Week 1 – Audio Lesson: Listen & Read

Pete: So, what do you see happening with the Australian wildlife in this sort of area or the ecosystems in your lifetime or in my lifetime? Do you think it’s only going to get worse and we’re going to see mass extinction happen?

Ian: Oh, look, it will. And There’s almost nothing we can do about that. Yeah, in the general sense, other than doing things like major change on policy and practice on fire is a good example of that. We can’t recover ecosystems from fire if they have completely destroyed the ecosystem. We could go and replant, but that’s, you know, that’s a century long solution. It’s not a solution that any government, certainly any government in this political environment…

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: …is going to be able to get away with doing. They are going to disappear and so on, which means that it’s important for us to try and do whatever we can to maintain areas in a way that we’re not going to have these catastrophic disasters going through them. So, having controlled burns and doing those sort of things where we’re actually trying to replicate the historical and evolutionary environment that these ecosystems have grown up in, because for decades certainly and possibly longer than that, we have allowed fires to occur, and, in effect, we’ve deliberately lit fires, not recently, but in decades past in order to clear land. And so, clearing in the past is something that’s happened. We can’t change that. But what we can do is to say we want to be able to maintain these ecosystems in a way that means that they can… we can have controlled fires, but they’re not going to have… if there is a bush fire that comes by accident or, heaven forbid, by some idiot lighting it, that they are not going to turn into catastrophic events like we’ve had recently.

Pete: Yeah, there was some story I was reading about a guy in South Australia who lit six fires and was 79 years old…

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: …running around lighting the fires two days ago or something on a forty degree day.

Ian: There’s always idiots doing that and just think you can’t account for it individual stupidity. 

Pete: They, literally… like the expression this guy “just wants to watch the world burn”. Yeah. 

Ian: Yeah, and you can’t account for individual stupidity where you’ve got you know, you’ve got a handful of people out of a population of 25 million who are going to do something stupid. You can’t legislate against stupidity.

Pete: This is almost like, I guess, Australia’s equivalent of America’s high school shooters, right? We’ve got our own arsonists. Where it’s…

Ian: We’ve got our own idiots.

Pete: You can’t… you don’t know who’s going to do it before they do it.

Ian: No. Exactly. And they say you can’t legislate against stupidity, but what you can do is you can mitigate the effect that either natural or human stupidity is going to create.