus, while the Land Conservation Act (1970) was not directly responsible for the suppression and prohibition of burning on public lands, we believe that the balance of evidence indicates that the sole product of the Act (the Land Conservation Council) presided over an fire-suppression ethos that sought to prohibit and advised against almost all forms of fire on public lands. The critics would have us believe that the Council was completely separate from the Act and the political context in which both were created, which is incorrect.

Here we provide a series of excerpts from Land Conservation Council (LCC) reports spanning the life of this entity to demonstrate that there was a deeply embedded and consistent fire-suppression ethos within what was the principal government body enacted by the Land Conservation Act (1970), advising on the way public land was engaged with, used and managed in Victoria (our emphases in bold and italicised text).

“…the worst excesses of land exploitation, such as uncontrolled logging, overgrazing, wildfires, and frequent burning”

LCC Report in the South Gippsland Study Area (1972) ([7], p. 49)

“The Council previously proposed certain additional arrangements for protecting public land from fire. These arrangements have now been incorporated into the Forests Act 1958.”

LCC East Gippsland Report (1977) ([8], p. 7)

“Fires in every state forest and national park, and on all protected public land, must be suppressed.”

LCC East Gippsland Area Review: final recommendations (1986) ([9], p. 12)

“[Grazing] is, however, of considerable importance to the individual licensees, for whom the forest grazing often forms an integral part of their enterprise. … Twenty-one-year licenses with stringent conditions on the use of fire and with conditions that permit the managing authority to exercise general supervision of the management of the licensed land…”

LCC North–Eastern Study Area, Districts 3,4,5 Final Recommendations (1977) ([10], p. 54)

“Particular attention has been given to fire prevention and suppression. Fire-protection services for public land are provided and coordinated by the Regional Management Division … these elements collectively enable more effective fire-prevention and fire-suppression programs to be achieved on the public lands of the State.”

LCC East Gippsland Area Review: final recommendations (1986) ([9], p. 11)

“Accumulation of fuel along roadsides is a fire hazard of concern to fire-control authorities and it must often be reduced by burning off during cool weather. This burning off sometimes conflicts with scenic and conservation values and the Council believes that such burning should be restricted to strategically important areas and kept to the minimum consistent with efficient fire protection.”

LCC East Gippsland Area Review: final recommendations (1986) ([9], p.79)

These excerpts from Land Conservation Council reports and recommendations to government clearly demonstrate a systemic fire-suppression ethos within this advisory body that was manifest in a systematic attempt to eradicate fire from public lands in the Gippsland area [4,5,6,7]. This ethos was in direct conflict with well-established Aboriginal practices around fire [3]. The result of suppression of fire in Gippsland was excellently encapsulated by one of 19th-century Australia’s most famous scientists, Alfred Howitt, who pointed out how Aboriginal people’s annual fires suppressed excessive growth in Gippsland’s forests. He predicted that “…any cause which would lessen the force of the annual bush fires, would, very materially, alter the balance of nature, and thus produce new and unexpected results” ([11], p. 109).

As we state clearly in the original paper, frequent burning under Aboriginal custodianship was replaced by “settler mimicry” burning, which sought to emulate select facets of Aboriginal cultural burning, such as increased green-pick for large herbivores and to reduce fire risk from woody fuel accumulation. We do not conflate Aboriginal cultural burning and settler mimicry burning, with the former being a deeply embedded cultural practice that is more complex, nuanced and multi-faceted than the latter, which is principally an economic activity [12,13]. Indeed, those settlers who were skilled enough to learn from observing Aboriginal people and apply fire to Country were extremely successful in their narrow aims of maintaining open Country that was both safe from bushfires and productive for cattle. From the Royal Commission following the 1939 Victorian catastrophic fires, that impacted Gippsland, conducted by Judge Leonard Stretton, it emerged that:

“In the drier forests (but generally not the wet mountain ash forests which had less grass), graziers used fire as Aboriginal people had done: to keep the forest open, to clean up the scrub, to encourage a ‘green pick’, and to protect themselves and their stock from wildfire. In autumn a portion of each run was burnt. It was a tradition handed down over generations, sanctioned, as Stretton observed, by long usage. ”

([14], p. 10).

The historian Griffiths concludes that:

“‘burning to clean up the country’—was uncannily like that of Aboriginal people”

([14], p. 13).

While we object to this conflation of settler burning and cultural burning, as pointed out above, it is clear that settlers who knew how to use fire and who maintained that knowledge and connection to place through time, were able to emulate some of the desired outcomes of cultural burning that they sought to replicate.

The suppression and cessation of settler mimicry burning, much like the suppression of cultural burning earlier in other parts of the Gippsland landscape [11], created new vegetation susceptible to catastrophic bushfires. This effect has been further exacerbated by the effects of climate change that are now being felt [15,16,17,18]. These more recent fires are less frequent but much hotter and more devastating [3]. Further, the strong fire-suppression narrative evident throughout the life of the Land Conservation Council, particularly in the Gippsland region, corroborates the narrative of Gilbert Rothe (cited in our original article) who clearly states that problems with bushfires began following the establishment of the Land Conservation Council and the removal of access for grazing (and associated burning) of public land.

2.2. Accuracy of the Interpretation, Conflicts with Existing Literature and Representativeness

2.2.1. Interpretation

Penna [1] and Feller [2] question the accuracy of the palaeoecological interpretation of our results. The palaeoecological approach is the preferred scientific technique for reconstructing past changes in vegetation and fire activity and has a long history of scholarly development and refinement. We present three types of data (proxies): pollen for vegetation; charcoal for fire; and magnetic susceptibility for influx of soil and other inorganic minerals into the lake (e.g., from flood events and/or post-fire soil erosion). We analyse these proxies within the context of what is known about the drivers of fires at the scale reflected in this palaeoecological study: landscape and decade- to century-scale. We also employ Occam’s Razor (the rule of parsimony) when interpreting the stratigraphic time-series data [19]. We also note that investigating the past carries with it inherent uncertainties, particularly with respect to chronology [20]. Dating methods on sediment material carry error ranges that were clearly represented in the original manuscript. This precludes attribution of exact years to our data and limits the comparison between exact fire histories derived from recorded history and our data. Hence our equivocation with exact ages and our use of broad timings, such as the 1970s, 1980s, etc. This is a well-known and understood limitation of palaeoecological data [20,21].

Regarding Penna’s [1] suggestion that flood dynamics and river regulation account for the changes in our data, we detect no evidence for influx of sediment from flooding or post-fire soil erosion (magnetic susceptibility) in the record until after the major peaks of charcoal in the 1970s and 1980s. Flood-derived sediment typically produces a magnetic susceptibility signal as mineral grains are delivered into sediments from floodwaters [22,23,24]. Penna’s [1] scenario for river regulation of the Snowy River would result in the episodic delivery of sediment to Tooculerdoyung Lagoon from flood water prior to river regulation in the mid to late 20th century, followed by a decline in flood-derived sediment following river regulation. This is the opposite trend to what our data demonstrates from the sediments of Tooculerdoyung Lagoon [3], demonstrating that Penna’s contention is unfounded. Further, the temporal sequence recorded in the sediments of Tooculerdoyung Lagoon after the 1970s is marked by an increase in trees and shrubs, followed by discrete peaks in charcoal, followed by discrete peaks in magnetic susceptibility and finally a reduction in tree and shrub pollen [3]. This temporal sequence can be expected when flammable fuel loads increase and fires result that are hot enough to incinerate the plant biomass that protects soil from erosion. This is not consistent with flood impacts.

Likewise, Penna’s [1] assertion that the data reflect vegetation change in response to riverbank stabilisation, following the cessation of flooding after river regulation, is not correct, since the pollen data show increases in forest taxa rather than riparian plants. Further, Penna’s [1] claim that the Snowy River is “an environment unique in Australia” is inaccurate. Many major rivers in southeast Australia have been regulated, including the Murray, Darling, Goulburn, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan and Yarra Rivers.

Feller [2] further argues that climate change could be a factor accounting for the time series sequence. While climate change is a clear exacerbator of catastrophic fire risk, Feller [2] provides no data or explanation for how climate change could have produced our time series data, such as the increase in trees and shrubs in the 1970s and 1980s followed by peaks in charcoal (fire). Carbon dioxide (CO₂) fertilisation is one theoretical driver not mentioned by Feller [2] for an increase in trees and shrubs; however, there are no data on the effects of CO₂ fertilisation on woody fuel loads as early as the 1970s and 1980s globally that can account for the trends in the data. Garnaut [25], in one of the most comprehensive government reports on the potential effects of climate change on Australia, predicted that the effects of climate change will be felt on Australian fire regimes by 2020 (coincident with the southeast Australian Black Summer bushfires of the 2019/2020 austral summer), long after the recorded shifts in our data.

Feller [2] invokes campfires to account for the charcoal data in our record. Lake and lagoon sediment proxies reflect changes in the hectares of land surrounding a site [26,27]. Short of people deliberately dumping charcoal in the billabong, there is no way to explain the huge charcoal influx from small campfires in the area around the site.

To demonstrate the degree of landcover change spanning the period from implementation of the Land Conservation Council in 1970 through to the 1980s, we conducted an image analysis of aerial photographs of the Snowy River National Park adjacent to Tooculerdoyung Lagoon (Figure 1) [28,29,30,31,32,33]. The aerial photographs were obtained from Geoscience Australia [34] and image analysis was undertaken using Adobe Photoshop 2023 and ArcGIS Pro 3.1.0 [28,29,30,31,32,33]. While a simple visual inspection reveals a significant increase in tree/shrub cover between 1969 and 1986 (Figure 1b,e), our analysis, using standard methodology [28,29,30,31,32,33], demonstrates a substantial increase in light-frequency band-inferred canopy cover between sequential aerial photographs taken in 1969 and 1986 (Figure 1). The data demonstrate that >99% of pixels in these images had a shift in light-frequency consistent with increased tree/shrub cover, with 89% of pixels recording a greater than 20% increase (Figure 1c,f). These aerial images corroborate the pollen data recorded in our analysis, demonstrating a drastic increase in tree and shrub pollen in the 1970s–1980s [1]. This was the period in which the Land Conservation Council was established through legislative action under the Land Conservation Act (1970).

2.2.2. Conflict with Existing Literature

Feller [2] cites Gell et al. [35] and Williams et al. [36] to argue that our data contrast with the established literature on post-British invasion vegetation change in Gippsland and the relationship between people and fire in Australia, respectively. The Gell et al. [35] paper referred to by Feller provides no insight into post-British invasion vegetation change whatsoever. This is because the unconventional data treatment in that study breaches standard palaeoecological protocols. All pollen abundances in Gell et al. [35] are calculated as proportional to Eucalyptus spp. pollen concentration values. The standard for decades in pollen analysis is to calculate pollen values as percentages of the total dryland plant sum of pollen [37,38] or to provide pollen concentrations for all taxa. It is not possible to gauge changes in forest cover by calculating values based on Eucalyptus spp. pollen concentrations alone. Contrary to Feller’s [2] claim that our interpretation “is not supported by the published literature”, our data are in complete agreement with a recent regional analysis that empirically demonstrated that woody fuel increased following the removal of Aboriginal cultural burning across southeast Australia [39].

In support of his critique, Feller [2] quotes Williams et al. [36] as saying “human control of fire by prehistoric people in Australia is not evident at broad landscape levels”. However, Feller [2] deliberately omits the start of the same sentence: “we do not discount the possibility of systematic or deliberate manipulation of fire regimes at local spatial scales” ([36], p. 49). We find this misrepresentation of the original sentence deceptive. The Williams et al. [36] study referred to by Feller [2] attempted to understand how continental-scale changes in fire activity corresponded to archaeologically inferred human population dynamics. This study [36] is flawed for two key reasons: (1) Williams et al. [36] assume that human fire regimes only ever diverge from what is expected “naturally”; and (2) that a continental-scale analysis of centennial- to millennial-scale trends in fire activity and human population dynamics can possibly detect human fire regimes that occur at local scales over months to several years. Roos et al. [40] present an excellent critique of the first flaw of the Williams et al. study [36], demonstrating that humans have always, and continue to, leverage, natural variability in our day-to-day lives.

The premise that human activity only ever occurs in opposition to natural variability is a deeply problematic cultural standpoint that has hindered progress in understanding how people have created and shaped the world we live in over tens of millennia. It is a trope that dehumanises Indigenous peoples and is entrenched in some academics and academic disciplines. Feller’s [2] assertion that Indigenous people’s management of landscapes using fire is “unsubstantiated” conveniently overlooks a vast body of evidence from oral history, ethnographic records, historical documents, archaeology and palaeoecology [41,42]. We leave it to the better judgement of the journal’s readers to decide whether the idea that humans are in constant opposition to nature bears any relation to reality.

The second critique of the Williams et al. [24] study is a methodological issue that results in a bias toward detecting drivers of change that operate at century to millennial timescale and the regional to continental spatial scale. Attempts to reconstruct regional- to continental-scale environmental change over long timescales are, thus, predisposed to detecting trends produced by drivers that act on large spatiotemporal scales, such as climate change. This bias masks human-scale activities in these efforts and much greater diversity is revealed in studies that give precedence to local change [39,43]. When coupled, these two systemic flaws in the Williams et al. [36], and other similar studies, render them both culturally inappropriate and scientifically inaccurate [42].

2.2.3. Representativeness

Both Penna [1] and Feller [2] falsely state that we interpret our data as representative of all southeast Australia. At no point do we argue that the empirical changes we observe at Tooculerdoyung Lagoon, located in southeast Australia (as clearly reflected in our title), represents the broader region. On the contrary, our paper clearly states “that catastrophic bushfires first impacted the local area immediately following the prohibition of settler burning in 1970” [3]. Moreover, we clearly locate the impact of wilderness-inspired land conservation on bushfires within a complex of factors that have produced the current bushfire crisis: “The impact of this constellation of factors—including the British Invasion, wilderness inspired conservation legislation, bushfire suppression, shifting scale of landscape management—had profound impacts on the landscape configuration” [1]. To reinforce this point, our conceptual model [3] clearly locates conservation measures as subordinate to the initial impacts of the British invasion along a continuum of changes that have contributed to the current bushfire crisis. At no point do we assert that conservation approaches are responsible for all bushfires across southeast Australia.

3. Conclusions

In conclusion, we acknowledge that our claim that the Land Conservation Act (1970) prohibited settler burning was factually incorrect. We show, however, that the Act’s outcome was to create the Land Conservation Council, the sole government body advising on the way public land was engaged with, used, and managed in Victoria, and its actions and messaging were underpinned by fire-suppression ethos [4,5,6,7]. The Land Conservation Council embarked on a systematic campaign to eradicate fire from public land, particularly forests. We refute the attempts to cast our data and interpretations in doubt and we show how the literature drawn on by Feller [2] is both culturally inappropriate and scientifically flawed. We use quantitative analysis of aerial photography to demonstrate that our data faithfully represent the drastic increase in tree and shrub fuel loads in the 1970s and 1980s (Figure 1). It is our contention that the central premise of our initial paper—that wilderness-inspired conservation legislation has resulted in conditions in which catastrophic bushfires occurred—stands up to the rigours of academic inquiry.