Should Australia look to Aboriginal land practices to help beat bushfires?
The Australia Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) is calling for the official inquiry into last summer’s devastating bushfires to investigate how traditional land and fire management practices of Indigenous Australians could improve the country’s resilience to fire.
Dubbed “Black Summer” the 2019/2020 bush fire season left 33 people dead, destroyed 3000 homes and 7000 outbuildings, and burned 10 million hectares of land across the country.
AILA believes traditional land management should be explored as a way to help control or prevent bushfires. Image credit - Pixabay.
The Australian Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements was set up in response and hopes to present its findings well before the next fire season begins later this year.
LAA spoke to AILA’s Daniel Bennett who chairs the group’s national advocacy committee about its submission to the Royal Commission. He says the team started pulling it together almost while the fires were happening - and tried to not to get distracted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Daniel Bennett is AILA’s National Advocacy Chairman.
Bennett believes landscape architects have a key role to play around bush fire management.
“Either side of an event like this is critical. The planning and design of how we deal with bush fire in our cities and our peri-urban areas and our rural areas, as well as what happens after are very much things we can influence, shape and impact,” he says.
AILA is advocating a strengthening of traditional land management practices - its submission says the scale of effort required for the response to the 2019/2020 bushfires is so large that it can’t be held by any one approach or cultural system.
“There is a broad, ongoing and unresolved social debate about the incorporation and collaboration with Traditional Custodians of Australia, and the many ways of reconciling competition cultures, sharing knowledge and making reparations,” AILA's submission states.
The 2019/2020 bushfire season claimed 33 lives. Image credit - Pixabay.
Bennett says the Royal Commission has declared it will be looking at traditional land management and he is delighted. “This is the first time in my memory that such a spotlight has been put on traditional land practices. The scale of effort required though, will turn a lot of the authorities on their heads because it will change the way they manage bushfires.”
Bennett is very hopeful the AILA submission will be well listened to. “Landscape Architecture as a profession can be a great facilitator. We understand natural systems, we also understand cities and we are also good about having conversations about communities.”
In terms of an outcome from the inquiry, he says a win for AILA would be a better understanding of natural systems and cities.
You can see the complete AILA submission here and in the video below you can hear more from Daniel Bennett.
