1-1-21
Fire extent from July 1, 2019, to June 22, 2020
E così eccoci al nuovo anno.
Non è così entusiasmante vedere passare gli anni, mi sembra l'altro ieri che qualcuno disse 'e anche giugno ce lo siamo giocato'. Giugno, luglio, agosto, settembre, ottobre, novembre e pure dicembre. E così via.
Un anno fa non c'era ancora nessuna emergenza mondiale COVID. Ma c'era la catastrofe climatica in atto, l'Australia avvolta dai più grandi incendi degli ultimi anni. Una strage orrenda non tanto di persone, ma di natura nel senso più letterale del termine. Oltre un miliardo di animali (considerando solo i vertebrati) stimati morti. Quelli sopravvissuti morti poi per carestia d'acqua e di cibo. Il tutto esacerbato dalle limitazioni del COVID.
E' una brutta, brutta storia. Niente di bello da raccontare.
Da allora non ci siamo fatti mancare niente, ad ogni modo. E meno male, che il covid ha rallentato l'inquinamento e l'atmosfera è meno pregna di CO2 di prima.
Ma intanto la California ha avuto la peggiore stagione di incendi (dopo un 2019 clemente e un biennio 2017-2018 terribili) a memoria d'uomo. Un disastro che ha raddoppiato il precedente record (del '18) di territorio bruciato.
Ed è bruciato anche il Pantanal. No dico, la maggiore area umida del mondo. E il superbastardo Bolsonazi che diceva spudoratamente che è impossibile che una foresta bruci, quindi è una fake-news.
E ci sono tanti che lo adulano perché non ha messo il Brasile in lockdown. In fondo, cosa saranno mai 180.000 morti?
Insomma, torniamo all'Australia, devastata dai terribili incendi di un anno fa. Ricordiamo lo scempio allora, e la catastrofe che è a tutt'oggi l'ecologia in Australia, apparentemente in maniera incomprensibile, l'unica nazione 'sviluppata' con problemi di disboscamento. Dove ci abitano 3 abitanti per kmq, come se noi in Italia fossimo un milione in tutto. Eppure devastata dall'industria mineraria e dai ranchers disboscatori. Perché? Forse perché le risorse australiane servono per i famelici due miliardi e mezzo di cinesi e indiani, per esempio. Ma più in generale, perché abbiamo a che fare con un governo di destra, pari pari a quello del bolsonazista quanto a 'sensibilità ecologica'.
Ma di questo ho già parlato a suo tempo.
Adesso andiamo avanti.
No, koalas aren't 'functionally extinct'—yet (nationalgeographic.com)
No, koalas aren't 'functionally extinct'—yetAs koalas suffer in the Australian bushfires, misinformation has spread about their demise. Here’s what we know.
A koala is pictured in Queensland, Australia. The iconic marsupials have an extensive habitat range along Australia’s eastern coast, where a large number of bushfires are burning.
BY NATASHA DALY
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 25, 2019
AUSTRALIA IS IN the midst of a catastrophic and unprecedented early fire season. As dozens of bushfires rage up the country’s eastern coast, from Sydney to Byron Bay, incinerating houses, forest, and even marshland, one of Australia’s most iconic animals has taken center stage in headlines.
A female koala, named Anwen by her rescuers, receives treatment at the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, Australia. She was burnt in a brushfire ravaging the area.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN EDWARDSImages of burned, dying koalas have emerged as a symbol of the fire’s devastating toll. “They’re such helpless little things,” says Christine Adams-Hosking, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia. “A bird can fly, a kangaroo can hop very fast, but koalas are so slow. They basically just get stuck where they are.”
The plight of the defenseless animals has sparked a flurry of concern—and confusion. Over the weekend, erroneous declarations that the animals have lost most of their habitat and are “functionally extinct” made the rounds in headlines and on social media, illustrating just how quickly misinformation can spread in times of crisis.
Red dots show locations of fires detected in Australia the week ending Nov. 25, 2019.
The brown area shows the range of the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus).
Koalas are considered vulnerable to extinction—just a step above endangered—and reports indicate that between 350 and a thousand koalas have been found dead so far in fire-devastated zones of northern New South Wales.
But, experts say, we are not looking at the death of a species—yet. “We’re not going to see koalas go extinct this fast,” says Chris Johnson, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Tasmania. “Koala populations will continue to decline because of lots of interacting reasons, but we’re not at the point where one event could take them out.”
Here’s the current situation:
Why are koalas suffering so much in this fire season?When it comes to fire, everything seems to be stacked against koalas. Their only real defense is climbing higher into the eucalyptus trees where they make their homes—little defense at all in a raging forest fire.
Eucalyptus itself is some of the most fire-adapted vegetation on Earth, able to sprout and grow anew in the immediate aftermath of fires. In normal fire conditions, the flames wouldn’t typically reach the top of the trees, leaving the koalas relatively unscathed. The spike we’re seeing in koala deaths is an indicator that something is wrong, says David Bowman, director of the Fire Center Research Hub at the University of Tasmania.
The scale of the current fires—largely a result of climate change and the slow death of Aboriginal fire management methods—has no precedent, according to Bowman. “They are burning at a particularly high intensity,” he says.
Packed with oil, the trees are burning hot and fast, sometimes exploding and sending sparks yards in every direction.
It’s only the spring in Australia. “In terms of then bushfire crisis, this is the supporting act,” Bowman says. He worries that the situation will be far worse come in January and February, as temperatures continue to rise and drought is exacerbated.
How many koalas are left?In 2016, experts estimated that there are about 329,000 koalas in Australia, which represents an average of a 24 percent decline in populations over the past three generations.
“It’s very difficult to estimate koala populations, even at the best of times,” Adams-Hosking says, because they have a very wide range across eastern Australia, and are human-shy and found very high up in trees. “Some populations are becoming locally extinct and others are doing just fine.”
Koalas are threatened by land development, food degradation (increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has diminished the nutritional quality of eucalyptus leaves), drought, dog attacks, and chlamydia. (Read more about the threats posed by cars and dogs.)
And, yes, fire too. In certain areas that have been hard hit by fire, it’s possible that local koala populations won’t recover, “but it’s too early to tell,” says Adams-Hosking. “We’d need monitoring over several years.”
Have the fires really decimated 80 percent of koala habitat?No. Koalas’ range is large, extending along Australia’s entire Eastern coast. The recent bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland cover about a million hectares, Fisher says (and some estimates indicate as many as 2.5 million hectares), but the area of forest in eastern Australia where koalas can live is more than 100 million hectares.
Koala Hospital volunteers found this mother and her baby searching for food and water on the ground in the Port Macquarie fire zone. The pair, named Julie and Joey, are now receiving care at the hospital.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN EDWARDSFurthermore, just because an area has been affected by fire, says Grant Williamson, a postdoctoral fellow specializing in landscape ecology at the University of Tasmania, “does not mean it has been ‘destroyed’ and is no longer suitable for occupation by koalas.”
Are koalas ‘functionally extinct?’“Functionally extinct” refers to when a species no longer has enough individual members to produce future generations or play a role in the ecosystem. (Learn more: What is extinction? The answer is complicated.)
The fires may have killed many koalas “but this is not enough to change their overall threat status as a species,” Fisher says.
KOALAS 101Koalas are not bears—they’re marsupials. Learn about koalas’ unique traits, including six opposable “thumbs,” downward-facing pouches, and an ability to sleep nearly all day in tree branches.The headlines claiming that koalas are functionally extinct appear to be based on a claim from a koala conservation group earlier in 2019. Scientists disputed it then and continue to dispute it now: “It is threatened in some parts of its range and not in others,” says Diana Fisher, associate professor in the school of biological sciences at the University of Queensland.
For some local populations of koalas in the fire zones, especially in northern New South Wales, the impact has likely been “catastrophic,” Adams-Hosking says. A third of koalas in the fire zones there may have perished.
But other populations, such as those in the southern state of Victoria, have not been affected by these fires at all, according to Johnson.
So what’s next?“It’s not looking good for koalas at all, even before the fires,” says Adams-Hosking. While they have government protections—it’s illegal to kill a koala, for instance—their habitat is highly vulnerable, she says. “Very little of koala habitat is designated as protected area. Almost nothing.” She argues that the government needs to put the environment before economic growth. “Until that political will kicks in—and in Australia, it hasn’t—it’s not going to get any better for koalas.”
In the meantime, The Koala Hospital of Port Macquarie, located about 250 miles north of Sydney in one of the most fire-affected zones, is actively rescuing and treating koalas. To date, they’ve treated at least 22, according to the New York Times.
Adams-Hosking and David Bowman, the landscape fire expert, both argue that in addition to protecting land, it’s vital to start looking at rewilding and relocating koalas. “We’ve got to get with the program and start adapting, says Bowman. “If we want koalas, we’ve got to look after them. We need to step up.”
'Starvation event' shows wildlife may need human help to survive (smh.com.au)
Starvation event' shows wildlife may need human help to survive
By Mike Foley
January 1, 2020 — 5.33pm
More than 300 baby flying foxes have been abandoned in a "starvation event" on NSW's South Coast as their desperate mothers leave them behind in order to survive.
The devastating drought and fires have hit wildlife habitats so hard experts believe human intervention will be needed to repopulate sensitive species that will otherwise be wiped out locally.
Experts warn drought and bushfires have combined to create a new level of threat to local wildlife. CREDIT:NINE
Wildlife Rescue South Coast secretary Jenny Packwood said large numbers of flying foxes flew south in spring, after early season fires on the North Coast wiped out large areas of their northern habitat, looking for fruit and nectar in forests between Nowra and Batemans Bay.
“Mothers are abandoning babies at two weeks after birth, because there is no food for them. We’ve picked them up out of local colonies. Last week we had 300 come in, and we’ve been flat out feeding since then. We had to fly some of them to the North Coast, to carer groups up there,” Ms Packwood said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, we’re calling it a starvation event. I just had a phone call from Nowra, where there are more dead and starving babies in the Bomaderry and Berry colonies.”
Professor of conservation biology at the University of Sydney Mike Letnic said drought and searing fires had put koalas and potaroos under increased pressure this summer.
With the climate being so dry at the moment, and the intensity of these fires, wet gully areas and so on that normally escape the worst of it have been burnt,” he said.
“Animals that typically survive in these patches that don’t burn can recolonise from these refuges, but there may be too few pathways to allow for effective recolonisation. It will depend on how many refuges are left.”
Professor Letnic said koalas and potaroos would become locally extinct in some areas of their habitat - which extends across the North and South Coast fire grounds.
Another problem for native wildlife would come from predators - which can be more mobile and escape fires - that then move back into the old fireground and “start mopping up vulnerable animals”, he said.
Professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania David Bowman said it was “extraordinary” to have concurrent fires in all of Australia’s dry forest regions, which sit across Tasmania and “a narrow ribbon of land” running around the coast from Queensland to the south-west forest of Western Australia.
“Normally they were the refugia for fire sensitive species - that goes back to ancient times - but it’s been so dry due to extreme drought fires have overwhelmed what are normally safe havens,” Professor Bowman said.
“We’re living in the Anthropocene and it calls into question the idea that nature can self-assemble. Nature is super resilient, but it might reassemble with lots of missing parts, and that would be very distressing to people.
BushfiresHandful of Blue Mountains koalas successfully relocated to Taronga Zoo“
This opens a big box of issues and will change the way we think about Australia’s forest ecology. We may see more sensitive interventions, like trying to rescue animals ahead of fires, or reintroduce them after it.”
Professor Letnic and Professor Bowman both said feral deer, which are already damaging alpine areas in Victoria and the NSW North Coast and Illawarra, would likely spread into new ground as green shoots emerge from trees and undergrowth when fire-hit landscapes begin to recover.
NSW considering evacuating up to 90 towns if they run out of water (thefifthestate.com.au)
NSW considering evacuating up to 90 towns if they run out of waterThe NSW state government is considering evacuating the residents of as many as 90 towns that are seriously affected by drought if they completely run out of water. Sign up to our twice weekly newsletter to keep up with the news on sustainability and the built environment.
BY TINA PERINOTTO 13 DECEMBER 2019
The NSW state government is considering evacuating the residents of as many as 90 towns that are seriously affected by drought if they completely run out of water.For months, many towns in rural NSW have been relying on water being trucked in but that is only a short-term solution, and bore water is only available to some towns.
Prime7 News Central West late last month reported that the government would make the drastic move of relocating populations from towns without any water supply. Asked by Prime TV how many towns were facing the prospect of completely running out of water, the state’s regional town water supply co-ordinator, James McTavish, said: “We have about 90 towns and communities that we have substantial concerns about now”.
“We are very keen to make sure that we use that [evacuation] as an absolute last case only and in every community we have a plan,” said Mr McTavish.
He said the government had not learned from the Millennium drought.
“We are looking to make sure we are never here again,” he told Prime7.
At the time of writing, the state government had not responded to requests from The Fifth Estate for more information about any evacuation plans.
But a state government source told The Fifth Estate the government was looking at all options – new weirs, pipelines and bores, as well as reverse osmosis systems to purify water supplies.
The source denied there were plans to relocate the town but said resourcing to address the problem had moved to the “next level”.
“It’s huge… there’s been a big shuffle,” they said, adding that nine hydrologists had been hired.
Little else is known about the government’s plans but it is believed they vary from town to town.
“Different towns need different systems,” the source said.
“Day Zero is about the flow on-ground. It doesn’t take into account underground aquifers. Some [towns] do have the possibilities for bores. Some towns are easier to truck water into.”
The source said there was some optimism in government circles that solutions would be found, citing how a pipeline to supply Broken Hill with water was completed in 2016 “two weeks before the town ran out of water”.
Broken Hill is now one of the safest in the state for water. However, the pipeline is believed to have cost $500 million and it’s unclear how many pipelines the state could afford to build.
For most towns, a two-tier approach was being used, the source said.
“The state government isn’t the utility provider; we don’t control the water; the local councils do.
“We step in when they need some help; we have the expertise. A lot of local councils do not have that expertise.”
Working out where to drill for bores is complicated and drilling is expensive, they said.
A request for interview with Mr McTavish was not responded to before publication.
People living in Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo and other communities afflicted by water shortages are worried about what any evacuation plans might look like, according to Bathurst councillor John Fry.
Cr Fry told The Fifth Estate people were worried about whether entire families and communities would be moved and if they would ever be able to return to their homes.
People were also worried their homes could be damaged by vandals, he said.
Cr Fry said that as of Thursday water in Bathurst’s dam had fallen to 37 per cent of capacity – the lowest level since the dam was rebuilt in 2000 – and it was evaporating at 1.1 percentage points per week, with “no reasonable hope of decent rainfall.”
Cr Fry, who learnt about the government relocation plans when he saw the Prime7 news report, said he tried, unsuccessfully, to find out more about the plans through a senior contact in the Department of Water, Property and Housing.
He said farmers in his area were currently buying water at $2.50 per one thousand litres and while people were not talking about Day Zero, irrigators had been put on notice by the council.
“Our irrigators have been told to cut back to 20 per cent pumping rate and when the dam gets to 22 per cent [of capacity], it’s a total ‘cease to pump’,” he said.
“We realise our irrigators provide our food but at the end of the day the city takes priority.”
Cr Fry said he recently put a motion to council to declare a water emergency but it was voted down. Other councillors said there was “no need to panic”, and that climate change was “a beat up”.
Cr Fry, who is also part of a business that works on rehydrating land through regenerative farming, said a lot could be done to retain moisture in the soil and plants. It was also possible to capture water from summer storms but the infrastructure wasn’t in place.
Bathurst can’t access bore water, and although people had been pushing for grey water recycling for some time council hadn’t seriously considered it.
“We’ve been talking about it for 20 years,” he said.
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires Intensify - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires IntensifyCalling for evacuations along the southeastern coast, officials said the next few days would be among the worst yet in an already catastrophic fire season.
Across the scorched southeast, frightened Australians — taking a few cherished things, abandoning their homes and vacation rentals, and braving smoke that discolored the skies — struggled Thursday to evacuate as wildfires turned the countryside into charcoal wasteland.
And from government officials came a disheartening warning: This weekend will be one of the worst periods yet in Australia’s catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire conditions are set to intensify over the weekend.“It’s going to be a blast furnace,” Andrew Constance, the transport minister of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Monitoring a fire on Thursday in East Gippsland, Victoria, where 17 people were missing.Credit...Darrian Traynor/Getty ImagesThe blazes have strained the country’s firefighting resources, and the fire season, though still young, already ranks as among the worst in Australia’s recorded history.
The state of New South Wales declared an emergency in its southeastern region on Thursday, calling on residents and vacationers to evacuate. Mr. Constance said the relocation was the largest in the region’s history.
[Update: 3 U.S. firefighters die in plane crash as Australia’s blazes intensify.]
To the south, the state of Victoria declared a disaster on Thursday, allowing it to authorize the evacuation of areas along its eastern coast.
Using any means they could find, the authorities were warning people to evacuate. But with communication in some areas spotty to nonexistent, it was not clear that everyone would get the message.
In just the past week, at least nine people have died, and many more are unaccounted for. In all, at least 18 people have died in this fire season.
The blazes have consumed more than 1,000 houses, killed countless animals and ravaged a Pacific coast region of farms, bush, eucalyptus forests, mountains, lakes and vacation spots. About 15 million acres have been blackened over the past four months, and more than 100 wildfires are still burning.
With the Southern Hemisphere summer barely underway and the country already reeling from record-breaking heat, no one expects relief any time soon. No rain is in the forecast.
We’re still talking four to six weeks at best before we start to see a meaningful reprieve in the weather,” Shane Fitzsimmons, the rural fire commissioner for the state of New South Wales, told reporters.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria state, the Australian Navy on Friday began ferrying to safety some of the 4,000 people trapped there when flames cut off all escape routes on land.
TRACKING THE DEVASTATION
See where Australia’s deadly wildfires are burning.People camped on the beach and slept in small boats, they said, trying to shield themselves from flying embers as the inferno moved toward them. The heavy smoke meant only a few people with medical problems could be evacuated by helicopter.
COOKING: Daily inspiration, delicious recipes and other updates from Sam Sifton and NYT Cooking.
Sign UpAmong those on the beach was Justin Brady, a musician who just moved from Melbourne to Mallacoota, about 250 miles to the east. He managed to salvage a fiddle, a mandolin and some harmonicas before abandoning the home he built and its contents to the flames.
“It’s been pretty heavy,” he said.
Others nearby were not nearly so measured, venting their anger at the national and state governments, which they said had not taken the crisis seriously enough.
Michael Harkin, who lives in Sydney and was vacationing in Mallacoota, complained of “incompetent governance” that is “not keeping us safe at all.”
“I’m looking forward to getting somewhere that isn’t here,” he said.
The emergency services minister of New South Wales, David Elliott, drew withering criticism on social media after he left the country on Tuesday for a vacation in Britain and France. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he said he would return “if the bushfire situation should demand it.”
Mr. Elliott’s departure came just weeks after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was widely ridiculed for taking a vacation in Hawaii during the crisis. He cut his trip short.
The Navy ship that arrived at Mallacoota, the HMAS Choules, delivered food, water and medical supplies, and was expected to leave with hundreds of evacuees. Once it is far enough from shore, the sickest people can be taken away by helicopter.
The Choules will return for more people, officials said, but it will be a slow process; the trip to a safe port in the sprawling country is expected to take 17 hours. Many of the people aboard the cramped ship will have to spend most of that time sitting on the open deck.
The evacuation orders have been easier to make than to carry out.
Two-lane roads are carrying highway-level traffic, and some roads have been closed by the fires or blocked by downed trees and power lines. Long lines of cars snake around gas stations, tanks run dry, and drives that would normally take two hours last half a day or more.
The state premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, said 17 people were still missing as fires swept alpine resorts and the normally bucolic Gippsland area.
Thousands of people have gone days without electricity or phone service. With cell towers destroyed but landlines still working, long lines formed at pay phones, creating scenes from another era. Officials advised people to boil water before using it, after power failures knocked out local water treatment facilities.
Stores have run short of essentials like diapers, baby formula, bread and bottled water. With lodgings full, many people fleeing the fires have been forced to sleep in their cars.
Businesses with generators have continued to operate, but some have run out of fuel, and others are near that point.
Craig Scott, the manager of a supermarket in Ulladulla, a beach town about 100 miles south of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he planned to keep the generator there running by siphoning fuel from the tanks of fishing boats. He said the store had just gotten the generator a few months ago, when no one imagined how desperately it would be needed.
So vast and intense are the fires that they can create their own weather, generating winds as they suck in fresh air at ground level, and sparking lightning in the immense ash clouds that rise from them.
Canberra, Australia’s capital, recorded the worst air quality ever measured on Thursday; the largest city, Sydney, has been suffering through intense smoke for weeks; and ash from the blazes has darkened skies and coated glaciers in New Zealand, more than a thousand miles away.
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My Five-Week-Long First DateThe fires have set off anger at Prime Minister Morrison, in particular. He has played down the role of global warming, opposed measures to combat climate change and, at least initially, rejected additional funding for firefighters.
On Thursday, Mr. Morrison was heckled as he visited Cobargo, a New South Wales village where fires have killed two men and destroyed the main street. When he extended his hand to one woman, she said she would shake it only if he increased spending on firefighting.
“You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy,” one man yelled. “You’re out, son.”
As Mr. Morrison left hurriedly, the man taunted him about returning to Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s elegant official residence in Sydney, with spectacular views of the harbor and the city.
“I don’t see Kirribilli burning,” the man yelled.
Mr. Morrison said he understood residents’ frustration.
“I’m not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “That’s why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could.”
“I understand the very strong feelings people have — they’ve lost everything,” he said, adding that there were still “some very dangerous days ahead.”
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires Intensify - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires IntensifyCalling for evacuations along the southeastern coast, officials said the next few days would be among the worst yet in an already catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire season, already record breaking, is expected to get worse.CreditCredit...DELWP, via Associated PressBy Livia Albeck-Ripka, Jamie Tarabay and Richard Pérez-Peña
Across the scorched southeast, frightened Australians — taking a few cherished things, abandoning their homes and vacation rentals, and braving smoke that discolored the skies — struggled Thursday to evacuate as wildfires turned the countryside into charcoal wasteland.
And from government officials came a disheartening warning: This weekend will be one of the worst periods yet in Australia’s catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire conditions are set to intensify over the weekend.“It’s going to be a blast furnace,” Andrew Constance, the transport minister of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
The blazes have strained the country’s firefighting resources, and the fire season, though still young, already ranks as among the worst in Australia’s recorded history.
The state of New South Wales declared an emergency in its southeastern region on Thursday, calling on residents and vacationers to evacuate. Mr. Constance said the relocation was the largest in the region’s history.
[Update: 3 U.S. firefighters die in plane crash as Australia’s blazes intensify.]
To the south, the state of Victoria declared a disaster on Thursday, allowing it to authorize the evacuation of areas along its eastern coast.
Using any means they could find, the authorities were warning people to evacuate. But with communication in some areas spotty to nonexistent, it was not clear that everyone would get the message.
In just the past week, at least nine people have died, and many more are unaccounted for. In all, at least 18 people have died in this fire season.
The blazes have consumed more than 1,000 houses, killed countless animals and ravaged a Pacific coast region of farms, bush, eucalyptus forests, mountains, lakes and vacation spots. About 15 million acres have been blackened over the past four months, and more than 100 wildfires are still burning.
With the Southern Hemisphere summer barely underway and the country already reeling from record-breaking heat, no one expects relief any time soon. No rain is in the forecast.
“We’re still talking four to six weeks at best before we start to see a meaningful reprieve in the weather,” Shane Fitzsimmons, the rural fire commissioner for the state of New South Wales, told reporters.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria state, the Australian Navy on Friday began ferrying to safety some of the 4,000 people trapped there when flames cut off all escape routes on land.
See where Australia’s deadly wildfires are burning.People camped on the beach and slept in small boats, they said, trying to shield themselves from flying embers as the inferno moved toward them. The heavy smoke meant only a few people with medical problems could be evacuated by helicopter.
COOKING: Daily inspiration, delicious recipes and other updates from Sam Sifton and NYT Cooking.
Sign UpAmong those on the beach was Justin Brady, a musician who just moved from Melbourne to Mallacoota, about 250 miles to the east. He managed to salvage a fiddle, a mandolin and some harmonicas before abandoning the home he built and its contents to the flames.
“It’s been pretty heavy,” he said.
Others nearby were not nearly so measured, venting their anger at the national and state governments, which they said had not taken the crisis seriously enough.
Michael Harkin, who lives in Sydney and was vacationing in Mallacoota, complained of “incompetent governance” that is “not keeping us safe at all.”
“I’m looking forward to getting somewhere that isn’t here,” he said.
The emergency services minister of New South Wales, David Elliott, drew withering criticism on social media after he left the country on Tuesday for a vacation in Britain and France. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he said he would return “if the bushfire situation should demand it.”
Mr. Elliott’s departure came just weeks after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was widely ridiculed for taking a vacation in Hawaii during the crisis. He cut his trip short.
The Navy ship that arrived at Mallacoota, the HMAS Choules, delivered food, water and medical supplies, and was expected to leave with hundreds of evacuees. Once it is far enough from shore, the sickest people can be taken away by helicopter.
The Choules will return for more people, officials said, but it will be a slow process; the trip to a safe port in the sprawling country is expected to take 17 hours. Many of the people aboard the cramped ship will have to spend most of that time sitting on the open deck.
The evacuation orders have been easier to make than to carry out.
Two-lane roads are carrying highway-level traffic, and some roads have been closed by the fires or blocked by downed trees and power lines. Long lines of cars snake around gas stations, tanks run dry, and drives that would normally take two hours last half a day or more.
The state premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, said 17 people were still missing as fires swept alpine resorts and the normally bucolic Gippsland area.
Thousands of people have gone days without electricity or phone service. With cell towers destroyed but landlines still working, long lines formed at pay phones, creating scenes from another era. Officials advised people to boil water before using it, after power failures knocked out local water treatment facilities.
Stores have run short of essentials like diapers, baby formula, bread and bottled water. With lodgings full, many people fleeing the fires have been forced to sleep in their cars.
Businesses with generators have continued to operate, but some have run out of fuel, and others are near that point.
Craig Scott, the manager of a supermarket in Ulladulla, a beach town about 100 miles south of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he planned to keep the generator there running by siphoning fuel from the tanks of fishing boats. He said the store had just gotten the generator a few months ago, when no one imagined how desperately it would be needed.
So vast and intense are the fires that they can create their own weather, generating winds as they suck in fresh air at ground level, and sparking lightning in the immense ash clouds that rise from them.
Canberra, Australia’s capital, recorded the worst air quality ever measured on Thursday; the largest city, Sydney, has been suffering through intense smoke for weeks; and ash from the blazes has darkened skies and coated glaciers in New Zealand, more than a thousand miles away.
Editors’ PicksWas That a Dropped Call From ET?
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
My Five-Week-Long First DateThe fires have set off anger at Prime Minister Morrison, in particular. He has played down the role of global warming, opposed measures to combat climate change and, at least initially, rejected additional funding for firefighters.
On Thursday, Mr. Morrison was heckled as he visited Cobargo, a New South Wales village where fires have killed two men and destroyed the main street. When he extended his hand to one woman, she said she would shake it only if he increased spending on firefighting.
“You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy,” one man yelled. “You’re out, son.”
As Mr. Morrison left hurriedly, the man taunted him about returning to Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s elegant official residence in Sydney, with spectacular views of the harbor and the city.
“I don’t see Kirribilli burning,” the man yelled.
Mr. Morrison said he understood residents’ frustration.
“I’m not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “That’s why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could.”
“I understand the very strong feelings people have — they’ve lost everything,” he said, adding that there were still “some very dangerous days ahead.”
'I don't take it personally' says Morrison on angry Cobargo visit (9news.com.au)
By Stuart Marsh
Nick Pearson
6:48pm Jan 3, 2020
The Prime Minister has spoken about the angry reception he received in the bushfire-ravaged town of Cobargo on the NSW South Coast.
Speaking on 3AW this morning, Scott Morrison said the heckles, insults and heated words he copped from locals in the town was because they were hurting amid the ongoing crisis.
"Whether they're angry with me or their angry with the situation, they're hurting," he said.
"And it's my job to offer comfort and support.
"I don't take it personally."
Mr Morrison was touring the devastated region after fire tore through the township on Monday night, tragically killing a father and son.
After taking snaps with a few locals, Mr Morrison was ushered into a waiting car after locals began yelling their disapproval of the PM.Related
He was widely criticised for grabbing the hand of a volunteer firefighter who had declined to shake his hand.
Moments later, Mr Morrison excused the man's behaviour, describing the firefighter as "tired", before being told he'd just lost his own home while battling the ferocious blaze attacking his town.
Read more: NSW Liberal Minister Andrew Constance lashes out at PM
FOLLOW LIVE: Updates from Australia's bushfire crisis
Scott Morrison has been criticised for grabbing the hand of a volunteer firefighter who declined a handshake as he pondered the loss of his own home in blaze. (9News)
The PM made excuses for the firefighter who rejected his handshake before being told he'd actually lost his home while fighting the intense blaze closing in on his town. (9News)
Locals told Scott Morrison he was not welcome in their town. (9News)
"You won't be getting any votes down here buddy," one resident can be heard yelling.
"Who votes Liberal around here? Nobody."
Another can be heard referring to the recent Sydney Harbour New Year's Eve fireworks display, which the PM watched from his government residence at Kirribilli.
"Go home to Kirribilli. Why won't that burn down?" another local yelled.
"I don't see Kirribilli burning after the fireworks."
The Prime Minister was touring Cobargo to hear of the devastation as a result of the fires. (9News)
Residents expressed their concerns at PM Scott Morrison in the fire-ravaged town of Cobargo. (9News)
Others complained that government assistance was too slow to reach the town of Cobargo.
"This is not fair. We are totally forgotten down here. Every single time this area gets a flood or a fire we get nothing," yelled another.
"If we lived in Sydney or on the North Coast we would be flooded with donations and emergency relief."
Play Video
Australia Bushfires: PM leadership under question
Mr Morrison later told the ABC that he understood the strong feelings people in fire-ravaged areas have.
"I'm not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment," Mr Morrsion told the ABC.
"And that's why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could
"I understand the very strong feelings people have, they've lost everything. And there is still some very dangerous days ahead."
As soon as the yelling began the PM bid a hasty exit for a waiting Commonwealth car. (9News)Analysis: Chris O'Keefe
"It is the Prime Minister's attempt at sympathy and empathy and support, but didn't it backfire," 9News reporter Chris O'Keefe told Today.
"At the end of the day Scott Morrison was in Hawaii and he is pilloried for being out of the country and pilloried for not being anywhere in the last couple of weeks, not being on the front line of the fires, being at Kirribilli House - and he goes to the frontline and he cops this.
"This is a by-product of how it has been had handled by the Prime Minister. They are angry and they need someone to blame and it is Scott Morrison.
"If he wasn't getting the point, he got it yesterday in Cobargo.
"This RFS volunteer, he was fighting fires but he lost his own house. That is why he was so upset. This is palpable for these residents and Scott Morrison just walked straight into it."
Morrison grabbed the hand of a volunteer firefighter who declined a handshake as he pondered the loss of his won house in the fires. (AAP)
Play Video
Australia Bushfires: PM's attempt at empathy backfiresTragedy hits town
The township of Cobargo was one of the hardest hit in NSW, with the entire main street destroyed by the flames.
Tragically, the bodies of farmers Patrick Salway and his 63-year-old father Robert Salway were discovered on Tuesday morning by Robert's wife (the mother of Patrick).
The pair had perished after choosing to stay and defend the family property at Wandella, 20km north-west of Cobargo.
Yesterday Mr Morrison defended the federal government's role in the response to the ongoing bushfire crisis.
A resident of Cobargo surveys the rubble of his burnt-out home. (9News)
In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, he said a "coordinated response" was what was needed, at the same time calling for "patience" from disaster-hit Australians.
"What we won't allow to happen is for governments to be tripping over each other in order to somehow outbid each other in response," he said.
He urged Australians to have patience, days after some of their homes burned.
29-year-old Patrick Salway (right) and his wife Renee. Patrick tragically perished in the fires while protecting the family home. (Facebook)
"My simple request is to be patient, to have confidence in the state agencies," he said.
"What we are saying is we cannot control the natural disaster but what we can do is control our response."
Opinion | Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Australia Is Committing Climate SuicideAs record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.
By Richard Flanagan
An out-of-control fire in Hillville, in the Australian state of New South Wales, on Nov. 12.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesBRUNY ISLAND, Australia — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.
All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.
As I write, a state of emergency has been declared in New South Wales and a state of disaster in Victoria, mass evacuations are taking place, a humanitarian catastrophe is feared, and towns up and down the east coast are surrounded by fires, all transport and most communication links cut, their fate unknown.
“All
we and most of Gipsy Point houses still here as of now. We have 16 people in Gipsy pt.
No power, no phone no chance of anyone arriving for 4 days as all roads blocked. Only satellite email is working We have 2 bigger boats and might be able to get supplies ‘esp fuel at Coota.
We need more able people to defend the town as we are in for bad heat from Friday again. Tucks area will be a problem from today, but trees down on all tracks, and no one to fight it.
The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”
And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.
Editors’ PicksWas That a Dropped Call From ET?
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
My Five-Week-Long First DateSince 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action.
In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory last year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia.
Since Mr. Morrison, an ex-marketing man, was forced to return from his vacation and publicly apologize, he has chosen to spend his time creating feel-good images of himself, posing with cricketers or his family. He is seen far less often at the fires’ front lines, visiting ravaged communities or with survivors. Mr. Morrison has tried to present the fires as catastrophe-as-usual, nothing out of the ordinary.
This posture seems to be a chilling political calculation: With no effective opposition from a Labor Party reeling from its election loss and with media dominated by Rupert Murdoch — 58 percent of daily newspaper circulation — firmly behind his climate denialism, Mr. Morrison appears to hope that he will prevail as long as he doesn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster engulfing Australia.
Agree to disagree, or disagree better? Broaden your perspective with sharp arguments on the most pressing issues of the week. Sign up here.Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating.
“Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. To which he might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure.
Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.
More than one-third of Australians are estimated to be affected by the fires. By a significant and increasing majority, Australians want action on climate change, and they are now asking questions about the growing gap between the Morrison government’s ideological fantasies and the reality of a dried-out, rapidly heating, burning Australia.
The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.
Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a pregnant woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.”
As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?
60 hours on Kangaroo Island: A reporter's diary documenting wildlife destruction (nationalgeographic.com)
60 hours on burning Kangaroo IslandDispatch from Australia: Our reporter describes the ongoing catastrophe of record bushfires on the continent's wildlife.
Kangaroo Island volunteer firefighter Jen Child took this photograph of fellow crew members after a long day of tamping down hot spots that continue to threaten wildlife, livestock, property, and human life a week after catastrophic fires swept across the western end of the island.
BY KENNEDY WARNE
PUBLISHED JANUARY 17, 2020
3 p.m. (New Zealand time), January 5
This is the day of the tangerine sky. It is midsummer, mid-afternoon, and the sky above Auckland, New Zealand, has turned dark orange, as if in an eclipse. Drivers turn on their headlights. Worried residents call the emergency number to ask what’s happening. Smoke from Australia’s bushfires is drifting across the ocean and turning our own sky fiery. We have seen the headlines: “Australia is burning,” “Australia is on fire,” even, “Australia is committing climate suicide.” We have seen the photos: a fire tornado, evacuated townsfolk sheltering on a beach, kangaroos leaping for their lives, flames turning forests incandescent, cockatoos dropping dead out of scorching skies. And now the disaster is above our heads, eerily present though 1,400 miles away. It used to be that the symbol of climate change in the South Pacific was a drowning atoll; now it’s a burning continent.
On January 9, when this satellite image was recorded, a third of Kangaroo Island had been burned. Hot weather and unfavorable winds that day caused the fires
… Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN DAUPHIN, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY/LANDSAT
Midday, January 9
I board a plane to Adelaide, South Australia, and stumble on an inflight movie miniseries about Chernobyl. I watch it obsessively for the next four hours. Its relevance feels uncanny. A nuclear meltdown in preparation for a climate meltdown, each cataclysm surrounded by its own political ecosystem of deception and denial, promulgated, in the words of Chernobyl’s narrator, by “an entire congregation of obedient fools.” Chernobyl was madness. Climate change is madness. When do we reach a tipping point with this? When do we start to become sane?
11 a.m. (South Australia time), January 9
I walk across the tarmac and feel the dragon’s breath on my neck and scalp. The temperature is 99°F, and in two hours it will reach 106. The sky has the faded look of an atmosphere drained of moisture. A taxi takes me through the city’s outer suburbs into the country. A road sign points to a “bushfire last resort refuge.” The message is no exaggeration. In February 1983, on Ash Wednesday, deadly fires swept across the outskirts of Adelaide and other parts of the states of South Australia and Victoria, destroying thousands of homes, killing hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle, and taking the lives of 65 people, including 17 firefighters. Black Saturday, in February 2009, was even deadlier, killing 173 people. Some of the individual fires in those events spread at speeds exceeding 70 mph. People driving at the speed limit on freeways watched the fire front pass them. This season’s bushfires have so far burned across 65,000 square miles, an area the size of Florida, destroyed more than 2,200 homes, and killed 28 people. A billion animals may have perished.
A dusty driveway on a parched hillside leads me to the home of the founders of SAVEM (South Australian Veterinary Emergency Management), a volunteer organization formed in the wake of Black Saturday to provide a coordinated response to retrieve, triage, and treat farm animals, pets, and wildlife during an emergency. Veterinarians from local practices are gathering here for a three-day deployment on Kangaroo Island, 70 miles from Adelaide, which has been ravaged since fires spread catastrophically on Friday, January 3.
The fires on Kangaroo Island spread so quickly that even fast-moving kangaroos were caught in the conflagration that has left forests reduced to charred stumps.
What Australia's fires mean for koala survival
Emilis Prelgauskas, who handles logistics for the group, greets me at the door with his two greyhounds. He says that what’s been happening on the island, which is about 90 miles long and 55 at its widest point, is unprecedented. “No one expected 30 percent of Kangaroo Island to burn in one go,” he says. “This level of destruction has not been contemplated. We’re talking about a new reality. And if we don’t get significant rain, which we may not get until May, then this fire will continue until May.”
He says that the work the volunteers will be doing is dangerous, complex, and traumatic. “The fire of January 3 may have burned 85 percent of animals on the fire ground—[live]stock and wildlife. Either killed them outright or took them so close to death that the kindest thing you can do is put a bullet through them. And yes, our teams have been using bullets. The truth is that a wild animal that has been traumatized by the fire, traumatized by its injuries—are you going to traumatize it more with human handling? This is about the welfare of the animal, not about making ourselves feel good.”
The team is ready. They're taking a private plane made available by a supporter. They drop me at the airport for my commercial flight.
5:15 p.m., January 9
Oliver Funnell, another SAVEM veterinarian, is booked on the same small turboprop plane. I ask him about the challenges of treating large, wild animals. He says it’s almost impossible to hospitalize and treat an adult kangaroo. They’re too big and too flighty. “They’d probably kill themselves if you tried to contain them, and might kill or injure you as well,” he says.
We climb out of Adelaide into a smoke bank that lasts all the way to Kangaroo Island. I’ve been told that the January 3 fire was so hot it melted concrete at a luxury lodge, where staff survived by sheltering in a bunker. It caused flakes of granite to peel from the Remarkable Rocks, a tourist attraction in Flinders Chase National Park. That park is now mostly ash. “Pompeii,” one wildlife rescuer calls it. Flinders Chase celebrated its 100th anniversary in October 2019. Some anniversary present.
8 p.m., January 9
A blood-red moon rises through the smoke haze east of Flour Cask Bay, on the south coast of the island. Motel owner John Hofmann and I watch flecks of ash drift past on the breeze. Kangaroos are sipping from water bowls he has set out nearby. They move cautiously, walking in an awkward combination of diminutive elbows and massive hind legs. But when they hop, they’re grace incarnate.
“We may have to evacuate,” Hofmann warns. The fire authorities have issued a “watch and act” notification for this area as winds blow the fire front in our direction.
Ninety percent of Kangaroo Island’s timber plantations have been burned since December, including hundreds of acres of highly flammable eucalyptus.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LISA KARRAN
Unbeknown to us, across the world, on American late-night television, Patti Smith reads a poem about “fires raging the Earth” and sings Neil Young’s 50-year-old song “After the Gold Rush,” updating the last line to “Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century.” It could be an anthem for an island on fire.
3:45 a.m., January 10
I am awakened by Hofmann’s footsteps on the veranda. He knocks on the glass door. “Time to go,” he calls. He’s loading a trailer with camping equipment, food, water, torches, a generator. Who knows when we’ll be coming back. I stand with his sister and brother-in-law, the only other guests, facing an orange glow in the sky. It’s very warm, very quiet. The ash has stopped falling. Notifications say that the fire is threatening the airport. The road to Kingscote, the island’s main town of 1,800 people, has been closed. Our part of the island is cut off. We deliberate. Hofmann, a trained firefighter, looks at the wind forecast. It’s still blowing from the west, in our direction, but is predicted to swing south. That will reduce the danger. We have an evacuation route to the coast if the fire flares. Should we stay or go?
“I think we go,” Hofmann says. I follow his four-by-four to Penneshaw, the island’s second largest settlement, on the eastern peninsula. We pull into a sportsground and line up with other vehicles and tents. I push the car seat back and try to sleep.
6 a.m., January 10
A flock of shrieking corellas, a loud-mouthed species of cockatoo, land in a nearby tree, ending any prospect of further rest. The road to Kingscote has reopened, so I follow a fleet of emergency rescue vehicles traveling in that direction. I find my way to a café called Cactus, where the servers alternate between taking orders and hugging customers. At times like this, cafés provide as much therapy as they do sustenance. One server tells me she isn’t supposed to be working today, “but when people are coming in who have lost everything, you want to be here.” The editor of the island newspaper arrives and orders breakfast. He’s been working round the clock, keeping the community up to date and positive. “It’s on us, Stan,” she says. “So is the kale smoothie.”
There’s a stream of army reservists, firefighters, farm support people, park rangers, media coming through the doors. I strike up a conversation with a local family and within minutes am taken to their home, where they’re looking after a kangaroo joey and a young brushtailed possum. The possum is in a bird cage. The joey hops around the living room. Robyn Karran steps into the garden to pick roses, which the possum gobbles greedily. Her daughter, Lisa, a wildlife rescuer who is married to the local policeman, shows me photos of animals they’ve helped. She estimates they’re driven 600 miles around the island since the fires began, picking up survivors.
“There’s not a lot of life out there,” Lisa says. What there is can break your heart—animals frozen in the moment the fire took them, a baby koala still holding a eucalyptus branch, blown out of its tree. “This little guy,” she says, showing me a photo of a kangaroo joey, “was out of the pouch but still suckling on mum. There was no food around. They would have starved to death. I jumped on him and took him back to the car, but found that his feet were burned down to the bone. He wouldn’t have survived. So I had to say goodbye to him. That crushed me.” She left food and water for the mother and took the joey to Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park to be euthanized.
She says that sometimes, as they drive around, they can’t even tell where they are. “It all looks the same. Vaporized.” Normal fires leave tree skeletons standing in the landscape. In some areas, this fire has left little more than matchsticks and ash.
While I’m talking to the Karrans, at a press conference in Kingscote, the island’s mayor, Michael Pengilly, tells reporters there is no connection between the fires and a changing climate.
1 p.m., January 10
I drive west through the town of Parndana to Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, which escaped destruction when Friday’s fires swept through the center of the island. Smoke is still billowing across the highway. Rows of round hay bales in a paddock smolder, some of them reduced to charred lumps. Melted roadside markers bend over like drooping flowers. Road signs are unreadable. A vineyard, every vine, every leaf scorched, a support post still on fire. I want to call someone. “Put it out.” But flare-ups much worse than this have incinerated more than 800 square miles of Kangaroo Island so far.
It’s a miracle that the wildlife park is still intact, the animals alive. Fires raged on three sides but didn’t join up. Staff have converted a dining area into a field hospital, and the SAVEM veterinarians are changing the dressings on koalas’ feet. Three medics to an animal, working steadily through the patients. An anesthetic injection to reduce the handling trauma, then the feet are unwrapped, swabbed, smeared with antiseptic cream, and rebandaged. A saline drip is connected to hydrate the animals, and a painkiller popped into their mouths. New victims arrive in wheelbarrows as the treated koalas are moved to hastily erected pens. There they sit, shell-shocked, on eucalyptus branches. Traumatized, but alive.
7 p.m., January 10
Richard Glatz, an entomologist, inhabits a world of smaller creatures, ones less thought about when disaster strikes. I drive to his home in D’Estrees Bay, which he shares with Janine Mackintosh, an assemblage artist who draws her materials and inspiration from the 800 acres of woodland, heathland, and wetland that surround them on the island’s south coast. She feels fiercely protective toward these natural landscapes.
Today their own home needs protecting. The doors and windows are covered with aluminium insulation, to reflect heat if fire approaches. The previous night, the two had packed their vehicles with their most precious possessions and parked them in a farm field near a dam. Glatz had made sure he had access to the ceiling space in his research hut where he stores tens of thousands of insect specimens, so he could fight a fire if it broke out there.
Normally, the birdsong here would be constant, they say. Now the only sound is an indifferent wind.
He shows me the collection, pulling out glass-topped trays of specimens neatly pinned and labeled, each a work of the entomologist’s art, a meticulous record of life in this place. He points to a moth named after him, Aenigmatinea glatzella, the enigma moth. Its name refers to the puzzling time taxonomists had in figuring out where it fit in the moth lineage. Endemic to the island, it’s so ancient as to be classified in a family by itself.
Gorgeous, much larger eastern bronze azure butterflies are arrayed next to the enigmas. These butterflies lay their eggs on the nests of a single species of ant. When the eggs hatch, the ants appear to be fooled into taking the larvae down into the nest, where they are either fed by the ants, or, it is speculated, eat the ants’ own offspring. The butterfly larvae pupate in the nest, then emerge briefly to mate and start the cycle again. Glatz says that at this time of year the larvae are still underground. Have they survived the broiling heat of the fires?
Glatz picks another insect out of its tray: a green carpenter bee, one of more than a hundred native species of bee on the island and one for which he has a special fondness. Extinct in mainland South Australia and Victoria, it persists in a few sites on Kangaroo Island and in the ranges around Sydney. Metallic green, twice the size of a honeybee, it’s a showy creature with a reclusive lifestyle: It drills into the dead flower stalks of yacca, the iconic Australian grass tree, which looks like a giant green pompom, and into the rotting trunks of old banksia trees to make its nests—hence the name carpenter.
The banksias are crucial, Glatz says. While yaccas recover and flower quickly after a fire, their flower stalks soon disintegrate, and the plants may not flower again for years. The carpenter bees need the longstanding banksias to carry them through multiple seasons. Glatz wants to see if the banksias are still standing after the fires and invites me to join him the next day as he searches for survivors.
8 a.m., January 11
The entomologist, the artist, and the reporter drive westward. We take two vehicles for safety. We pass a flock of dove-grey Cape Barren geese in a paddock. We pass charred beehives. Close to a thousand commercial beehives have been lost on Kangaroo Island. When a hive burns, the beeswax melts, and the honey streams out. One beekeeper found to his dismay that birds called New Holland honeyeaters had come to the river of sweetness, become stuck in the thickening honey, and died.
We come to Church Road—I can just make out the blistered letters on the blackened street sign. But this is not Church Road, this is “desolation row.” Beside the geometrically straight lines of a burned eucalyptus plantation, the ground is scattered with koala bodies. Like pandas, koalas are a global emblem of all that is endearing in the natural world. Their charred, furless bodies lie in the ashes at my feet. According to one of the owners of Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, half the Island’s estimated 50,000 koalas may have succumbed.
Farther up the road, we stop at the property of some of Glatz’s and Mackintosh’s friends. The home is a pile of rubble covered with the twisted iron of the fallen roof. The windows have exploded, blasting glass hundreds of feet away. The roof of a garage on the property has been blown across the road, ending up wrapped around the skeletons of trees. Plastic water tanks have melted like toffee.
This isn’t Mother Nature. This isn’t natural at all.
PAT HODGENS, WILDLIFE ECOLOGIST
The property next door has fared no better. We see something that touches us deeply. A row of salvaged coffee cups has been set out on a sheet of iron and filled with water. Even in the total loss of their homes, the owners have made sure that there is water for heat-parched animals and birds. Next to what was the house is an orchard enclosed in wire netting to protect the harvest from fruit-loving creatures. The trees—laden with nectarines, apples, plums—are scorched brown, the fruit shrunken but still holding on. As the owners turned away from the ruins, they opened the gate to the orchard so that birds could have the fruit.
We return to our vehicles solemn, distressed, moved by acts of kindness. My companions remark on the silence. Normally, the birdsong here would be constant, they say. Now the only sound is an indifferent wind sighing in the darkened trees.
We drive west to the entrance of Kelly Hill Conservation Area, one of Glatz’s carpenter bee sites, and walk a few hundred yards through an ash landscape, looking for the host trees. But the old banksia trunks have gone. We don’t see a single one. It’s a serious blow: By such deletions species are lost, and ecosystems unravel.
Yet there is life here. The fire has opened the cones of a small shrub, the endemic Kangaroo Island conestick, and they’re spilling white seeds onto the ashy soil. Glatz kneels to pick some up. One of the fears ecologists have is that with a fire of this intensity the seed banks that hold the key to regrowth may be destroyed, heated beyond their tolerance. Veronica Bates, a botanist on the island, tells me that it will take an autumn, winter, and spring before they know which seeds have survived and can form the basis of a vegetation recovery.
That much of Australia’s flora is fire-adapted is common knowledge. What isn’t as widely appreciated is that historical fires typically burned with less ferocious heat. South Australians tell me repeatedly that these latest fires are not comparable. They have arisen in the midst of fire seasons that have increased from six months to nine. They’re more like furnaces than fires. Yes, there will be recovery. But what will be lost? Bates tells me something hard to believe: that farms in the western half of Kangaroo Island were once marginal in winter because they were too wet. That seems a distant memory now. Looking at the stricken landscape at Kelly Hill, I wonder if Glatz’s carpenter bees are just a memory too.
12:50 p.m., January 11
Wildlife ecologist Pat Hodgens takes me into a forest remnant on the north coast, one of the few recorded locations of the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-size marsupial on the verge of extinction. The species is known from only 13 sites in western Kangaroo Island, Hodgens says, and all of those locations have now been burned, some beyond recognition. This one was lucky. It burned in the December fire, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, Hodgens says. The resulting loss of undergrowth meant less fuel was available for ignition by the more intense blaze of January 3, and the site was spared. We’re in ironstone country—the name for the iron-rich soils that cover much of the island. Ironstone is a geological lightning rod, and it was a lightning strike that ignited the fires that so far have burned almost half the island.
“I saw the thunderstorm approaching,” he says, “and I thought, Here we go. This could be the end. No one could have predicted what happened last Friday—that every other dunnart site would be fried.”
With so much of the surrounding bush now destroyed, a different pressure has come to bear: predators, especially feral cats, the most severe predators of Kangaroo Island’s native wildlife. “When a predator-naive marsupial goes up against a highly evolved predator like a cat, it doesn’t stand a chance,” Hodgens tells me.
In the coming weeks, a six-foot-high cat-proof fence will be installed around this critical habitat. Meanwhile, Hodgens and his partner, Heidi Groffen, have installed two types of cat trap to give the dunnarts, bandicoots, and other marsupials a chance. We check several cage traps, which Hodgens baits with chicken wings. We find no trapped cats but liberate two goannas. The two-foot-long lizards streak away into what little undergrowth remains. Hodgens shows me a more high-tech device called a Felixer grooming trap, designed to identify a feral cat passing in front of it and shoot a blob of toxic paste onto the animal’s fur. The cat licks the paste and dies.
I follow Hodgens through charred shrubbery where he checks the memory cards of motion-activated trail cameras. He shades a camera screen, and we make out the shape of a dunnart that has snuffled past in the night. This is thrilling news—the species lives. Yet even this relief feels fragile and provisional.
As we drive back to the road, Hodgens voices a frustration. “People often say, ‘The bush always comes back. It will regenerate. Fire’s natural. It’s all good. Mother Nature knows best.’ This isn’t Mother Nature. This isn’t natural at all. The bush doesn’t come back. Superficially, yes, it will look green, it will have flowers and birds, but it might not have dunnarts in it ever again unless we can take care of the remnants we’ve got. Dunnarts need a variety of habitats. They need old growth, they need thick undergrowth, they need a bit of everything. We don’t know if they will recover from this.”
5 p.m., January 11
A concert has been organized to lift the islanders’ spirits. One singer steps to the microphone and says, “My name’s Craig. I was born here. I’ve lost everything. Here’s a song about that.”
He's followed by Glatz, who sings Ben Folds's song "Smoke" and, true to his profession, one about a housefly and a typewriter. At one point during the evening, the audience chants in unison: "Bring back the bush."
I meet the couple with the orchard in Church Road. Tomorrow they’re taking out food pellets and hay for the wallabies. “We’ve still got survivors coming out of the bush,” they say. “They’re our priority.”
8:30 a.m., January 12
On my way to the airport, I visit a clifftop archaeological site called Red Banks, one of dozens of sites around the island where the first people left evidence of an occupation that stretches back more than 10,000 years. I would like to ask those people about how to live endure, how to survive on this island, on this Earth. I think they would start by saying that humans are not separate from nature—that land, waters, people, plants, animals are one living tissue.
Much of Flinders Chase National Park, which celebrated its hundredth anniversary last October, has been reduced to ash. For kangaroos, koalas, wallabies
… Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY LISA MAREE WILLIAMS, GETTY IMAGES
At my feet, half-inch-long ants are busy around the entrance to their nest. I don’t know the temperament of these insects, so I keep my distance. In the Aboriginal world, they are my kin, and I am their custodians. As Aboriginal writer Tyson Yunkaporta puts it: “This is why we’re here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between.”
It strikes me that pretty much everyone I’ve met on Kangaroo Island is “looking after things”—from firefighters to café servers, koala rescuers to dunnart ecologists, dedicated vets to devastated homeowners who give water and fruit to wildlife. How do we begin to do this when it’s not an emergency? Or when it’s a permanent emergency? The past decade, 2010 to 2019, has been the planet’s hottest on record, and the thermometer’s not going down.
11:45 a.m., January 12
At the departure gate for my flight to Auckland, I see a TV screen playing an interview with Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister. The interviewer has just challenged him with a comment from former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that "if ever there was a crisis not to waste, it is this one." Morrison dismisses the comment, stressing the importance of a strong economy and "Australia’s broader national interests"—such as being the world's leading exporter of coal. I remark to passengers watching next to me about the logic of needing to make lots of money from climate-damaging industries to fund the recovery that results from climate-damaging industries.
12:15 p.m., January 12
I watch the final episode of Chernobyl on the flight home. The narrator confronts the seeming futility of his profession as a scientist. “To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not.” Isn’t this the story of climate science?
Some people—including even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—think Chernobyl was the tipping point that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, overturning an establishment based on secrets and lies. What will be the tipping point that awakens humanity to its present condition, ending the denial of the climate crisis? Chernobyl caused the Soviet people to question the political reality of their times. Their government could not, would not protect them. They came to see the system as irredeemable. How many fires does it take to get to that point?
Wildfires have spread dramatically—and some forests may not recover (nationalgeographic.com)
Wildfires have spread dramatically—and some forests may not recoverAn explosion in the frequency and extent of wildfires worldwide is hindering recovery even in ecosystems that rely on natural blazes to survive.
BY JOHN PICKRELL
PUBLISHED JANUARY 30, 2020
Pungent and damp, the so-called tall, wet forests of southeastern Australia are home to the tallest flowering plants on Earth. Eucalyptus regnans, the Latin name of the mountain ash, means “ruler of the gum trees”—which is fitting, given these giants can reach more than 300 feet high.
Many of Australia’s gum trees, particularly those in drier forest types, are famously able to tolerate fire, throwing out new buds and shoots within weeks of being engulfed in flames. But even these tenacious species have their limits.
Old-growth forests of the mountain ash and a related species, the alpine ash, are among the gum trees that are less tolerant of intense blazes. In the state of Victoria, these trees had already been severely depleted by logging and land clearing. Now, the bushfires that have burned more than 26 million acres of eastern Australia in recent months are putting the forests at even greater risk.
Some of the forests razed this year have experienced four bushfires in the past 25 years, meaning they’ve had no chance to recover, says David Lindenmayer, an ecologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.
“They should be burning no more than every 75 to 125 years, so that’s just an extraordinary change to fire regimes,” he says. “Mountain ash need to be about 15 to 30 years old before they can produce viable amounts of seed to replace themselves following fire.”
The loss of these dominant trees is a significant problem, since they provide vital habitat for threatened animal species such as the sooty owl, the giant burrowing frog, and a fluffy arboreal marsupial called the greater glider. (Also find out how Australia’s fires can create big problems for freshwater supplies.)
.“The ecosystem has effectively collapsed, it’s transitioned into something else … more likely to be colonized by generalist, weedy plants,” says John Woinarski, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory. “They’ll converge into less interesting, less distinctive vegetation that supports fewer threatened plants and animals.”
As the world warms with climate change, the situation in Australia reflects what’s happening in forests globally—from California and Canada to Brazil and Borneo. Even forests made up of species that thrive on cycles of fire and regrowth are losing resilience in the face of wildfires that are escalating in frequency, severity, and extent. According to research published earlier this month, climate change is significantly increasing the risk of wildfires by stimulating hot and dry conditions and high-risk weather. Over the past 40 years, the length of fire seasons has increased by 20 percent across more than a quarter of the world’s vegetated land surface.
California, for instance, suffered its worst ever wildfires in 2018. Record blazes also struck other places with arid Mediterranean-type ecosystems, such as Greece and Portugal. Tropical rainforests are being hit, too, with recent satellite data showing an 11-year high in Amazon deforestation, much of it through deliberately set fires for land clearing. Even boreal forests and tundra are igniting—fires consumed many millions of acres of Alaska and Siberia in 2019. (Here’s what Portugal’s wildfires may teach us about how to live with mega-fires.)
“Places that people didn’t think could burn are now burning,” says Craig Allen, an ecologist who studies the effect of climate change on forests at the U.S. Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The great dryingOne of the things changing globally is that the air is getting warmer, Allen says. As air warms, it holds more water, drawing moisture out of the environment, drying soils, and stressing trees. This makes ecosystems more flammable and trees more likely to be attacked by insects, which increases the number of dead trees, further exacerbating fire risk.
“Warming temperatures are making fuel more available and lengthening fire seasons,” he says. “The fire season in western North America is two to three months longer than 30 years ago.”
The number of years with severe wildfires is also increasing, says Camille Stevens-Rumann, a scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who studies how ecosystems respond to disturbance.
“Whereas before, maybe you had one a decade, or even less frequently, now, we’re seeing these large, bad fires at least every other year,” she says.
Last year was Australia’s driest and hottest in 120 years of record taking. An unprecedented drought left forests tinder dry and poised to ignite in fires that started in September and peaked in late December, burning great swathes of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria.
“The places burned will bear the marks of this year for centuries,” says Joe Fontaine, a fire ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. “Drier forests, which burn more readily, will likely replace wet forests in many places.”
Similarly, increasingly frequent and intense fires in North America are acting like a filter, slowly pushing out dominant vegetation, Allen says. For more than a century, forest management has largely suppressed fires in the region’s Ponderosa pine forests, resulting in a huge increase in tree density. But extreme weather is making fires harder to suppress, and when they do blaze, they are so intense they are killing “mother trees,” which are vital for reseeding the next generation following fire.
“Ponderosa pine forests are perfectly suited to high-frequency, low-intensity forest fires, burning in grass and pine needles in the understory,” he says. “But if severe fires get into the canopy of the trees, the pines don’t tolerate that and die as mature individuals, which don’t regenerate.”
Surrounded by scorched trees, Steve Bear, Station Fire Reforestation Project leader with the U.S. Forest Service, surveys the area where Ponderosa Pine seedlings were planted in the Station Fire burn area at Barley Flats, in the Angeles National Forest.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLEN J. SCHABEN, LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGESPonderosa pine seeds rarely disperse further than about 500 feet, so when trees die, they’re leaving huge gaps. In some mountainous forests of western North America, Allen says, “we’re getting a wholesale conversion from dominant conifer forests—spruces, firs, and pines—to areas with a larger proportion of grasses and shrubs.”
Stacked disturbancesWhere forests can’t fully recover from fire, the animal species that rely on those ecosystems will face increasing challenges. Part of the problem is that species struggling through frequent fire events are often already stressed by other climate-related impacts, such as drought, heatwaves, and pest infestations. Whether so-called stacked disturbances are further compounding recovery is “a crucial and massively important question” to answer, Fontaine says.
His team has been studying a fire-tolerant shrub, Banksia hookeriana, from Western Australia which holds its seeds in a woody cone that only opens after fire. They’ve found that since the 1980s, climate change has caused a 50-percent reduction in the number of seeds it produces. Combine increasing fire intensity with climate change, and the shrub is facing a Sisyphean fate.
“Numbers like this take climate change from theoretical to a slap in the face,” Fontaine says.
This pattern spells bad news for many North American animal species that prefer old-growth forests, such as the spotted owl and the Canada lynx, says Stevens-Rumann. Australia’s current bushfires have so far burned more than 80 percent of the habitat of about 50 threatened species. The entire ranges of some have been obliterated, such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a shrew-sized marsupial carnivore, and the mountain trachymene, a fire-sensitive herb.
Losing these individual plants and animals from the landscape means we may also be losing important interactions between species, which could have unforeseen impacts on ecosystem function and their ability to recover from fire.
In Portugal, wildflowers appeared to burst back to life abundantly after fires, but a study published last year found that species of moths that are vital for pollinating them were transporting just a fifth of the pollen they were carrying in unburnt areas, spelling trouble for regeneration further down the line.
However, not all species will dwindle as wildfires increase. More than a century of fire suppression in North America had led to a decline in the black-backed woodpecker, which is camouflaged to blend in against burned trees. An increase in fires is now seeing it bounce back, Stevens-Rumann says.
In Australia, many predators—such as monitor lizards, some birds of prey, and introduced cats and foxes—actively seek out fire scars to hunt survivors that are left exposed in landscapes devoid of cover. Other animals that thrive in post-fire landscapes include the fire chaser beetles in the genus Melanophila, which lay their eggs in freshly burnt wood, where their larvae develop. Even species that are relatively common can benefit following fire, Stevens-Rumann adds.
“If you open up that forest and there are abundant shrubs and grasses … we tend to see a resurgence of things like deer and elk.”
Beacons of hopeWhile bigger, hotter wildfires are becoming an increasingly common reality, experts agree that the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. We need to be more ambitious, creative, and adventurous in our approach to conservation in a world where environmental disasters are more pervasive, says Woinarski.
“It's a major challenge and … we won't have all of the solutions in the short term.”
Post-fire seeding, for example, happens often in North America but is rare in Australia. Lindenmayer says that dropping mountain ash seeds from helicopters may be something they consider in the future. Planting forests with non-native, fire-resistant vegetation is a more radical idea. And better land management is another part of the solution.
“There’s this great Finnish proverb that says, Fire is a good servant, but a bad master,” notes Stevens-Rumann, alluding to the fact that humans can use fire effectively as a tool as long as it stays under our control. (Here’s how California is turning to natural solutions to manage wildfires.)
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal people in Australia effectively prevented large blazes by reducing fuel, such as dry grasses and leaf litter, with frequent, small, hand-set burns. Now there are increasing calls for a return to that kind of traditional burning.
“We suppress 98 percent of fires that start in the U.S., meaning that it’s only those 2 percent that make the news or are large,” says Stevens-Rumann. “But if we use more of that 98 percent to actually help clear high fuel loads, and create a more mosaic landscape, we have the potential to stop the spread of those large extreme fires.”
Nevertheless, the climate change trajectory we are on will mean an unavoidable increase in droughts, heatwaves, and other drivers of fire. Several decades from now, 2019 may be regarded as normal year, or even a relatively cool and wet year, Allen says.
“It’s a really foreboding future that has crept up on us very quickly,” Woinarski adds. “We’re witnessing the beginning of the deterioration of many of our most loved ecological systems. That's a tragedy for us, but a worse tragedy for our descendants.”
Koalas, wombats, other marsupials struggle to recover from Australia’s bushfires (nationalgeographic.com)
Koalas and other marsupials struggle to recover from Australia’s bushfiresThe pandemic slowed recovery efforts, but help for the animals is coming.
A rescued eastern grey kangaroo stands on the burned grounds of a house and wildlife shelter in February 2020 after fires swept through the town of Goongerah in the Australian state of Victoria. Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia were the hardest hit by the 2019-2020 bushfire season, which is estimated to have killed more than a billion animals.
BY TODD WOODY
PUBLISHED JULY 17, 2020
MORE THAN SIX months after cataclysmic bushfires incinerated an Iowa-size swath of Australia, estimates of the staggering number of native animals killed continue to grow even as the fate of surviving wildlife remains largely unknown.
“The data is still coming in, but if anything, the estimate that a billion animals died was more conservative than I realized,” says Chris Dickman, a University of Sydney ecologist who calculated the preliminary death toll. “I think there’s no doubt that some species will go extinct.”
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted most recovery efforts in March. Travel restrictions and social distancing mandates left many scientists homebound and scores of species struggling to survive in apocalyptic landscapes. The lockdown came as the Australian government identified 119 priority animal species “requiring urgent management intervention.
Australia has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinction, and most of the animals that have disappeared since colonization have been marsupials, or animals whose young develop in their mothers’ pouches. Of the mammal species on the government’s post-fire priority list, the majority are marsupials with declining populations and whose habitat overlaps the range of the bushfires.
Some scientists and volunteers have been able to venture into burn zones to aid koalas, wombats, and other wildlife. What they’re finding indicates the extent of the devastation and the challenges native animals face in bouncing back from fires so intense they obliterated all life in the most ravaged areas.
The fires, according to a new government report, have also laid bare just how little is known about populations of even iconic species like the koala, as well as how little protection conservation laws have provided vulnerable wildlife amid rampant deforestation, development, and climate change.
“Just doing those initial assessments and trying to figure out where we need to focus first has been hampered by this lack of fundamental data,” says Sarah Legge, a wildlife ecologist at Australian National University who helped draft a recovery strategy for the government.
Danger in the trees
Scientists, for instance, long thought few koalas lived in the Blue Mountains, a 2.5 million-acre World Heritage Area of soaring escarpments, deep gorges, and eucalyptus forests 80 miles west of Sydney in the state of New South Wales.
Then in 2013 researchers from a nonprofit conservation organization, Science for Wildlife, began conducting surveys and found large numbers of koalas in the region. That was good news for a threatened species that has long been in decline because of drought, deforestation, and disease. Even better, the scientists discovered that the Blue Mountains population was not only growing, but it was among the most genetically diverse in Australia. It was also largely free of chlamydia, a deadly disease that causes infertility and that afflicts koalas nationwide.
When bushfires began to engulf the Blue Mountains last December, Science for Wildlife’s executive director, Kellie Leigh, scrambled to organize a rescue operation of koalas that had been previously outfitted with radio collars. Authorities gave her team just two days to evacuate them.
“We thought if it all burns, at least we would have got some good genes out,” says Leigh.
Radio trackers fanned out through the scorching and smoky wilderness, and koala catchers scaled 130-foot-tall eucalyptus trees to retrieve the animals. They saved 10 adults and two juveniles. A koala named Houdini had to be left behind as there was no time to extract him from a deep ravine.
The fires burned 80 percent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Based on her past surveys, Leigh thinks that a thousand koalas died in the conflagrations. A report released June 30 by the New South Wales parliament estimates that the bushfires killed at least 5,000 koalas—as much as a third of the state population—and that the fires destroyed 24 percent of koala habitat on public lands. It concluded that koalas in the state face extinction by 2050. New South Wales has roughly 10 percent of Australia’s total koala population, though estimates of state and national numbers vary because of a lack of surveys. A 2016 study pegged the number at 329,000 koalas nationwide. (Read more: Koalas are not ‘functionally extinct’—yet.)
Across Australia, at least 30,000 koalas died in the fires, according to experts.
“It was pretty depressing and still is,” Leigh says. “You go out to the badly burned areas and there’s nothing living.”
After the fires, her team studied satellite images to identify woodlands with sufficient remaining tree cover. Then they unleashed a koala-detecting dog named Smudge to search for signs of survivors in prospective resettlement habitat.
“He found a lot of burned scat but also some fresh stuff, so we got an idea of where and when koalas were moving through the area,” says Leigh.
A mother koala and her joey are released into a state forest in Victoria after being treated for burns. Because bushfires destroyed their home, they had to be resettled in woodlands 70 miles away.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESYHer staff and more than 140 volunteers spent two months building and deploying food and drinking stations for surviving koalas before the lockdown. In March, they returned the rescued koalas to the Blue Mountains.
Leigh has continued to radio track and observe the koalas throughout the pandemic. “They’re not in top-notch body condition, but they’re doing OK,” she says. But “if most of their home ranges burned, they’re not going to have enough resources to survive longer term.”
Safety in burrows
In contrast to the global media attention focused on the koala’s plight, the fate of the marsupial’s closest cousin, the bare-nosed wombat, has been largely overlooked.
Fires tore through the Southern Highlands south of Sydney after midnight on January 5. “When then sun came up, there was nothing, and I mean nothing there but absolute blackness for as far as the eye could see,” says John Creighton, a wombat carer in the town of Bundanoon who had expected to find hundreds of injured animals in the morning. “It was otherworldly silent. There were no birds, no wallabies, no kangaroos.”
There were wombats, though.
“They were the only animal to make it through the fires,” Creighton says of the stocky, bear-like marsupials that spend most of their time in deep burrows. “The wombats were just sitting in the entrance to their burrows, disoriented and in shock as everything they knew had been erased.”
He had already been providing supplemental water and food to the wombats because a years-long drought had left them with little to eat or drink. In the wake of the fires, he stepped up efforts as the animals faced starvation in an obliterated landscape.
Creighton and volunteers set up feeding stations on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery that borders a burned national park. Wombats have a keen sense of smell, and they soon made their way to the food and water. Solitary creatures whose cuddly appearance belies their fierceness, the wombats gathered in uncharacteristically large groups.
A roadside sign stands amid the desolation from fires that burned this area of Victoria in late 2019. Experts say that fires in some places burned so hot that some ecosystems may never recover.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESY
Left: Wildlife carer Rena Gaborov bottle feeds a young male bare-nosed wombat named Kip in January 2020. Gaborov evacuated Kip and other animals from her wildlife shelter in Victoria before it was destroyed by bushfires weeks earlier. Tens of millions of dollars in donations have
… Read More
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESY“There would be eight wombats around a feeding station,” Creighton says. “They were virtually waiting in line to eat.”
Weeks after the fires, he found a wombat near death. “She was just skin and bones but had the biggest head I’ve ever seen and would have been queen of that forest,” says Creighton. “Wombats like that survived the fires only to die of starvation and thirst.” While there are no scientific estimates of wombat deaths during and after the fires, he says it’s likely that “thousands and thousands of wombats” perished.
Then came torrential rains that finally snuffed out the fires but flooded wombat burrows, killing scores of animals.
Today, community volunteers are still feeding about a hundred wombats at the monastery. “As areas are greening up, animals are moving back,” Creighton says. “But the burned areas are still desolate, and it’s shocking how little feed is growing.”
Back in the field
Evan Quartermain, head of programs for Humane Society International Australia, was on Kangaroo Island in South Australia after firestorms killed half of the isle’s 50,000 koalas. It’s uncertain, he says, if the insects, fungi, seeds, and microbes needed to recover the ecosystem survived temperatures that reached nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. “It may be that some building blocks of the ecosystem will not come back,” he says. (Read more: Some of Australia's forests may not recover.)
Many crucial wildlands had been destroyed by development before the fires. The New South Wales parliamentary koala inquiry found that even after laws were implemented to protect koala habitat, deforestation increased because of lax enforcement of environmental regulations. The state government, for example, has approved the construction a coal mine in prime koala habitat in New South Wales. Accelerating climate change and severe drought have put further pressure on habitats.
A wildlife study commissioned by WWF Australia found a 90 percent reduction in ground-dwelling animals in parts of New South Wales surveyed in early March. Elsewhere, scientists are most concerned about the survival of already endangered species such as the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo and Kangaroo Island dunnart, a rat-size marsupial, whose limited habitat burned in the fires. But even less vulnerable animals, like the platypus and a small eucalypt-dwelling marsupial called the greater glider, are now in peril due to the sheer amount of land lost. In the state of Western Australia, fires burned the habitat of one of the last mainland populations of quokkas, the smiley-faced marsupial that has starred in thousands of selfies. As for the iconic kangaroos, thousands likely died, but with a population estimated at 50 million, scientists aren’t concerned about the species’ survival.
As pandemic restrictions ease, scientists are planning their return to field and volunteers are putting the tens of millions of dollars in international donations to work to help wildlife. The federal government has allocated $200 million Australian dollars toward wildlife recovery. (Learn more about how you can help Australia recover.)
University of Sydney biologist Valentina Mella’s research established that koalas will use drinking stations during drought and heatwaves. She is now working with wildlife rescue group WIRES to distribute 800 drinking stations around Australia. WIRES is also issuing grants to communities for habitat restoration while Humane Society International is providing financial support to wildlife carers and helping them prepare for the fires to come. Quartermain says koalas rescued and later released on Kangaroo Island were implanted with microchips and will be tracked to keep tabs on their condition.
Science for Wildlife, meanwhile, is launching a six-month survey of koala habitat in the Blue Mountains. But Leigh is relieved to already have found one particular koala: Houdini, the radio-collared marsupial she could not rescue during the fires.
Houdini earned his name for his skill at escaping capture, and he proved adept at eluding the bushfires. “He was in a steep gully with huge trees, which don’t burn easily,” Leigh says. “He has given us some hope that in other steep gullies that suffered a similar low-intensity burn, we might find more surviving koalas.”
Pollution made the pandemic worse, but lockdowns clean the sky (nationalgeographic.com)
Pollution made COVID-19 worse. Now, lockdowns are clearing the air.Even before the coronavirus, air pollution killed seven million people a year. Will today's cleaner air inspire us to do better?
BY BETH GARDINER
PUBLISHED APRIL 8, 2020
AS THE NOVEL coronavirus tears around the world, it’s exploiting our biggest weaknesses, from creaking health care systems to extreme social inequality. Its relationship with one pervasive and neglected problem, however, is more tangled: Air pollution has intensified the pandemic, but the pandemic has—temporarily—cleaned the skies.
When new evidence emerged this week that dirty air makes COVID-19 more lethal, it surprised no one who has followed the science of air pollution—but the scale of the effect was striking. The study, which must still undergo peer review for publication, found that the tiny pollutant particles known as PM2.5, breathed over many years, sharply raise the chances of dying from the virus.
Researchers from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed data on PM2.5 levels and COVID-19 deaths from about 3,000 U.S. counties covering 98 percent of the U.S. population. Counties that averaged just one microgram per cubic meter more PM2.5 in the air had a COVID-19 death rate that was 15 percent higher.
“If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire,” said Francesca Dominici, a Harvard biostatistics professor and the study’s senior author.
That’s because the fine particles penetrate deep into the body, promoting hypertension, heart disease, breathing trouble, and diabetes, all of which increase complications in coronavirus patients. The particles also weaken the immune system and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract, adding to the risk both of getting COVID-19 and of having severe symptoms.
Dominici and her colleagues illustrated the impact with a specific example: Manhattan, the current epicenter of the pandemic, where PM2.5 averages range as high as 11 micrograms per cubic meter, and where 1,904 deaths from COVID-19 had been reported as of April 4. Had particle levels averaged just one unit lower over the past two decades, the researchers calculated, 248 fewer people would have died over the past several weeks. And of course the toll has mounted since April 4.
But while pollution inhaled in the past is still causing harm today, the temporary experience of cleaner air brought about by widespread shutdowns may offer lessons for the kind of world we want to build after the pandemic.
A single bus owns a usually crowded highway on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on April 5, after the Indian govenment ordered a three-week lockdown slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
People so accustomed to pollution they hardly think about it may realize, “Actually, I really do quite enjoy clean air: Do you think we could get it, or keep it?” says Simon Birkett, founder and director of Clean Air in London, an advocacy organization. “There’s a chance to really get people to stop, take a deep breath,” and reflect on questions like “How was your asthma during this period?”
Although a near-halt in normal life and economic activity is no one’s idea of a good way to reduce pollution, the brief respite might, in Birkett’s view, turn this dark time into “a catalyst, or a tipping point, which could get us to say ‘Clean air—there’s something special about it.’”
Cleaner pandemic skies
From China’s Hubei province to industrial northern Italy and beyond, pollution levels have plummeted as lockdowns aimed at slowing the viral spread have shuttered businesses and trapped billions of people at home. In India, where air pollution is among the world’s worst, “people are reporting seeing the Himalayas for the first time from where they live,” Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said in an email.
India’s hastily imposed shutdowns have been devastating, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrant workers without homes or jobs. But in Delhi, where air is normally choking, levels of both PM2.5 and the harmful gas nitrogen dioxide fell more than 70 percent.
Areas in Germany, the United Kingdom, Czechia, and northen Italy saw large reductions in nitrogen dioxide, while some eastern European countries like Ukraine saw an increase.
In Asia, South Korea and China took dramatic lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus. Satellites recorded significantly less pollution compared to the same period last year.
Less pollution, for now
Like the fine particles known as PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is emitted by burning fossil fuels—mostly in industry, vehicles, and domestic boilers. In the first three months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the globe from China, and governments began shutting down businesses and transportation, satellites detected sharp declines in NO2 levels compared with the same period in 2019. In the U.S., the stay-at-home orders began in March. The drop in NO2 has been most pronounced in cities and along major transportation corridors.
The declines are sure to be only temporary. To get healthier air for the longer term, Myllyvirta said, means shifting to clean energy and transportation, “not ordering people to stay at home at drastic economic cost.” But the cleaner pandemic skies do show how fast we can bring down pollution when we reduce our burning of fossil fuels.
The cleaner air is also a reminder of how deadly air pollution is. The World Health Organization says dirty air, both indoors and out, cuts short seven million lives annually worldwide.
In the United States, decades of regulation have led to air quality that is far better than in most of the world. In New York City, for example, PM2.5 levels actually fell 30 percent from 2009 to 2017, which has presumably saved many lives during the current pandemic. Nevertheless, air pollution still kills more than 100,000 Americans every year.
The realization that COVID-19 may match or even exceed that toll has rightly terrified Americans. But the lethal effects of air pollution are barely discussed—and activists and scientists are hoping that might change.
Pollution and COVID-19
Even before the new Harvard study, scientists were convinced that air pollution was likely worsening COVID-19’s impact, in addition to the wide-ranging health damage it causes on its own. A 2003 study of the outbreak of SARS, the closest relative of the new coronavirus, found that death rates in China’s most polluted areas were twice as high as in the least polluted ones.
“You could bet a fiver that London and other more polluted places will have higher mortality rates [from the virus], because there’ll be more people with underlying issues,” Birkett said. Scientists also believe viruses may bond with pollution particles, enabling them to remain in the air longer and helping them make their way into the body.
The flip side is that even temporarily cleaner air can help “flatten the curve” of the pandemic, easing the burden on health care systems by reducing the number of people who experience severe COVID-19 symptoms, said Christopher Carlsten, head of respiratory medicine at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, in Vancouver.
Cleaner pandemic skies should also reduce other pressures on hospitals struggling with COVID-19 cases, Carlsten said. In addition to the cumulative effects of breathing dirty air for years, a large body of evidence shows that short-term changes in air quality have an immediate impact on heart attacks, strokes, and emergency room visits. All increase when pollution spikes.
Authorities in British Columbia had that hope in mind when they issued restrictions on the fires farmers typically light at the start of spring to clear old growth from fields. One region in British Columbia even banned campfires. Wood smoke is thick with PM2.5 particles.
In China, the drops in pollution resulting from coronavirus shutdowns likely saved between 53,000 and 77,000 lives—many times more than the direct toll of the virus—according to calculations done by Marshall Burke, an Earth system scientist at Stanford University. That might sound surprising, but it shouldn’t be, he said, given that air pollution causes more than 1.2 million annual deaths in China. Indeed, a 2016 study found that China’s aggressive measures to clean the air in and around Beijing for the 2008 Olympics had led to a temporary 8 percent drop in the overall death rate.
Burke emphasized that in estimating the benefit of China’s less polluted air, he was in no way minimizing the cost or the horror of the pandemic. But “these other things we do, that we can change, are also important,” he said. “Lives we lose absent a pandemic are also really important, and are lives we shouldn’t lose.”
After the pandemic—what?
There’s no doubt the pandemic-driven clearing of the air will be short-lived, with emissions sure to return to, if not surpass, their usual levels whenever factories start up again and people get back in their cars.
That’s already happening in China, where pollution has returned to its pre-coronavirus range, Myllyvirta said, even though some industries are not yet fully operational—a worrying hint that air quality could end up worse than before, he added.
That’s a danger elsewhere too. When the pandemic finally abates, polluting industries may well seek to make up for lost time with even higher production, said François Gemenne, a political scientist and environmental researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium. If the virus makes people fearful of public transportation, driving could increase also.
What’s more, “a lot of governments will be inclined to restart their fossil fuel industry, because that is the industry that is immediately available,” Gemenne said. With recession looming and credit markets taking a hit, analysts say investment in wind and solar power is likely to sag.
Economic troubles often prompt governments to loosen health-protective regulations. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has cited the pandemic as justification for a decision to all but suspend enforcement of pollution rules. The Trump administration is also rolling back ambitious Obama-era auto mileage standards, and unraveling other regulations too.
In the middle of a health emergency, it’s exactly the wrong move, said Susan Anenberg, associate professor of environmental health at the George Washington University. On the contrary, she argued, “it’s the time to be considering whether the status quo that we had in place prior to this disaster is the one we want going forward. We don’t need to tolerate this level of air pollution.”
MOTIVAZIONI DI TANTA STUPIDITA'? I SOLDI, L'IGNORANZA E LA STUPIDITA'
Ecco dall'articolo del NYT alcuni degli oltre 700 commenti dei lettori. Sono tutti molto interessanti, ma preferisco fornire giusto i primi della lista, tanto quanto c'é da dire è presto detto: 'se vuoi essere felice, sii ignorante e pensa solo al breve periodo' (il tipico stile di pensiero repubblicano).
Dee McShan
Newcastle Australia
Jan. 3, 2020
We are heartbroken to hear that our beautiful flora and fauna are being lost and some species may be extinct forever. The firefighters said they could hear the koalas screaming in the forest. How truly awful!!
We have never seen anything like these horrendous fire storms and fire tornadoes.
Yes, we recently voted in a bunch of climate change deniers and the opposition leader didn't quite have it together. How unfortunate. So think of us this weekend is as it is going to be catastrophic.
There is a realisation that we may not fully recover from this and that it might become the new normal.
Jon commented January 3, 2020
The little seasonal rain we get
and the persistent elevated temperatures turn our incredibly flammable gum and Eucalypt bush into a massive fuel load. The periods in cooler months have been reduced significantly due to warmer temperatures preventing fuel reduction and back burning due to the severe dangers to property.
When we do get rain, the fuel load increases quickly and the cycle continues.
Most fires are started by dry lightening strikes, failed back burning attempts arson and complete stupidity.
Yes we get bushfires a lot. It's part of life here. I was very close to the black Saturday fires and witnessed first hand the utter devastation. You can still see it now 10 years on.
I have never seen anything on this scale in my lifetime. And we still have at least 8 more weeks, and January is the hottest month of the year. The rain is coming, but not until April at this stage when it is usually here late Jan/Feb.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say climate change. You may want to live in the false hope that it isn't because it's too challenging to face, but the sooner you let go and realise the consequences of our actions over the past hundred years or so are here to collect for all our greed and consumerism.
RBR commented January 2, 2020
What it is extremely painful to watch, is all the fauna so particular to Australia suffer due to human irresponsibility.
Hugh Garner commented January 2, 2020
In a lifetime in Australia, I have never seen anything like these fires. The Prime Ministers vacuous comments only add fuel to the flame of public contempt. The Federal Government is climate change denying, like the Trump government. The smirking image of the Prime Minister standing in the Federal House of Representatives, holding up a large lump of coal, mocking those who were warning of disasters due to climate change will always live in my mind, like his contempt for asylum seekers. The current government got back into power in the last election, because of a fear campaign aimed at working and lower middle class voters afraid of losing their jobs if green policies were enacted. Now it’s all come back to bite them in the most vicious way. The world, particularly the US should take note of the Australian bushfire situation. What is happening here, and recently in California and Brazil, will sweep many climate denying politicians down the gutter in a flood of contempt into the cesspit of the beyond worthless, where they belong.
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Birdygirl commented January 2, 2020
Australia has a long fire history. Like California, the deadly fires in Australia increase in intensity and frequency for similar reasons: climate change, poor land management practices, building in fire-pone areas, Mediterranean climates, and a host of other parallel factors. Both places used to have indigenous traditional ecological knowledge of using and controlling fire. Had European settlers listened to indigenous peoples, perhaps we would not be in this terrible situation.
PosiThis commented January 2, 2020
Washington State
Jan. 2, 2020
Times Pick
My husband and I were going to spend Christmas in Sydney. We cut our trip short and returned US on December 13 because of the air quality issues in the city. It frankly was scary watching the smoke haze envelope the city and it wasn't even close to what is happening now. Not once in out 3 week visit did we see the Sydney of but sky and blue water.
Diana commented January 2, 2020
So Mr. Morrison cut short a vacation to "offer comfort". How very noble of him. I am certain that those devastated by the fires and fleeing for their very lives appreciate his empty words. It is the equivalent of the meaningless "thoughts and prayers" we get here in this country after yet another mass shooting.
What is going to happen to those who are displaced and have lost everything? Does Mr. Morrison have a plan? Or is he just going to offer words of comfort? Will he continue to deny what scientists have been warning about for years now? Why are conservatives making climate change a political issue (other than to appease big business donors) when lives are being ruined and our planet is in a death spiral? Big businesses don't have a plan B for saving the planet. They have a bottom line.
Once a tipping point is reached, there will be no way turning things around. The clock is ticking.
Is there any way we can help those in Australia? Are there organizations to which we can donate funds? I wish that had been included in this article. I will search online.
David
Sydney, Australia
Jan. 2, 2020
As an Australian citizen, resident and volunteer firefighter can I ask that visitors from other countries do not come here. Ignore the tasteless commercials from Tourism Australia - a large proportion of the cute marsupials featured in the film are dead or are now dying of starvation. Several cities are, or have been, wreathed in smoke for weeks. Large areas of the country are running out of water. The fires will burn for months. I know that the loss of tourist dollars will affect many local businesses and people will suffer. But there is something much bigger at stake - a true existential threat. We are at the absolute front line of climate change. In the face of this our Prime Minister wants more coal mines more coal exports and continuation of coal-fired electricity. He cannot see a future for this country that is not based on coal. Our politicians are not listening to pleas from within the country and need to hear strong messages and actions from outside, particularly if there are economic consequences. So please help us by staying away and make it clear why you are taking this action.
liceu93
Bethesda
Jan. 2, 2020
This is unreal. Words like catastrophic are inadequate to describe what we're seeing in the photos and reports. The destruction of property, livelihoods and wildlife is heartbreaking. Although it's an overworked phrase, I'm sending my thoughts and prayers to the people of Australia.
However, as we watch this catastrophe in horror, we need to be mindful that this is a fate that faces parts of our country and other places in the world if we don't get serious about addressing climate change. Oh, I know that the climate change deniers want to blame this on poor forest management, but they're ignoring the effects of years of rising temperatures and drought.
Fire extent from July 1, 2019, to June 22, 2020
E così eccoci al nuovo anno.
Non è così entusiasmante vedere passare gli anni, mi sembra l'altro ieri che qualcuno disse 'e anche giugno ce lo siamo giocato'. Giugno, luglio, agosto, settembre, ottobre, novembre e pure dicembre. E così via.
Un anno fa non c'era ancora nessuna emergenza mondiale COVID. Ma c'era la catastrofe climatica in atto, l'Australia avvolta dai più grandi incendi degli ultimi anni. Una strage orrenda non tanto di persone, ma di natura nel senso più letterale del termine. Oltre un miliardo di animali (considerando solo i vertebrati) stimati morti. Quelli sopravvissuti morti poi per carestia d'acqua e di cibo. Il tutto esacerbato dalle limitazioni del COVID.
E' una brutta, brutta storia. Niente di bello da raccontare.
Da allora non ci siamo fatti mancare niente, ad ogni modo. E meno male, che il covid ha rallentato l'inquinamento e l'atmosfera è meno pregna di CO2 di prima.
Ma intanto la California ha avuto la peggiore stagione di incendi (dopo un 2019 clemente e un biennio 2017-2018 terribili) a memoria d'uomo. Un disastro che ha raddoppiato il precedente record (del '18) di territorio bruciato.
Ed è bruciato anche il Pantanal. No dico, la maggiore area umida del mondo. E il superbastardo Bolsonazi che diceva spudoratamente che è impossibile che una foresta bruci, quindi è una fake-news.
E ci sono tanti che lo adulano perché non ha messo il Brasile in lockdown. In fondo, cosa saranno mai 180.000 morti?
Insomma, torniamo all'Australia, devastata dai terribili incendi di un anno fa. Ricordiamo lo scempio allora, e la catastrofe che è a tutt'oggi l'ecologia in Australia, apparentemente in maniera incomprensibile, l'unica nazione 'sviluppata' con problemi di disboscamento. Dove ci abitano 3 abitanti per kmq, come se noi in Italia fossimo un milione in tutto. Eppure devastata dall'industria mineraria e dai ranchers disboscatori. Perché? Forse perché le risorse australiane servono per i famelici due miliardi e mezzo di cinesi e indiani, per esempio. Ma più in generale, perché abbiamo a che fare con un governo di destra, pari pari a quello del bolsonazista quanto a 'sensibilità ecologica'.
Ma di questo ho già parlato a suo tempo.
Adesso andiamo avanti.
No, koalas aren't 'functionally extinct'—yet (nationalgeographic.com)
No, koalas aren't 'functionally extinct'—yetAs koalas suffer in the Australian bushfires, misinformation has spread about their demise. Here’s what we know.
A koala is pictured in Queensland, Australia. The iconic marsupials have an extensive habitat range along Australia’s eastern coast, where a large number of bushfires are burning.
BY NATASHA DALY
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 25, 2019
AUSTRALIA IS IN the midst of a catastrophic and unprecedented early fire season. As dozens of bushfires rage up the country’s eastern coast, from Sydney to Byron Bay, incinerating houses, forest, and even marshland, one of Australia’s most iconic animals has taken center stage in headlines.
A female koala, named Anwen by her rescuers, receives treatment at the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, Australia. She was burnt in a brushfire ravaging the area.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN EDWARDSImages of burned, dying koalas have emerged as a symbol of the fire’s devastating toll. “They’re such helpless little things,” says Christine Adams-Hosking, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia. “A bird can fly, a kangaroo can hop very fast, but koalas are so slow. They basically just get stuck where they are.”
The plight of the defenseless animals has sparked a flurry of concern—and confusion. Over the weekend, erroneous declarations that the animals have lost most of their habitat and are “functionally extinct” made the rounds in headlines and on social media, illustrating just how quickly misinformation can spread in times of crisis.
Red dots show locations of fires detected in Australia the week ending Nov. 25, 2019.
The brown area shows the range of the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus).
Koalas are considered vulnerable to extinction—just a step above endangered—and reports indicate that between 350 and a thousand koalas have been found dead so far in fire-devastated zones of northern New South Wales.
But, experts say, we are not looking at the death of a species—yet. “We’re not going to see koalas go extinct this fast,” says Chris Johnson, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Tasmania. “Koala populations will continue to decline because of lots of interacting reasons, but we’re not at the point where one event could take them out.”
Here’s the current situation:
Why are koalas suffering so much in this fire season?When it comes to fire, everything seems to be stacked against koalas. Their only real defense is climbing higher into the eucalyptus trees where they make their homes—little defense at all in a raging forest fire.
Eucalyptus itself is some of the most fire-adapted vegetation on Earth, able to sprout and grow anew in the immediate aftermath of fires. In normal fire conditions, the flames wouldn’t typically reach the top of the trees, leaving the koalas relatively unscathed. The spike we’re seeing in koala deaths is an indicator that something is wrong, says David Bowman, director of the Fire Center Research Hub at the University of Tasmania.
The scale of the current fires—largely a result of climate change and the slow death of Aboriginal fire management methods—has no precedent, according to Bowman. “They are burning at a particularly high intensity,” he says.
Packed with oil, the trees are burning hot and fast, sometimes exploding and sending sparks yards in every direction.
It’s only the spring in Australia. “In terms of then bushfire crisis, this is the supporting act,” Bowman says. He worries that the situation will be far worse come in January and February, as temperatures continue to rise and drought is exacerbated.
How many koalas are left?In 2016, experts estimated that there are about 329,000 koalas in Australia, which represents an average of a 24 percent decline in populations over the past three generations.
“It’s very difficult to estimate koala populations, even at the best of times,” Adams-Hosking says, because they have a very wide range across eastern Australia, and are human-shy and found very high up in trees. “Some populations are becoming locally extinct and others are doing just fine.”
Koalas are threatened by land development, food degradation (increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has diminished the nutritional quality of eucalyptus leaves), drought, dog attacks, and chlamydia. (Read more about the threats posed by cars and dogs.)
And, yes, fire too. In certain areas that have been hard hit by fire, it’s possible that local koala populations won’t recover, “but it’s too early to tell,” says Adams-Hosking. “We’d need monitoring over several years.”
Have the fires really decimated 80 percent of koala habitat?No. Koalas’ range is large, extending along Australia’s entire Eastern coast. The recent bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland cover about a million hectares, Fisher says (and some estimates indicate as many as 2.5 million hectares), but the area of forest in eastern Australia where koalas can live is more than 100 million hectares.
Koala Hospital volunteers found this mother and her baby searching for food and water on the ground in the Port Macquarie fire zone. The pair, named Julie and Joey, are now receiving care at the hospital.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN EDWARDSFurthermore, just because an area has been affected by fire, says Grant Williamson, a postdoctoral fellow specializing in landscape ecology at the University of Tasmania, “does not mean it has been ‘destroyed’ and is no longer suitable for occupation by koalas.”
Are koalas ‘functionally extinct?’“Functionally extinct” refers to when a species no longer has enough individual members to produce future generations or play a role in the ecosystem. (Learn more: What is extinction? The answer is complicated.)
The fires may have killed many koalas “but this is not enough to change their overall threat status as a species,” Fisher says.
KOALAS 101Koalas are not bears—they’re marsupials. Learn about koalas’ unique traits, including six opposable “thumbs,” downward-facing pouches, and an ability to sleep nearly all day in tree branches.The headlines claiming that koalas are functionally extinct appear to be based on a claim from a koala conservation group earlier in 2019. Scientists disputed it then and continue to dispute it now: “It is threatened in some parts of its range and not in others,” says Diana Fisher, associate professor in the school of biological sciences at the University of Queensland.
For some local populations of koalas in the fire zones, especially in northern New South Wales, the impact has likely been “catastrophic,” Adams-Hosking says. A third of koalas in the fire zones there may have perished.
But other populations, such as those in the southern state of Victoria, have not been affected by these fires at all, according to Johnson.
So what’s next?“It’s not looking good for koalas at all, even before the fires,” says Adams-Hosking. While they have government protections—it’s illegal to kill a koala, for instance—their habitat is highly vulnerable, she says. “Very little of koala habitat is designated as protected area. Almost nothing.” She argues that the government needs to put the environment before economic growth. “Until that political will kicks in—and in Australia, it hasn’t—it’s not going to get any better for koalas.”
In the meantime, The Koala Hospital of Port Macquarie, located about 250 miles north of Sydney in one of the most fire-affected zones, is actively rescuing and treating koalas. To date, they’ve treated at least 22, according to the New York Times.
Adams-Hosking and David Bowman, the landscape fire expert, both argue that in addition to protecting land, it’s vital to start looking at rewilding and relocating koalas. “We’ve got to get with the program and start adapting, says Bowman. “If we want koalas, we’ve got to look after them. We need to step up.”
'Starvation event' shows wildlife may need human help to survive (smh.com.au)
Starvation event' shows wildlife may need human help to survive
By Mike Foley
January 1, 2020 — 5.33pm
More than 300 baby flying foxes have been abandoned in a "starvation event" on NSW's South Coast as their desperate mothers leave them behind in order to survive.
The devastating drought and fires have hit wildlife habitats so hard experts believe human intervention will be needed to repopulate sensitive species that will otherwise be wiped out locally.
Experts warn drought and bushfires have combined to create a new level of threat to local wildlife. CREDIT:NINE
Wildlife Rescue South Coast secretary Jenny Packwood said large numbers of flying foxes flew south in spring, after early season fires on the North Coast wiped out large areas of their northern habitat, looking for fruit and nectar in forests between Nowra and Batemans Bay.
“Mothers are abandoning babies at two weeks after birth, because there is no food for them. We’ve picked them up out of local colonies. Last week we had 300 come in, and we’ve been flat out feeding since then. We had to fly some of them to the North Coast, to carer groups up there,” Ms Packwood said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, we’re calling it a starvation event. I just had a phone call from Nowra, where there are more dead and starving babies in the Bomaderry and Berry colonies.”
Professor of conservation biology at the University of Sydney Mike Letnic said drought and searing fires had put koalas and potaroos under increased pressure this summer.
With the climate being so dry at the moment, and the intensity of these fires, wet gully areas and so on that normally escape the worst of it have been burnt,” he said.
“Animals that typically survive in these patches that don’t burn can recolonise from these refuges, but there may be too few pathways to allow for effective recolonisation. It will depend on how many refuges are left.”
Professor Letnic said koalas and potaroos would become locally extinct in some areas of their habitat - which extends across the North and South Coast fire grounds.
Another problem for native wildlife would come from predators - which can be more mobile and escape fires - that then move back into the old fireground and “start mopping up vulnerable animals”, he said.
Professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania David Bowman said it was “extraordinary” to have concurrent fires in all of Australia’s dry forest regions, which sit across Tasmania and “a narrow ribbon of land” running around the coast from Queensland to the south-west forest of Western Australia.
“Normally they were the refugia for fire sensitive species - that goes back to ancient times - but it’s been so dry due to extreme drought fires have overwhelmed what are normally safe havens,” Professor Bowman said.
“We’re living in the Anthropocene and it calls into question the idea that nature can self-assemble. Nature is super resilient, but it might reassemble with lots of missing parts, and that would be very distressing to people.
BushfiresHandful of Blue Mountains koalas successfully relocated to Taronga Zoo“
This opens a big box of issues and will change the way we think about Australia’s forest ecology. We may see more sensitive interventions, like trying to rescue animals ahead of fires, or reintroduce them after it.”
Professor Letnic and Professor Bowman both said feral deer, which are already damaging alpine areas in Victoria and the NSW North Coast and Illawarra, would likely spread into new ground as green shoots emerge from trees and undergrowth when fire-hit landscapes begin to recover.
NSW considering evacuating up to 90 towns if they run out of water (thefifthestate.com.au)
NSW considering evacuating up to 90 towns if they run out of waterThe NSW state government is considering evacuating the residents of as many as 90 towns that are seriously affected by drought if they completely run out of water. Sign up to our twice weekly newsletter to keep up with the news on sustainability and the built environment.
BY TINA PERINOTTO 13 DECEMBER 2019
The NSW state government is considering evacuating the residents of as many as 90 towns that are seriously affected by drought if they completely run out of water.For months, many towns in rural NSW have been relying on water being trucked in but that is only a short-term solution, and bore water is only available to some towns.
Prime7 News Central West late last month reported that the government would make the drastic move of relocating populations from towns without any water supply. Asked by Prime TV how many towns were facing the prospect of completely running out of water, the state’s regional town water supply co-ordinator, James McTavish, said: “We have about 90 towns and communities that we have substantial concerns about now”.
“We are very keen to make sure that we use that [evacuation] as an absolute last case only and in every community we have a plan,” said Mr McTavish.
He said the government had not learned from the Millennium drought.
“We are looking to make sure we are never here again,” he told Prime7.
At the time of writing, the state government had not responded to requests from The Fifth Estate for more information about any evacuation plans.
But a state government source told The Fifth Estate the government was looking at all options – new weirs, pipelines and bores, as well as reverse osmosis systems to purify water supplies.
The source denied there were plans to relocate the town but said resourcing to address the problem had moved to the “next level”.
“It’s huge… there’s been a big shuffle,” they said, adding that nine hydrologists had been hired.
Little else is known about the government’s plans but it is believed they vary from town to town.
“Different towns need different systems,” the source said.
“Day Zero is about the flow on-ground. It doesn’t take into account underground aquifers. Some [towns] do have the possibilities for bores. Some towns are easier to truck water into.”
The source said there was some optimism in government circles that solutions would be found, citing how a pipeline to supply Broken Hill with water was completed in 2016 “two weeks before the town ran out of water”.
Broken Hill is now one of the safest in the state for water. However, the pipeline is believed to have cost $500 million and it’s unclear how many pipelines the state could afford to build.
For most towns, a two-tier approach was being used, the source said.
“The state government isn’t the utility provider; we don’t control the water; the local councils do.
“We step in when they need some help; we have the expertise. A lot of local councils do not have that expertise.”
Working out where to drill for bores is complicated and drilling is expensive, they said.
A request for interview with Mr McTavish was not responded to before publication.
People living in Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo and other communities afflicted by water shortages are worried about what any evacuation plans might look like, according to Bathurst councillor John Fry.
Cr Fry told The Fifth Estate people were worried about whether entire families and communities would be moved and if they would ever be able to return to their homes.
People were also worried their homes could be damaged by vandals, he said.
Cr Fry said that as of Thursday water in Bathurst’s dam had fallen to 37 per cent of capacity – the lowest level since the dam was rebuilt in 2000 – and it was evaporating at 1.1 percentage points per week, with “no reasonable hope of decent rainfall.”
Cr Fry, who learnt about the government relocation plans when he saw the Prime7 news report, said he tried, unsuccessfully, to find out more about the plans through a senior contact in the Department of Water, Property and Housing.
He said farmers in his area were currently buying water at $2.50 per one thousand litres and while people were not talking about Day Zero, irrigators had been put on notice by the council.
“Our irrigators have been told to cut back to 20 per cent pumping rate and when the dam gets to 22 per cent [of capacity], it’s a total ‘cease to pump’,” he said.
“We realise our irrigators provide our food but at the end of the day the city takes priority.”
Cr Fry said he recently put a motion to council to declare a water emergency but it was voted down. Other councillors said there was “no need to panic”, and that climate change was “a beat up”.
Cr Fry, who is also part of a business that works on rehydrating land through regenerative farming, said a lot could be done to retain moisture in the soil and plants. It was also possible to capture water from summer storms but the infrastructure wasn’t in place.
Bathurst can’t access bore water, and although people had been pushing for grey water recycling for some time council hadn’t seriously considered it.
“We’ve been talking about it for 20 years,” he said.
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires Intensify - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires IntensifyCalling for evacuations along the southeastern coast, officials said the next few days would be among the worst yet in an already catastrophic fire season.
- By Livia Albeck-Ripka, Jamie Tarabay and Richard Pérez-Peña
- Published Jan. 2, 2020
Across the scorched southeast, frightened Australians — taking a few cherished things, abandoning their homes and vacation rentals, and braving smoke that discolored the skies — struggled Thursday to evacuate as wildfires turned the countryside into charcoal wasteland.
And from government officials came a disheartening warning: This weekend will be one of the worst periods yet in Australia’s catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire conditions are set to intensify over the weekend.“It’s going to be a blast furnace,” Andrew Constance, the transport minister of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Monitoring a fire on Thursday in East Gippsland, Victoria, where 17 people were missing.Credit...Darrian Traynor/Getty ImagesThe blazes have strained the country’s firefighting resources, and the fire season, though still young, already ranks as among the worst in Australia’s recorded history.
The state of New South Wales declared an emergency in its southeastern region on Thursday, calling on residents and vacationers to evacuate. Mr. Constance said the relocation was the largest in the region’s history.
[Update: 3 U.S. firefighters die in plane crash as Australia’s blazes intensify.]
To the south, the state of Victoria declared a disaster on Thursday, allowing it to authorize the evacuation of areas along its eastern coast.
Using any means they could find, the authorities were warning people to evacuate. But with communication in some areas spotty to nonexistent, it was not clear that everyone would get the message.
In just the past week, at least nine people have died, and many more are unaccounted for. In all, at least 18 people have died in this fire season.
The blazes have consumed more than 1,000 houses, killed countless animals and ravaged a Pacific coast region of farms, bush, eucalyptus forests, mountains, lakes and vacation spots. About 15 million acres have been blackened over the past four months, and more than 100 wildfires are still burning.
With the Southern Hemisphere summer barely underway and the country already reeling from record-breaking heat, no one expects relief any time soon. No rain is in the forecast.
We’re still talking four to six weeks at best before we start to see a meaningful reprieve in the weather,” Shane Fitzsimmons, the rural fire commissioner for the state of New South Wales, told reporters.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria state, the Australian Navy on Friday began ferrying to safety some of the 4,000 people trapped there when flames cut off all escape routes on land.
TRACKING THE DEVASTATION
See where Australia’s deadly wildfires are burning.People camped on the beach and slept in small boats, they said, trying to shield themselves from flying embers as the inferno moved toward them. The heavy smoke meant only a few people with medical problems could be evacuated by helicopter.
COOKING: Daily inspiration, delicious recipes and other updates from Sam Sifton and NYT Cooking.
Sign UpAmong those on the beach was Justin Brady, a musician who just moved from Melbourne to Mallacoota, about 250 miles to the east. He managed to salvage a fiddle, a mandolin and some harmonicas before abandoning the home he built and its contents to the flames.
“It’s been pretty heavy,” he said.
Others nearby were not nearly so measured, venting their anger at the national and state governments, which they said had not taken the crisis seriously enough.
Michael Harkin, who lives in Sydney and was vacationing in Mallacoota, complained of “incompetent governance” that is “not keeping us safe at all.”
“I’m looking forward to getting somewhere that isn’t here,” he said.
The emergency services minister of New South Wales, David Elliott, drew withering criticism on social media after he left the country on Tuesday for a vacation in Britain and France. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he said he would return “if the bushfire situation should demand it.”
Mr. Elliott’s departure came just weeks after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was widely ridiculed for taking a vacation in Hawaii during the crisis. He cut his trip short.
The Navy ship that arrived at Mallacoota, the HMAS Choules, delivered food, water and medical supplies, and was expected to leave with hundreds of evacuees. Once it is far enough from shore, the sickest people can be taken away by helicopter.
The Choules will return for more people, officials said, but it will be a slow process; the trip to a safe port in the sprawling country is expected to take 17 hours. Many of the people aboard the cramped ship will have to spend most of that time sitting on the open deck.
The evacuation orders have been easier to make than to carry out.
Two-lane roads are carrying highway-level traffic, and some roads have been closed by the fires or blocked by downed trees and power lines. Long lines of cars snake around gas stations, tanks run dry, and drives that would normally take two hours last half a day or more.
The state premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, said 17 people were still missing as fires swept alpine resorts and the normally bucolic Gippsland area.
Thousands of people have gone days without electricity or phone service. With cell towers destroyed but landlines still working, long lines formed at pay phones, creating scenes from another era. Officials advised people to boil water before using it, after power failures knocked out local water treatment facilities.
Stores have run short of essentials like diapers, baby formula, bread and bottled water. With lodgings full, many people fleeing the fires have been forced to sleep in their cars.
Businesses with generators have continued to operate, but some have run out of fuel, and others are near that point.
Craig Scott, the manager of a supermarket in Ulladulla, a beach town about 100 miles south of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he planned to keep the generator there running by siphoning fuel from the tanks of fishing boats. He said the store had just gotten the generator a few months ago, when no one imagined how desperately it would be needed.
So vast and intense are the fires that they can create their own weather, generating winds as they suck in fresh air at ground level, and sparking lightning in the immense ash clouds that rise from them.
Canberra, Australia’s capital, recorded the worst air quality ever measured on Thursday; the largest city, Sydney, has been suffering through intense smoke for weeks; and ash from the blazes has darkened skies and coated glaciers in New Zealand, more than a thousand miles away.
Editors’ PicksWas That a Dropped Call From ET?
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
My Five-Week-Long First DateThe fires have set off anger at Prime Minister Morrison, in particular. He has played down the role of global warming, opposed measures to combat climate change and, at least initially, rejected additional funding for firefighters.
On Thursday, Mr. Morrison was heckled as he visited Cobargo, a New South Wales village where fires have killed two men and destroyed the main street. When he extended his hand to one woman, she said she would shake it only if he increased spending on firefighting.
“You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy,” one man yelled. “You’re out, son.”
As Mr. Morrison left hurriedly, the man taunted him about returning to Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s elegant official residence in Sydney, with spectacular views of the harbor and the city.
“I don’t see Kirribilli burning,” the man yelled.
Mr. Morrison said he understood residents’ frustration.
“I’m not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “That’s why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could.”
“I understand the very strong feelings people have — they’ve lost everything,” he said, adding that there were still “some very dangerous days ahead.”
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires Intensify - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
‘It’s Going to Be a Blast Furnace’: Australia Fires IntensifyCalling for evacuations along the southeastern coast, officials said the next few days would be among the worst yet in an already catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire season, already record breaking, is expected to get worse.CreditCredit...DELWP, via Associated PressBy Livia Albeck-Ripka, Jamie Tarabay and Richard Pérez-Peña
- Published Jan. 2, 2020
Across the scorched southeast, frightened Australians — taking a few cherished things, abandoning their homes and vacation rentals, and braving smoke that discolored the skies — struggled Thursday to evacuate as wildfires turned the countryside into charcoal wasteland.
And from government officials came a disheartening warning: This weekend will be one of the worst periods yet in Australia’s catastrophic fire season.
Australia’s fire conditions are set to intensify over the weekend.“It’s going to be a blast furnace,” Andrew Constance, the transport minister of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
The blazes have strained the country’s firefighting resources, and the fire season, though still young, already ranks as among the worst in Australia’s recorded history.
The state of New South Wales declared an emergency in its southeastern region on Thursday, calling on residents and vacationers to evacuate. Mr. Constance said the relocation was the largest in the region’s history.
[Update: 3 U.S. firefighters die in plane crash as Australia’s blazes intensify.]
To the south, the state of Victoria declared a disaster on Thursday, allowing it to authorize the evacuation of areas along its eastern coast.
Using any means they could find, the authorities were warning people to evacuate. But with communication in some areas spotty to nonexistent, it was not clear that everyone would get the message.
In just the past week, at least nine people have died, and many more are unaccounted for. In all, at least 18 people have died in this fire season.
The blazes have consumed more than 1,000 houses, killed countless animals and ravaged a Pacific coast region of farms, bush, eucalyptus forests, mountains, lakes and vacation spots. About 15 million acres have been blackened over the past four months, and more than 100 wildfires are still burning.
With the Southern Hemisphere summer barely underway and the country already reeling from record-breaking heat, no one expects relief any time soon. No rain is in the forecast.
“We’re still talking four to six weeks at best before we start to see a meaningful reprieve in the weather,” Shane Fitzsimmons, the rural fire commissioner for the state of New South Wales, told reporters.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria state, the Australian Navy on Friday began ferrying to safety some of the 4,000 people trapped there when flames cut off all escape routes on land.
See where Australia’s deadly wildfires are burning.People camped on the beach and slept in small boats, they said, trying to shield themselves from flying embers as the inferno moved toward them. The heavy smoke meant only a few people with medical problems could be evacuated by helicopter.
COOKING: Daily inspiration, delicious recipes and other updates from Sam Sifton and NYT Cooking.
Sign UpAmong those on the beach was Justin Brady, a musician who just moved from Melbourne to Mallacoota, about 250 miles to the east. He managed to salvage a fiddle, a mandolin and some harmonicas before abandoning the home he built and its contents to the flames.
“It’s been pretty heavy,” he said.
Others nearby were not nearly so measured, venting their anger at the national and state governments, which they said had not taken the crisis seriously enough.
Michael Harkin, who lives in Sydney and was vacationing in Mallacoota, complained of “incompetent governance” that is “not keeping us safe at all.”
“I’m looking forward to getting somewhere that isn’t here,” he said.
The emergency services minister of New South Wales, David Elliott, drew withering criticism on social media after he left the country on Tuesday for a vacation in Britain and France. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he said he would return “if the bushfire situation should demand it.”
Mr. Elliott’s departure came just weeks after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was widely ridiculed for taking a vacation in Hawaii during the crisis. He cut his trip short.
The Navy ship that arrived at Mallacoota, the HMAS Choules, delivered food, water and medical supplies, and was expected to leave with hundreds of evacuees. Once it is far enough from shore, the sickest people can be taken away by helicopter.
The Choules will return for more people, officials said, but it will be a slow process; the trip to a safe port in the sprawling country is expected to take 17 hours. Many of the people aboard the cramped ship will have to spend most of that time sitting on the open deck.
The evacuation orders have been easier to make than to carry out.
Two-lane roads are carrying highway-level traffic, and some roads have been closed by the fires or blocked by downed trees and power lines. Long lines of cars snake around gas stations, tanks run dry, and drives that would normally take two hours last half a day or more.
The state premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, said 17 people were still missing as fires swept alpine resorts and the normally bucolic Gippsland area.
Thousands of people have gone days without electricity or phone service. With cell towers destroyed but landlines still working, long lines formed at pay phones, creating scenes from another era. Officials advised people to boil water before using it, after power failures knocked out local water treatment facilities.
Stores have run short of essentials like diapers, baby formula, bread and bottled water. With lodgings full, many people fleeing the fires have been forced to sleep in their cars.
Businesses with generators have continued to operate, but some have run out of fuel, and others are near that point.
Craig Scott, the manager of a supermarket in Ulladulla, a beach town about 100 miles south of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he planned to keep the generator there running by siphoning fuel from the tanks of fishing boats. He said the store had just gotten the generator a few months ago, when no one imagined how desperately it would be needed.
So vast and intense are the fires that they can create their own weather, generating winds as they suck in fresh air at ground level, and sparking lightning in the immense ash clouds that rise from them.
Canberra, Australia’s capital, recorded the worst air quality ever measured on Thursday; the largest city, Sydney, has been suffering through intense smoke for weeks; and ash from the blazes has darkened skies and coated glaciers in New Zealand, more than a thousand miles away.
Editors’ PicksWas That a Dropped Call From ET?
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
My Five-Week-Long First DateThe fires have set off anger at Prime Minister Morrison, in particular. He has played down the role of global warming, opposed measures to combat climate change and, at least initially, rejected additional funding for firefighters.
On Thursday, Mr. Morrison was heckled as he visited Cobargo, a New South Wales village where fires have killed two men and destroyed the main street. When he extended his hand to one woman, she said she would shake it only if he increased spending on firefighting.
“You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy,” one man yelled. “You’re out, son.”
As Mr. Morrison left hurriedly, the man taunted him about returning to Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s elegant official residence in Sydney, with spectacular views of the harbor and the city.
“I don’t see Kirribilli burning,” the man yelled.
Mr. Morrison said he understood residents’ frustration.
“I’m not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “That’s why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could.”
“I understand the very strong feelings people have — they’ve lost everything,” he said, adding that there were still “some very dangerous days ahead.”
'I don't take it personally' says Morrison on angry Cobargo visit (9news.com.au)
By Stuart Marsh
Nick Pearson
6:48pm Jan 3, 2020
- NOW
NSW Bushfires: Morrison cops unfiltered criticism in Cobargo
NSW Fires: PM visits Bega RFS
Australian Bushfires: PM pays tribute to fallen firies
Australia Bushfires: PM visits Kangaroo Island
Australia Bushfires: PM speaks on Cobargo locals' anger
Queensland Bushfires: Government rejects backburning accusations
Out of control bushfires in Victoria
Victoria Bushfires: Grandfather found dead
SA Bushfires: Two towns under threat
NSW Bushfires: Lake Conjola ravaged by fires
Victoria Bushfires: Images emerge of fire-ravaged towns
NSW Bushfires: Town of Cobargo up in flames
NSW Bushfires: Cobargo homes lost to fires
NSW Bushfires: NSW Transport Minister addresses bushfires
SA Bushfires: Latest updates from 9News
Australia Bushfires: PM announces recovery agency
Australia Bushfires: PM addresses bushfire crisis
Bushfire recovery: PM due to announce more funding
NSW bushfires: Latest updates from 9News
Australia Bushfires: PM to do ‘whatever it costs’
The Prime Minister has spoken about the angry reception he received in the bushfire-ravaged town of Cobargo on the NSW South Coast.
Speaking on 3AW this morning, Scott Morrison said the heckles, insults and heated words he copped from locals in the town was because they were hurting amid the ongoing crisis.
"Whether they're angry with me or their angry with the situation, they're hurting," he said.
"And it's my job to offer comfort and support.
"I don't take it personally."
Mr Morrison was touring the devastated region after fire tore through the township on Monday night, tragically killing a father and son.
After taking snaps with a few locals, Mr Morrison was ushered into a waiting car after locals began yelling their disapproval of the PM.Related
He was widely criticised for grabbing the hand of a volunteer firefighter who had declined to shake his hand.
Moments later, Mr Morrison excused the man's behaviour, describing the firefighter as "tired", before being told he'd just lost his own home while battling the ferocious blaze attacking his town.
Read more: NSW Liberal Minister Andrew Constance lashes out at PM
FOLLOW LIVE: Updates from Australia's bushfire crisis
Scott Morrison has been criticised for grabbing the hand of a volunteer firefighter who declined a handshake as he pondered the loss of his own home in blaze. (9News)
The PM made excuses for the firefighter who rejected his handshake before being told he'd actually lost his home while fighting the intense blaze closing in on his town. (9News)
Locals told Scott Morrison he was not welcome in their town. (9News)
"You won't be getting any votes down here buddy," one resident can be heard yelling.
"Who votes Liberal around here? Nobody."
Another can be heard referring to the recent Sydney Harbour New Year's Eve fireworks display, which the PM watched from his government residence at Kirribilli.
"Go home to Kirribilli. Why won't that burn down?" another local yelled.
"I don't see Kirribilli burning after the fireworks."
The Prime Minister was touring Cobargo to hear of the devastation as a result of the fires. (9News)
Residents expressed their concerns at PM Scott Morrison in the fire-ravaged town of Cobargo. (9News)
Others complained that government assistance was too slow to reach the town of Cobargo.
"This is not fair. We are totally forgotten down here. Every single time this area gets a flood or a fire we get nothing," yelled another.
"If we lived in Sydney or on the North Coast we would be flooded with donations and emergency relief."
Play Video
Australia Bushfires: PM leadership under question
Mr Morrison later told the ABC that he understood the strong feelings people in fire-ravaged areas have.
"I'm not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment," Mr Morrsion told the ABC.
"And that's why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could
"I understand the very strong feelings people have, they've lost everything. And there is still some very dangerous days ahead."
As soon as the yelling began the PM bid a hasty exit for a waiting Commonwealth car. (9News)Analysis: Chris O'Keefe
"It is the Prime Minister's attempt at sympathy and empathy and support, but didn't it backfire," 9News reporter Chris O'Keefe told Today.
"At the end of the day Scott Morrison was in Hawaii and he is pilloried for being out of the country and pilloried for not being anywhere in the last couple of weeks, not being on the front line of the fires, being at Kirribilli House - and he goes to the frontline and he cops this.
"This is a by-product of how it has been had handled by the Prime Minister. They are angry and they need someone to blame and it is Scott Morrison.
"If he wasn't getting the point, he got it yesterday in Cobargo.
"This RFS volunteer, he was fighting fires but he lost his own house. That is why he was so upset. This is palpable for these residents and Scott Morrison just walked straight into it."
Morrison grabbed the hand of a volunteer firefighter who declined a handshake as he pondered the loss of his won house in the fires. (AAP)
Play Video
Australia Bushfires: PM's attempt at empathy backfiresTragedy hits town
The township of Cobargo was one of the hardest hit in NSW, with the entire main street destroyed by the flames.
Tragically, the bodies of farmers Patrick Salway and his 63-year-old father Robert Salway were discovered on Tuesday morning by Robert's wife (the mother of Patrick).
The pair had perished after choosing to stay and defend the family property at Wandella, 20km north-west of Cobargo.
Yesterday Mr Morrison defended the federal government's role in the response to the ongoing bushfire crisis.
A resident of Cobargo surveys the rubble of his burnt-out home. (9News)
In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, he said a "coordinated response" was what was needed, at the same time calling for "patience" from disaster-hit Australians.
"What we won't allow to happen is for governments to be tripping over each other in order to somehow outbid each other in response," he said.
He urged Australians to have patience, days after some of their homes burned.
29-year-old Patrick Salway (right) and his wife Renee. Patrick tragically perished in the fires while protecting the family home. (Facebook)
"My simple request is to be patient, to have confidence in the state agencies," he said.
"What we are saying is we cannot control the natural disaster but what we can do is control our response."
Opinion | Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Australia Is Committing Climate SuicideAs record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.
By Richard Flanagan
- Jan. 3, 2020
An out-of-control fire in Hillville, in the Australian state of New South Wales, on Nov. 12.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesBRUNY ISLAND, Australia — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.
All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.
As I write, a state of emergency has been declared in New South Wales and a state of disaster in Victoria, mass evacuations are taking place, a humanitarian catastrophe is feared, and towns up and down the east coast are surrounded by fires, all transport and most communication links cut, their fate unknown.
- Thanks for reading The Times.
“All
we and most of Gipsy Point houses still here as of now. We have 16 people in Gipsy pt.
No power, no phone no chance of anyone arriving for 4 days as all roads blocked. Only satellite email is working We have 2 bigger boats and might be able to get supplies ‘esp fuel at Coota.
We need more able people to defend the town as we are in for bad heat from Friday again. Tucks area will be a problem from today, but trees down on all tracks, and no one to fight it.
The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”
And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.
Editors’ PicksWas That a Dropped Call From ET?
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
My Five-Week-Long First DateSince 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action.
In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory last year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia.
Since Mr. Morrison, an ex-marketing man, was forced to return from his vacation and publicly apologize, he has chosen to spend his time creating feel-good images of himself, posing with cricketers or his family. He is seen far less often at the fires’ front lines, visiting ravaged communities or with survivors. Mr. Morrison has tried to present the fires as catastrophe-as-usual, nothing out of the ordinary.
This posture seems to be a chilling political calculation: With no effective opposition from a Labor Party reeling from its election loss and with media dominated by Rupert Murdoch — 58 percent of daily newspaper circulation — firmly behind his climate denialism, Mr. Morrison appears to hope that he will prevail as long as he doesn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster engulfing Australia.
Agree to disagree, or disagree better? Broaden your perspective with sharp arguments on the most pressing issues of the week. Sign up here.Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating.
“Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. To which he might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure.
Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.
More than one-third of Australians are estimated to be affected by the fires. By a significant and increasing majority, Australians want action on climate change, and they are now asking questions about the growing gap between the Morrison government’s ideological fantasies and the reality of a dried-out, rapidly heating, burning Australia.
The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.
Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a pregnant woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.”
As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?
60 hours on Kangaroo Island: A reporter's diary documenting wildlife destruction (nationalgeographic.com)
60 hours on burning Kangaroo IslandDispatch from Australia: Our reporter describes the ongoing catastrophe of record bushfires on the continent's wildlife.
Kangaroo Island volunteer firefighter Jen Child took this photograph of fellow crew members after a long day of tamping down hot spots that continue to threaten wildlife, livestock, property, and human life a week after catastrophic fires swept across the western end of the island.
BY KENNEDY WARNE
PUBLISHED JANUARY 17, 2020
3 p.m. (New Zealand time), January 5
This is the day of the tangerine sky. It is midsummer, mid-afternoon, and the sky above Auckland, New Zealand, has turned dark orange, as if in an eclipse. Drivers turn on their headlights. Worried residents call the emergency number to ask what’s happening. Smoke from Australia’s bushfires is drifting across the ocean and turning our own sky fiery. We have seen the headlines: “Australia is burning,” “Australia is on fire,” even, “Australia is committing climate suicide.” We have seen the photos: a fire tornado, evacuated townsfolk sheltering on a beach, kangaroos leaping for their lives, flames turning forests incandescent, cockatoos dropping dead out of scorching skies. And now the disaster is above our heads, eerily present though 1,400 miles away. It used to be that the symbol of climate change in the South Pacific was a drowning atoll; now it’s a burning continent.
On January 9, when this satellite image was recorded, a third of Kangaroo Island had been burned. Hot weather and unfavorable winds that day caused the fires
… Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN DAUPHIN, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY/LANDSAT
Midday, January 9
I board a plane to Adelaide, South Australia, and stumble on an inflight movie miniseries about Chernobyl. I watch it obsessively for the next four hours. Its relevance feels uncanny. A nuclear meltdown in preparation for a climate meltdown, each cataclysm surrounded by its own political ecosystem of deception and denial, promulgated, in the words of Chernobyl’s narrator, by “an entire congregation of obedient fools.” Chernobyl was madness. Climate change is madness. When do we reach a tipping point with this? When do we start to become sane?
11 a.m. (South Australia time), January 9
I walk across the tarmac and feel the dragon’s breath on my neck and scalp. The temperature is 99°F, and in two hours it will reach 106. The sky has the faded look of an atmosphere drained of moisture. A taxi takes me through the city’s outer suburbs into the country. A road sign points to a “bushfire last resort refuge.” The message is no exaggeration. In February 1983, on Ash Wednesday, deadly fires swept across the outskirts of Adelaide and other parts of the states of South Australia and Victoria, destroying thousands of homes, killing hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle, and taking the lives of 65 people, including 17 firefighters. Black Saturday, in February 2009, was even deadlier, killing 173 people. Some of the individual fires in those events spread at speeds exceeding 70 mph. People driving at the speed limit on freeways watched the fire front pass them. This season’s bushfires have so far burned across 65,000 square miles, an area the size of Florida, destroyed more than 2,200 homes, and killed 28 people. A billion animals may have perished.
A dusty driveway on a parched hillside leads me to the home of the founders of SAVEM (South Australian Veterinary Emergency Management), a volunteer organization formed in the wake of Black Saturday to provide a coordinated response to retrieve, triage, and treat farm animals, pets, and wildlife during an emergency. Veterinarians from local practices are gathering here for a three-day deployment on Kangaroo Island, 70 miles from Adelaide, which has been ravaged since fires spread catastrophically on Friday, January 3.
The fires on Kangaroo Island spread so quickly that even fast-moving kangaroos were caught in the conflagration that has left forests reduced to charred stumps.
What Australia's fires mean for koala survival
Emilis Prelgauskas, who handles logistics for the group, greets me at the door with his two greyhounds. He says that what’s been happening on the island, which is about 90 miles long and 55 at its widest point, is unprecedented. “No one expected 30 percent of Kangaroo Island to burn in one go,” he says. “This level of destruction has not been contemplated. We’re talking about a new reality. And if we don’t get significant rain, which we may not get until May, then this fire will continue until May.”
He says that the work the volunteers will be doing is dangerous, complex, and traumatic. “The fire of January 3 may have burned 85 percent of animals on the fire ground—[live]stock and wildlife. Either killed them outright or took them so close to death that the kindest thing you can do is put a bullet through them. And yes, our teams have been using bullets. The truth is that a wild animal that has been traumatized by the fire, traumatized by its injuries—are you going to traumatize it more with human handling? This is about the welfare of the animal, not about making ourselves feel good.”
The team is ready. They're taking a private plane made available by a supporter. They drop me at the airport for my commercial flight.
5:15 p.m., January 9
Oliver Funnell, another SAVEM veterinarian, is booked on the same small turboprop plane. I ask him about the challenges of treating large, wild animals. He says it’s almost impossible to hospitalize and treat an adult kangaroo. They’re too big and too flighty. “They’d probably kill themselves if you tried to contain them, and might kill or injure you as well,” he says.
We climb out of Adelaide into a smoke bank that lasts all the way to Kangaroo Island. I’ve been told that the January 3 fire was so hot it melted concrete at a luxury lodge, where staff survived by sheltering in a bunker. It caused flakes of granite to peel from the Remarkable Rocks, a tourist attraction in Flinders Chase National Park. That park is now mostly ash. “Pompeii,” one wildlife rescuer calls it. Flinders Chase celebrated its 100th anniversary in October 2019. Some anniversary present.
8 p.m., January 9
A blood-red moon rises through the smoke haze east of Flour Cask Bay, on the south coast of the island. Motel owner John Hofmann and I watch flecks of ash drift past on the breeze. Kangaroos are sipping from water bowls he has set out nearby. They move cautiously, walking in an awkward combination of diminutive elbows and massive hind legs. But when they hop, they’re grace incarnate.
“We may have to evacuate,” Hofmann warns. The fire authorities have issued a “watch and act” notification for this area as winds blow the fire front in our direction.
Ninety percent of Kangaroo Island’s timber plantations have been burned since December, including hundreds of acres of highly flammable eucalyptus.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LISA KARRAN
Unbeknown to us, across the world, on American late-night television, Patti Smith reads a poem about “fires raging the Earth” and sings Neil Young’s 50-year-old song “After the Gold Rush,” updating the last line to “Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century.” It could be an anthem for an island on fire.
3:45 a.m., January 10
I am awakened by Hofmann’s footsteps on the veranda. He knocks on the glass door. “Time to go,” he calls. He’s loading a trailer with camping equipment, food, water, torches, a generator. Who knows when we’ll be coming back. I stand with his sister and brother-in-law, the only other guests, facing an orange glow in the sky. It’s very warm, very quiet. The ash has stopped falling. Notifications say that the fire is threatening the airport. The road to Kingscote, the island’s main town of 1,800 people, has been closed. Our part of the island is cut off. We deliberate. Hofmann, a trained firefighter, looks at the wind forecast. It’s still blowing from the west, in our direction, but is predicted to swing south. That will reduce the danger. We have an evacuation route to the coast if the fire flares. Should we stay or go?
“I think we go,” Hofmann says. I follow his four-by-four to Penneshaw, the island’s second largest settlement, on the eastern peninsula. We pull into a sportsground and line up with other vehicles and tents. I push the car seat back and try to sleep.
6 a.m., January 10
A flock of shrieking corellas, a loud-mouthed species of cockatoo, land in a nearby tree, ending any prospect of further rest. The road to Kingscote has reopened, so I follow a fleet of emergency rescue vehicles traveling in that direction. I find my way to a café called Cactus, where the servers alternate between taking orders and hugging customers. At times like this, cafés provide as much therapy as they do sustenance. One server tells me she isn’t supposed to be working today, “but when people are coming in who have lost everything, you want to be here.” The editor of the island newspaper arrives and orders breakfast. He’s been working round the clock, keeping the community up to date and positive. “It’s on us, Stan,” she says. “So is the kale smoothie.”
There’s a stream of army reservists, firefighters, farm support people, park rangers, media coming through the doors. I strike up a conversation with a local family and within minutes am taken to their home, where they’re looking after a kangaroo joey and a young brushtailed possum. The possum is in a bird cage. The joey hops around the living room. Robyn Karran steps into the garden to pick roses, which the possum gobbles greedily. Her daughter, Lisa, a wildlife rescuer who is married to the local policeman, shows me photos of animals they’ve helped. She estimates they’re driven 600 miles around the island since the fires began, picking up survivors.
“There’s not a lot of life out there,” Lisa says. What there is can break your heart—animals frozen in the moment the fire took them, a baby koala still holding a eucalyptus branch, blown out of its tree. “This little guy,” she says, showing me a photo of a kangaroo joey, “was out of the pouch but still suckling on mum. There was no food around. They would have starved to death. I jumped on him and took him back to the car, but found that his feet were burned down to the bone. He wouldn’t have survived. So I had to say goodbye to him. That crushed me.” She left food and water for the mother and took the joey to Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park to be euthanized.
She says that sometimes, as they drive around, they can’t even tell where they are. “It all looks the same. Vaporized.” Normal fires leave tree skeletons standing in the landscape. In some areas, this fire has left little more than matchsticks and ash.
While I’m talking to the Karrans, at a press conference in Kingscote, the island’s mayor, Michael Pengilly, tells reporters there is no connection between the fires and a changing climate.
1 p.m., January 10
I drive west through the town of Parndana to Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, which escaped destruction when Friday’s fires swept through the center of the island. Smoke is still billowing across the highway. Rows of round hay bales in a paddock smolder, some of them reduced to charred lumps. Melted roadside markers bend over like drooping flowers. Road signs are unreadable. A vineyard, every vine, every leaf scorched, a support post still on fire. I want to call someone. “Put it out.” But flare-ups much worse than this have incinerated more than 800 square miles of Kangaroo Island so far.
It’s a miracle that the wildlife park is still intact, the animals alive. Fires raged on three sides but didn’t join up. Staff have converted a dining area into a field hospital, and the SAVEM veterinarians are changing the dressings on koalas’ feet. Three medics to an animal, working steadily through the patients. An anesthetic injection to reduce the handling trauma, then the feet are unwrapped, swabbed, smeared with antiseptic cream, and rebandaged. A saline drip is connected to hydrate the animals, and a painkiller popped into their mouths. New victims arrive in wheelbarrows as the treated koalas are moved to hastily erected pens. There they sit, shell-shocked, on eucalyptus branches. Traumatized, but alive.
7 p.m., January 10
Richard Glatz, an entomologist, inhabits a world of smaller creatures, ones less thought about when disaster strikes. I drive to his home in D’Estrees Bay, which he shares with Janine Mackintosh, an assemblage artist who draws her materials and inspiration from the 800 acres of woodland, heathland, and wetland that surround them on the island’s south coast. She feels fiercely protective toward these natural landscapes.
Today their own home needs protecting. The doors and windows are covered with aluminium insulation, to reflect heat if fire approaches. The previous night, the two had packed their vehicles with their most precious possessions and parked them in a farm field near a dam. Glatz had made sure he had access to the ceiling space in his research hut where he stores tens of thousands of insect specimens, so he could fight a fire if it broke out there.
Normally, the birdsong here would be constant, they say. Now the only sound is an indifferent wind.
He shows me the collection, pulling out glass-topped trays of specimens neatly pinned and labeled, each a work of the entomologist’s art, a meticulous record of life in this place. He points to a moth named after him, Aenigmatinea glatzella, the enigma moth. Its name refers to the puzzling time taxonomists had in figuring out where it fit in the moth lineage. Endemic to the island, it’s so ancient as to be classified in a family by itself.
Gorgeous, much larger eastern bronze azure butterflies are arrayed next to the enigmas. These butterflies lay their eggs on the nests of a single species of ant. When the eggs hatch, the ants appear to be fooled into taking the larvae down into the nest, where they are either fed by the ants, or, it is speculated, eat the ants’ own offspring. The butterfly larvae pupate in the nest, then emerge briefly to mate and start the cycle again. Glatz says that at this time of year the larvae are still underground. Have they survived the broiling heat of the fires?
Glatz picks another insect out of its tray: a green carpenter bee, one of more than a hundred native species of bee on the island and one for which he has a special fondness. Extinct in mainland South Australia and Victoria, it persists in a few sites on Kangaroo Island and in the ranges around Sydney. Metallic green, twice the size of a honeybee, it’s a showy creature with a reclusive lifestyle: It drills into the dead flower stalks of yacca, the iconic Australian grass tree, which looks like a giant green pompom, and into the rotting trunks of old banksia trees to make its nests—hence the name carpenter.
The banksias are crucial, Glatz says. While yaccas recover and flower quickly after a fire, their flower stalks soon disintegrate, and the plants may not flower again for years. The carpenter bees need the longstanding banksias to carry them through multiple seasons. Glatz wants to see if the banksias are still standing after the fires and invites me to join him the next day as he searches for survivors.
8 a.m., January 11
The entomologist, the artist, and the reporter drive westward. We take two vehicles for safety. We pass a flock of dove-grey Cape Barren geese in a paddock. We pass charred beehives. Close to a thousand commercial beehives have been lost on Kangaroo Island. When a hive burns, the beeswax melts, and the honey streams out. One beekeeper found to his dismay that birds called New Holland honeyeaters had come to the river of sweetness, become stuck in the thickening honey, and died.
We come to Church Road—I can just make out the blistered letters on the blackened street sign. But this is not Church Road, this is “desolation row.” Beside the geometrically straight lines of a burned eucalyptus plantation, the ground is scattered with koala bodies. Like pandas, koalas are a global emblem of all that is endearing in the natural world. Their charred, furless bodies lie in the ashes at my feet. According to one of the owners of Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, half the Island’s estimated 50,000 koalas may have succumbed.
Farther up the road, we stop at the property of some of Glatz’s and Mackintosh’s friends. The home is a pile of rubble covered with the twisted iron of the fallen roof. The windows have exploded, blasting glass hundreds of feet away. The roof of a garage on the property has been blown across the road, ending up wrapped around the skeletons of trees. Plastic water tanks have melted like toffee.
This isn’t Mother Nature. This isn’t natural at all.
PAT HODGENS, WILDLIFE ECOLOGIST
The property next door has fared no better. We see something that touches us deeply. A row of salvaged coffee cups has been set out on a sheet of iron and filled with water. Even in the total loss of their homes, the owners have made sure that there is water for heat-parched animals and birds. Next to what was the house is an orchard enclosed in wire netting to protect the harvest from fruit-loving creatures. The trees—laden with nectarines, apples, plums—are scorched brown, the fruit shrunken but still holding on. As the owners turned away from the ruins, they opened the gate to the orchard so that birds could have the fruit.
We return to our vehicles solemn, distressed, moved by acts of kindness. My companions remark on the silence. Normally, the birdsong here would be constant, they say. Now the only sound is an indifferent wind sighing in the darkened trees.
We drive west to the entrance of Kelly Hill Conservation Area, one of Glatz’s carpenter bee sites, and walk a few hundred yards through an ash landscape, looking for the host trees. But the old banksia trunks have gone. We don’t see a single one. It’s a serious blow: By such deletions species are lost, and ecosystems unravel.
Yet there is life here. The fire has opened the cones of a small shrub, the endemic Kangaroo Island conestick, and they’re spilling white seeds onto the ashy soil. Glatz kneels to pick some up. One of the fears ecologists have is that with a fire of this intensity the seed banks that hold the key to regrowth may be destroyed, heated beyond their tolerance. Veronica Bates, a botanist on the island, tells me that it will take an autumn, winter, and spring before they know which seeds have survived and can form the basis of a vegetation recovery.
That much of Australia’s flora is fire-adapted is common knowledge. What isn’t as widely appreciated is that historical fires typically burned with less ferocious heat. South Australians tell me repeatedly that these latest fires are not comparable. They have arisen in the midst of fire seasons that have increased from six months to nine. They’re more like furnaces than fires. Yes, there will be recovery. But what will be lost? Bates tells me something hard to believe: that farms in the western half of Kangaroo Island were once marginal in winter because they were too wet. That seems a distant memory now. Looking at the stricken landscape at Kelly Hill, I wonder if Glatz’s carpenter bees are just a memory too.
12:50 p.m., January 11
Wildlife ecologist Pat Hodgens takes me into a forest remnant on the north coast, one of the few recorded locations of the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-size marsupial on the verge of extinction. The species is known from only 13 sites in western Kangaroo Island, Hodgens says, and all of those locations have now been burned, some beyond recognition. This one was lucky. It burned in the December fire, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, Hodgens says. The resulting loss of undergrowth meant less fuel was available for ignition by the more intense blaze of January 3, and the site was spared. We’re in ironstone country—the name for the iron-rich soils that cover much of the island. Ironstone is a geological lightning rod, and it was a lightning strike that ignited the fires that so far have burned almost half the island.
“I saw the thunderstorm approaching,” he says, “and I thought, Here we go. This could be the end. No one could have predicted what happened last Friday—that every other dunnart site would be fried.”
With so much of the surrounding bush now destroyed, a different pressure has come to bear: predators, especially feral cats, the most severe predators of Kangaroo Island’s native wildlife. “When a predator-naive marsupial goes up against a highly evolved predator like a cat, it doesn’t stand a chance,” Hodgens tells me.
In the coming weeks, a six-foot-high cat-proof fence will be installed around this critical habitat. Meanwhile, Hodgens and his partner, Heidi Groffen, have installed two types of cat trap to give the dunnarts, bandicoots, and other marsupials a chance. We check several cage traps, which Hodgens baits with chicken wings. We find no trapped cats but liberate two goannas. The two-foot-long lizards streak away into what little undergrowth remains. Hodgens shows me a more high-tech device called a Felixer grooming trap, designed to identify a feral cat passing in front of it and shoot a blob of toxic paste onto the animal’s fur. The cat licks the paste and dies.
I follow Hodgens through charred shrubbery where he checks the memory cards of motion-activated trail cameras. He shades a camera screen, and we make out the shape of a dunnart that has snuffled past in the night. This is thrilling news—the species lives. Yet even this relief feels fragile and provisional.
As we drive back to the road, Hodgens voices a frustration. “People often say, ‘The bush always comes back. It will regenerate. Fire’s natural. It’s all good. Mother Nature knows best.’ This isn’t Mother Nature. This isn’t natural at all. The bush doesn’t come back. Superficially, yes, it will look green, it will have flowers and birds, but it might not have dunnarts in it ever again unless we can take care of the remnants we’ve got. Dunnarts need a variety of habitats. They need old growth, they need thick undergrowth, they need a bit of everything. We don’t know if they will recover from this.”
5 p.m., January 11
A concert has been organized to lift the islanders’ spirits. One singer steps to the microphone and says, “My name’s Craig. I was born here. I’ve lost everything. Here’s a song about that.”
He's followed by Glatz, who sings Ben Folds's song "Smoke" and, true to his profession, one about a housefly and a typewriter. At one point during the evening, the audience chants in unison: "Bring back the bush."
I meet the couple with the orchard in Church Road. Tomorrow they’re taking out food pellets and hay for the wallabies. “We’ve still got survivors coming out of the bush,” they say. “They’re our priority.”
8:30 a.m., January 12
On my way to the airport, I visit a clifftop archaeological site called Red Banks, one of dozens of sites around the island where the first people left evidence of an occupation that stretches back more than 10,000 years. I would like to ask those people about how to live endure, how to survive on this island, on this Earth. I think they would start by saying that humans are not separate from nature—that land, waters, people, plants, animals are one living tissue.
Much of Flinders Chase National Park, which celebrated its hundredth anniversary last October, has been reduced to ash. For kangaroos, koalas, wallabies
… Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY LISA MAREE WILLIAMS, GETTY IMAGES
At my feet, half-inch-long ants are busy around the entrance to their nest. I don’t know the temperament of these insects, so I keep my distance. In the Aboriginal world, they are my kin, and I am their custodians. As Aboriginal writer Tyson Yunkaporta puts it: “This is why we’re here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between.”
It strikes me that pretty much everyone I’ve met on Kangaroo Island is “looking after things”—from firefighters to café servers, koala rescuers to dunnart ecologists, dedicated vets to devastated homeowners who give water and fruit to wildlife. How do we begin to do this when it’s not an emergency? Or when it’s a permanent emergency? The past decade, 2010 to 2019, has been the planet’s hottest on record, and the thermometer’s not going down.
11:45 a.m., January 12
At the departure gate for my flight to Auckland, I see a TV screen playing an interview with Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister. The interviewer has just challenged him with a comment from former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that "if ever there was a crisis not to waste, it is this one." Morrison dismisses the comment, stressing the importance of a strong economy and "Australia’s broader national interests"—such as being the world's leading exporter of coal. I remark to passengers watching next to me about the logic of needing to make lots of money from climate-damaging industries to fund the recovery that results from climate-damaging industries.
12:15 p.m., January 12
I watch the final episode of Chernobyl on the flight home. The narrator confronts the seeming futility of his profession as a scientist. “To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not.” Isn’t this the story of climate science?
Some people—including even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—think Chernobyl was the tipping point that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, overturning an establishment based on secrets and lies. What will be the tipping point that awakens humanity to its present condition, ending the denial of the climate crisis? Chernobyl caused the Soviet people to question the political reality of their times. Their government could not, would not protect them. They came to see the system as irredeemable. How many fires does it take to get to that point?
Wildfires have spread dramatically—and some forests may not recover (nationalgeographic.com)
Wildfires have spread dramatically—and some forests may not recoverAn explosion in the frequency and extent of wildfires worldwide is hindering recovery even in ecosystems that rely on natural blazes to survive.
BY JOHN PICKRELL
PUBLISHED JANUARY 30, 2020
Pungent and damp, the so-called tall, wet forests of southeastern Australia are home to the tallest flowering plants on Earth. Eucalyptus regnans, the Latin name of the mountain ash, means “ruler of the gum trees”—which is fitting, given these giants can reach more than 300 feet high.
Many of Australia’s gum trees, particularly those in drier forest types, are famously able to tolerate fire, throwing out new buds and shoots within weeks of being engulfed in flames. But even these tenacious species have their limits.
Old-growth forests of the mountain ash and a related species, the alpine ash, are among the gum trees that are less tolerant of intense blazes. In the state of Victoria, these trees had already been severely depleted by logging and land clearing. Now, the bushfires that have burned more than 26 million acres of eastern Australia in recent months are putting the forests at even greater risk.
Some of the forests razed this year have experienced four bushfires in the past 25 years, meaning they’ve had no chance to recover, says David Lindenmayer, an ecologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.
“They should be burning no more than every 75 to 125 years, so that’s just an extraordinary change to fire regimes,” he says. “Mountain ash need to be about 15 to 30 years old before they can produce viable amounts of seed to replace themselves following fire.”
The loss of these dominant trees is a significant problem, since they provide vital habitat for threatened animal species such as the sooty owl, the giant burrowing frog, and a fluffy arboreal marsupial called the greater glider. (Also find out how Australia’s fires can create big problems for freshwater supplies.)
.“The ecosystem has effectively collapsed, it’s transitioned into something else … more likely to be colonized by generalist, weedy plants,” says John Woinarski, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory. “They’ll converge into less interesting, less distinctive vegetation that supports fewer threatened plants and animals.”
As the world warms with climate change, the situation in Australia reflects what’s happening in forests globally—from California and Canada to Brazil and Borneo. Even forests made up of species that thrive on cycles of fire and regrowth are losing resilience in the face of wildfires that are escalating in frequency, severity, and extent. According to research published earlier this month, climate change is significantly increasing the risk of wildfires by stimulating hot and dry conditions and high-risk weather. Over the past 40 years, the length of fire seasons has increased by 20 percent across more than a quarter of the world’s vegetated land surface.
California, for instance, suffered its worst ever wildfires in 2018. Record blazes also struck other places with arid Mediterranean-type ecosystems, such as Greece and Portugal. Tropical rainforests are being hit, too, with recent satellite data showing an 11-year high in Amazon deforestation, much of it through deliberately set fires for land clearing. Even boreal forests and tundra are igniting—fires consumed many millions of acres of Alaska and Siberia in 2019. (Here’s what Portugal’s wildfires may teach us about how to live with mega-fires.)
“Places that people didn’t think could burn are now burning,” says Craig Allen, an ecologist who studies the effect of climate change on forests at the U.S. Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The great dryingOne of the things changing globally is that the air is getting warmer, Allen says. As air warms, it holds more water, drawing moisture out of the environment, drying soils, and stressing trees. This makes ecosystems more flammable and trees more likely to be attacked by insects, which increases the number of dead trees, further exacerbating fire risk.
“Warming temperatures are making fuel more available and lengthening fire seasons,” he says. “The fire season in western North America is two to three months longer than 30 years ago.”
The number of years with severe wildfires is also increasing, says Camille Stevens-Rumann, a scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who studies how ecosystems respond to disturbance.
“Whereas before, maybe you had one a decade, or even less frequently, now, we’re seeing these large, bad fires at least every other year,” she says.
Last year was Australia’s driest and hottest in 120 years of record taking. An unprecedented drought left forests tinder dry and poised to ignite in fires that started in September and peaked in late December, burning great swathes of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria.
“The places burned will bear the marks of this year for centuries,” says Joe Fontaine, a fire ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. “Drier forests, which burn more readily, will likely replace wet forests in many places.”
Similarly, increasingly frequent and intense fires in North America are acting like a filter, slowly pushing out dominant vegetation, Allen says. For more than a century, forest management has largely suppressed fires in the region’s Ponderosa pine forests, resulting in a huge increase in tree density. But extreme weather is making fires harder to suppress, and when they do blaze, they are so intense they are killing “mother trees,” which are vital for reseeding the next generation following fire.
“Ponderosa pine forests are perfectly suited to high-frequency, low-intensity forest fires, burning in grass and pine needles in the understory,” he says. “But if severe fires get into the canopy of the trees, the pines don’t tolerate that and die as mature individuals, which don’t regenerate.”
Surrounded by scorched trees, Steve Bear, Station Fire Reforestation Project leader with the U.S. Forest Service, surveys the area where Ponderosa Pine seedlings were planted in the Station Fire burn area at Barley Flats, in the Angeles National Forest.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLEN J. SCHABEN, LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGESPonderosa pine seeds rarely disperse further than about 500 feet, so when trees die, they’re leaving huge gaps. In some mountainous forests of western North America, Allen says, “we’re getting a wholesale conversion from dominant conifer forests—spruces, firs, and pines—to areas with a larger proportion of grasses and shrubs.”
Stacked disturbancesWhere forests can’t fully recover from fire, the animal species that rely on those ecosystems will face increasing challenges. Part of the problem is that species struggling through frequent fire events are often already stressed by other climate-related impacts, such as drought, heatwaves, and pest infestations. Whether so-called stacked disturbances are further compounding recovery is “a crucial and massively important question” to answer, Fontaine says.
His team has been studying a fire-tolerant shrub, Banksia hookeriana, from Western Australia which holds its seeds in a woody cone that only opens after fire. They’ve found that since the 1980s, climate change has caused a 50-percent reduction in the number of seeds it produces. Combine increasing fire intensity with climate change, and the shrub is facing a Sisyphean fate.
“Numbers like this take climate change from theoretical to a slap in the face,” Fontaine says.
This pattern spells bad news for many North American animal species that prefer old-growth forests, such as the spotted owl and the Canada lynx, says Stevens-Rumann. Australia’s current bushfires have so far burned more than 80 percent of the habitat of about 50 threatened species. The entire ranges of some have been obliterated, such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a shrew-sized marsupial carnivore, and the mountain trachymene, a fire-sensitive herb.
Losing these individual plants and animals from the landscape means we may also be losing important interactions between species, which could have unforeseen impacts on ecosystem function and their ability to recover from fire.
In Portugal, wildflowers appeared to burst back to life abundantly after fires, but a study published last year found that species of moths that are vital for pollinating them were transporting just a fifth of the pollen they were carrying in unburnt areas, spelling trouble for regeneration further down the line.
However, not all species will dwindle as wildfires increase. More than a century of fire suppression in North America had led to a decline in the black-backed woodpecker, which is camouflaged to blend in against burned trees. An increase in fires is now seeing it bounce back, Stevens-Rumann says.
In Australia, many predators—such as monitor lizards, some birds of prey, and introduced cats and foxes—actively seek out fire scars to hunt survivors that are left exposed in landscapes devoid of cover. Other animals that thrive in post-fire landscapes include the fire chaser beetles in the genus Melanophila, which lay their eggs in freshly burnt wood, where their larvae develop. Even species that are relatively common can benefit following fire, Stevens-Rumann adds.
“If you open up that forest and there are abundant shrubs and grasses … we tend to see a resurgence of things like deer and elk.”
Beacons of hopeWhile bigger, hotter wildfires are becoming an increasingly common reality, experts agree that the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. We need to be more ambitious, creative, and adventurous in our approach to conservation in a world where environmental disasters are more pervasive, says Woinarski.
“It's a major challenge and … we won't have all of the solutions in the short term.”
Post-fire seeding, for example, happens often in North America but is rare in Australia. Lindenmayer says that dropping mountain ash seeds from helicopters may be something they consider in the future. Planting forests with non-native, fire-resistant vegetation is a more radical idea. And better land management is another part of the solution.
“There’s this great Finnish proverb that says, Fire is a good servant, but a bad master,” notes Stevens-Rumann, alluding to the fact that humans can use fire effectively as a tool as long as it stays under our control. (Here’s how California is turning to natural solutions to manage wildfires.)
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal people in Australia effectively prevented large blazes by reducing fuel, such as dry grasses and leaf litter, with frequent, small, hand-set burns. Now there are increasing calls for a return to that kind of traditional burning.
“We suppress 98 percent of fires that start in the U.S., meaning that it’s only those 2 percent that make the news or are large,” says Stevens-Rumann. “But if we use more of that 98 percent to actually help clear high fuel loads, and create a more mosaic landscape, we have the potential to stop the spread of those large extreme fires.”
Nevertheless, the climate change trajectory we are on will mean an unavoidable increase in droughts, heatwaves, and other drivers of fire. Several decades from now, 2019 may be regarded as normal year, or even a relatively cool and wet year, Allen says.
“It’s a really foreboding future that has crept up on us very quickly,” Woinarski adds. “We’re witnessing the beginning of the deterioration of many of our most loved ecological systems. That's a tragedy for us, but a worse tragedy for our descendants.”
Koalas, wombats, other marsupials struggle to recover from Australia’s bushfires (nationalgeographic.com)
Koalas and other marsupials struggle to recover from Australia’s bushfiresThe pandemic slowed recovery efforts, but help for the animals is coming.
A rescued eastern grey kangaroo stands on the burned grounds of a house and wildlife shelter in February 2020 after fires swept through the town of Goongerah in the Australian state of Victoria. Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia were the hardest hit by the 2019-2020 bushfire season, which is estimated to have killed more than a billion animals.
BY TODD WOODY
PUBLISHED JULY 17, 2020
MORE THAN SIX months after cataclysmic bushfires incinerated an Iowa-size swath of Australia, estimates of the staggering number of native animals killed continue to grow even as the fate of surviving wildlife remains largely unknown.
“The data is still coming in, but if anything, the estimate that a billion animals died was more conservative than I realized,” says Chris Dickman, a University of Sydney ecologist who calculated the preliminary death toll. “I think there’s no doubt that some species will go extinct.”
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted most recovery efforts in March. Travel restrictions and social distancing mandates left many scientists homebound and scores of species struggling to survive in apocalyptic landscapes. The lockdown came as the Australian government identified 119 priority animal species “requiring urgent management intervention.
Australia has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinction, and most of the animals that have disappeared since colonization have been marsupials, or animals whose young develop in their mothers’ pouches. Of the mammal species on the government’s post-fire priority list, the majority are marsupials with declining populations and whose habitat overlaps the range of the bushfires.
Some scientists and volunteers have been able to venture into burn zones to aid koalas, wombats, and other wildlife. What they’re finding indicates the extent of the devastation and the challenges native animals face in bouncing back from fires so intense they obliterated all life in the most ravaged areas.
The fires, according to a new government report, have also laid bare just how little is known about populations of even iconic species like the koala, as well as how little protection conservation laws have provided vulnerable wildlife amid rampant deforestation, development, and climate change.
“Just doing those initial assessments and trying to figure out where we need to focus first has been hampered by this lack of fundamental data,” says Sarah Legge, a wildlife ecologist at Australian National University who helped draft a recovery strategy for the government.
Danger in the trees
Scientists, for instance, long thought few koalas lived in the Blue Mountains, a 2.5 million-acre World Heritage Area of soaring escarpments, deep gorges, and eucalyptus forests 80 miles west of Sydney in the state of New South Wales.
Then in 2013 researchers from a nonprofit conservation organization, Science for Wildlife, began conducting surveys and found large numbers of koalas in the region. That was good news for a threatened species that has long been in decline because of drought, deforestation, and disease. Even better, the scientists discovered that the Blue Mountains population was not only growing, but it was among the most genetically diverse in Australia. It was also largely free of chlamydia, a deadly disease that causes infertility and that afflicts koalas nationwide.
When bushfires began to engulf the Blue Mountains last December, Science for Wildlife’s executive director, Kellie Leigh, scrambled to organize a rescue operation of koalas that had been previously outfitted with radio collars. Authorities gave her team just two days to evacuate them.
“We thought if it all burns, at least we would have got some good genes out,” says Leigh.
Radio trackers fanned out through the scorching and smoky wilderness, and koala catchers scaled 130-foot-tall eucalyptus trees to retrieve the animals. They saved 10 adults and two juveniles. A koala named Houdini had to be left behind as there was no time to extract him from a deep ravine.
The fires burned 80 percent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Based on her past surveys, Leigh thinks that a thousand koalas died in the conflagrations. A report released June 30 by the New South Wales parliament estimates that the bushfires killed at least 5,000 koalas—as much as a third of the state population—and that the fires destroyed 24 percent of koala habitat on public lands. It concluded that koalas in the state face extinction by 2050. New South Wales has roughly 10 percent of Australia’s total koala population, though estimates of state and national numbers vary because of a lack of surveys. A 2016 study pegged the number at 329,000 koalas nationwide. (Read more: Koalas are not ‘functionally extinct’—yet.)
Across Australia, at least 30,000 koalas died in the fires, according to experts.
“It was pretty depressing and still is,” Leigh says. “You go out to the badly burned areas and there’s nothing living.”
After the fires, her team studied satellite images to identify woodlands with sufficient remaining tree cover. Then they unleashed a koala-detecting dog named Smudge to search for signs of survivors in prospective resettlement habitat.
“He found a lot of burned scat but also some fresh stuff, so we got an idea of where and when koalas were moving through the area,” says Leigh.
A mother koala and her joey are released into a state forest in Victoria after being treated for burns. Because bushfires destroyed their home, they had to be resettled in woodlands 70 miles away.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESYHer staff and more than 140 volunteers spent two months building and deploying food and drinking stations for surviving koalas before the lockdown. In March, they returned the rescued koalas to the Blue Mountains.
Leigh has continued to radio track and observe the koalas throughout the pandemic. “They’re not in top-notch body condition, but they’re doing OK,” she says. But “if most of their home ranges burned, they’re not going to have enough resources to survive longer term.”
Safety in burrows
In contrast to the global media attention focused on the koala’s plight, the fate of the marsupial’s closest cousin, the bare-nosed wombat, has been largely overlooked.
Fires tore through the Southern Highlands south of Sydney after midnight on January 5. “When then sun came up, there was nothing, and I mean nothing there but absolute blackness for as far as the eye could see,” says John Creighton, a wombat carer in the town of Bundanoon who had expected to find hundreds of injured animals in the morning. “It was otherworldly silent. There were no birds, no wallabies, no kangaroos.”
There were wombats, though.
“They were the only animal to make it through the fires,” Creighton says of the stocky, bear-like marsupials that spend most of their time in deep burrows. “The wombats were just sitting in the entrance to their burrows, disoriented and in shock as everything they knew had been erased.”
He had already been providing supplemental water and food to the wombats because a years-long drought had left them with little to eat or drink. In the wake of the fires, he stepped up efforts as the animals faced starvation in an obliterated landscape.
Creighton and volunteers set up feeding stations on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery that borders a burned national park. Wombats have a keen sense of smell, and they soon made their way to the food and water. Solitary creatures whose cuddly appearance belies their fierceness, the wombats gathered in uncharacteristically large groups.
A roadside sign stands amid the desolation from fires that burned this area of Victoria in late 2019. Experts say that fires in some places burned so hot that some ecosystems may never recover.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESY
Left: Wildlife carer Rena Gaborov bottle feeds a young male bare-nosed wombat named Kip in January 2020. Gaborov evacuated Kip and other animals from her wildlife shelter in Victoria before it was destroyed by bushfires weeks earlier. Tens of millions of dollars in donations have
… Read More
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG GIMESY“There would be eight wombats around a feeding station,” Creighton says. “They were virtually waiting in line to eat.”
Weeks after the fires, he found a wombat near death. “She was just skin and bones but had the biggest head I’ve ever seen and would have been queen of that forest,” says Creighton. “Wombats like that survived the fires only to die of starvation and thirst.” While there are no scientific estimates of wombat deaths during and after the fires, he says it’s likely that “thousands and thousands of wombats” perished.
Then came torrential rains that finally snuffed out the fires but flooded wombat burrows, killing scores of animals.
Today, community volunteers are still feeding about a hundred wombats at the monastery. “As areas are greening up, animals are moving back,” Creighton says. “But the burned areas are still desolate, and it’s shocking how little feed is growing.”
Back in the field
Evan Quartermain, head of programs for Humane Society International Australia, was on Kangaroo Island in South Australia after firestorms killed half of the isle’s 50,000 koalas. It’s uncertain, he says, if the insects, fungi, seeds, and microbes needed to recover the ecosystem survived temperatures that reached nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. “It may be that some building blocks of the ecosystem will not come back,” he says. (Read more: Some of Australia's forests may not recover.)
Many crucial wildlands had been destroyed by development before the fires. The New South Wales parliamentary koala inquiry found that even after laws were implemented to protect koala habitat, deforestation increased because of lax enforcement of environmental regulations. The state government, for example, has approved the construction a coal mine in prime koala habitat in New South Wales. Accelerating climate change and severe drought have put further pressure on habitats.
A wildlife study commissioned by WWF Australia found a 90 percent reduction in ground-dwelling animals in parts of New South Wales surveyed in early March. Elsewhere, scientists are most concerned about the survival of already endangered species such as the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo and Kangaroo Island dunnart, a rat-size marsupial, whose limited habitat burned in the fires. But even less vulnerable animals, like the platypus and a small eucalypt-dwelling marsupial called the greater glider, are now in peril due to the sheer amount of land lost. In the state of Western Australia, fires burned the habitat of one of the last mainland populations of quokkas, the smiley-faced marsupial that has starred in thousands of selfies. As for the iconic kangaroos, thousands likely died, but with a population estimated at 50 million, scientists aren’t concerned about the species’ survival.
As pandemic restrictions ease, scientists are planning their return to field and volunteers are putting the tens of millions of dollars in international donations to work to help wildlife. The federal government has allocated $200 million Australian dollars toward wildlife recovery. (Learn more about how you can help Australia recover.)
University of Sydney biologist Valentina Mella’s research established that koalas will use drinking stations during drought and heatwaves. She is now working with wildlife rescue group WIRES to distribute 800 drinking stations around Australia. WIRES is also issuing grants to communities for habitat restoration while Humane Society International is providing financial support to wildlife carers and helping them prepare for the fires to come. Quartermain says koalas rescued and later released on Kangaroo Island were implanted with microchips and will be tracked to keep tabs on their condition.
Science for Wildlife, meanwhile, is launching a six-month survey of koala habitat in the Blue Mountains. But Leigh is relieved to already have found one particular koala: Houdini, the radio-collared marsupial she could not rescue during the fires.
Houdini earned his name for his skill at escaping capture, and he proved adept at eluding the bushfires. “He was in a steep gully with huge trees, which don’t burn easily,” Leigh says. “He has given us some hope that in other steep gullies that suffered a similar low-intensity burn, we might find more surviving koalas.”
Pollution made the pandemic worse, but lockdowns clean the sky (nationalgeographic.com)
Pollution made COVID-19 worse. Now, lockdowns are clearing the air.Even before the coronavirus, air pollution killed seven million people a year. Will today's cleaner air inspire us to do better?
BY BETH GARDINER
PUBLISHED APRIL 8, 2020
AS THE NOVEL coronavirus tears around the world, it’s exploiting our biggest weaknesses, from creaking health care systems to extreme social inequality. Its relationship with one pervasive and neglected problem, however, is more tangled: Air pollution has intensified the pandemic, but the pandemic has—temporarily—cleaned the skies.
When new evidence emerged this week that dirty air makes COVID-19 more lethal, it surprised no one who has followed the science of air pollution—but the scale of the effect was striking. The study, which must still undergo peer review for publication, found that the tiny pollutant particles known as PM2.5, breathed over many years, sharply raise the chances of dying from the virus.
Researchers from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed data on PM2.5 levels and COVID-19 deaths from about 3,000 U.S. counties covering 98 percent of the U.S. population. Counties that averaged just one microgram per cubic meter more PM2.5 in the air had a COVID-19 death rate that was 15 percent higher.
“If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire,” said Francesca Dominici, a Harvard biostatistics professor and the study’s senior author.
That’s because the fine particles penetrate deep into the body, promoting hypertension, heart disease, breathing trouble, and diabetes, all of which increase complications in coronavirus patients. The particles also weaken the immune system and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract, adding to the risk both of getting COVID-19 and of having severe symptoms.
Dominici and her colleagues illustrated the impact with a specific example: Manhattan, the current epicenter of the pandemic, where PM2.5 averages range as high as 11 micrograms per cubic meter, and where 1,904 deaths from COVID-19 had been reported as of April 4. Had particle levels averaged just one unit lower over the past two decades, the researchers calculated, 248 fewer people would have died over the past several weeks. And of course the toll has mounted since April 4.
But while pollution inhaled in the past is still causing harm today, the temporary experience of cleaner air brought about by widespread shutdowns may offer lessons for the kind of world we want to build after the pandemic.
A single bus owns a usually crowded highway on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on April 5, after the Indian govenment ordered a three-week lockdown slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
People so accustomed to pollution they hardly think about it may realize, “Actually, I really do quite enjoy clean air: Do you think we could get it, or keep it?” says Simon Birkett, founder and director of Clean Air in London, an advocacy organization. “There’s a chance to really get people to stop, take a deep breath,” and reflect on questions like “How was your asthma during this period?”
Although a near-halt in normal life and economic activity is no one’s idea of a good way to reduce pollution, the brief respite might, in Birkett’s view, turn this dark time into “a catalyst, or a tipping point, which could get us to say ‘Clean air—there’s something special about it.’”
Cleaner pandemic skies
From China’s Hubei province to industrial northern Italy and beyond, pollution levels have plummeted as lockdowns aimed at slowing the viral spread have shuttered businesses and trapped billions of people at home. In India, where air pollution is among the world’s worst, “people are reporting seeing the Himalayas for the first time from where they live,” Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said in an email.
India’s hastily imposed shutdowns have been devastating, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrant workers without homes or jobs. But in Delhi, where air is normally choking, levels of both PM2.5 and the harmful gas nitrogen dioxide fell more than 70 percent.
Areas in Germany, the United Kingdom, Czechia, and northen Italy saw large reductions in nitrogen dioxide, while some eastern European countries like Ukraine saw an increase.
In Asia, South Korea and China took dramatic lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus. Satellites recorded significantly less pollution compared to the same period last year.
Less pollution, for now
Like the fine particles known as PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is emitted by burning fossil fuels—mostly in industry, vehicles, and domestic boilers. In the first three months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the globe from China, and governments began shutting down businesses and transportation, satellites detected sharp declines in NO2 levels compared with the same period in 2019. In the U.S., the stay-at-home orders began in March. The drop in NO2 has been most pronounced in cities and along major transportation corridors.
The declines are sure to be only temporary. To get healthier air for the longer term, Myllyvirta said, means shifting to clean energy and transportation, “not ordering people to stay at home at drastic economic cost.” But the cleaner pandemic skies do show how fast we can bring down pollution when we reduce our burning of fossil fuels.
The cleaner air is also a reminder of how deadly air pollution is. The World Health Organization says dirty air, both indoors and out, cuts short seven million lives annually worldwide.
In the United States, decades of regulation have led to air quality that is far better than in most of the world. In New York City, for example, PM2.5 levels actually fell 30 percent from 2009 to 2017, which has presumably saved many lives during the current pandemic. Nevertheless, air pollution still kills more than 100,000 Americans every year.
The realization that COVID-19 may match or even exceed that toll has rightly terrified Americans. But the lethal effects of air pollution are barely discussed—and activists and scientists are hoping that might change.
Pollution and COVID-19
Even before the new Harvard study, scientists were convinced that air pollution was likely worsening COVID-19’s impact, in addition to the wide-ranging health damage it causes on its own. A 2003 study of the outbreak of SARS, the closest relative of the new coronavirus, found that death rates in China’s most polluted areas were twice as high as in the least polluted ones.
“You could bet a fiver that London and other more polluted places will have higher mortality rates [from the virus], because there’ll be more people with underlying issues,” Birkett said. Scientists also believe viruses may bond with pollution particles, enabling them to remain in the air longer and helping them make their way into the body.
The flip side is that even temporarily cleaner air can help “flatten the curve” of the pandemic, easing the burden on health care systems by reducing the number of people who experience severe COVID-19 symptoms, said Christopher Carlsten, head of respiratory medicine at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, in Vancouver.
Cleaner pandemic skies should also reduce other pressures on hospitals struggling with COVID-19 cases, Carlsten said. In addition to the cumulative effects of breathing dirty air for years, a large body of evidence shows that short-term changes in air quality have an immediate impact on heart attacks, strokes, and emergency room visits. All increase when pollution spikes.
Authorities in British Columbia had that hope in mind when they issued restrictions on the fires farmers typically light at the start of spring to clear old growth from fields. One region in British Columbia even banned campfires. Wood smoke is thick with PM2.5 particles.
In China, the drops in pollution resulting from coronavirus shutdowns likely saved between 53,000 and 77,000 lives—many times more than the direct toll of the virus—according to calculations done by Marshall Burke, an Earth system scientist at Stanford University. That might sound surprising, but it shouldn’t be, he said, given that air pollution causes more than 1.2 million annual deaths in China. Indeed, a 2016 study found that China’s aggressive measures to clean the air in and around Beijing for the 2008 Olympics had led to a temporary 8 percent drop in the overall death rate.
Burke emphasized that in estimating the benefit of China’s less polluted air, he was in no way minimizing the cost or the horror of the pandemic. But “these other things we do, that we can change, are also important,” he said. “Lives we lose absent a pandemic are also really important, and are lives we shouldn’t lose.”
After the pandemic—what?
There’s no doubt the pandemic-driven clearing of the air will be short-lived, with emissions sure to return to, if not surpass, their usual levels whenever factories start up again and people get back in their cars.
That’s already happening in China, where pollution has returned to its pre-coronavirus range, Myllyvirta said, even though some industries are not yet fully operational—a worrying hint that air quality could end up worse than before, he added.
That’s a danger elsewhere too. When the pandemic finally abates, polluting industries may well seek to make up for lost time with even higher production, said François Gemenne, a political scientist and environmental researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium. If the virus makes people fearful of public transportation, driving could increase also.
What’s more, “a lot of governments will be inclined to restart their fossil fuel industry, because that is the industry that is immediately available,” Gemenne said. With recession looming and credit markets taking a hit, analysts say investment in wind and solar power is likely to sag.
Economic troubles often prompt governments to loosen health-protective regulations. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has cited the pandemic as justification for a decision to all but suspend enforcement of pollution rules. The Trump administration is also rolling back ambitious Obama-era auto mileage standards, and unraveling other regulations too.
In the middle of a health emergency, it’s exactly the wrong move, said Susan Anenberg, associate professor of environmental health at the George Washington University. On the contrary, she argued, “it’s the time to be considering whether the status quo that we had in place prior to this disaster is the one we want going forward. We don’t need to tolerate this level of air pollution.”
MOTIVAZIONI DI TANTA STUPIDITA'? I SOLDI, L'IGNORANZA E LA STUPIDITA'
Ecco dall'articolo del NYT alcuni degli oltre 700 commenti dei lettori. Sono tutti molto interessanti, ma preferisco fornire giusto i primi della lista, tanto quanto c'é da dire è presto detto: 'se vuoi essere felice, sii ignorante e pensa solo al breve periodo' (il tipico stile di pensiero repubblicano).
Dee McShan
Newcastle Australia
Jan. 3, 2020
We are heartbroken to hear that our beautiful flora and fauna are being lost and some species may be extinct forever. The firefighters said they could hear the koalas screaming in the forest. How truly awful!!
We have never seen anything like these horrendous fire storms and fire tornadoes.
Yes, we recently voted in a bunch of climate change deniers and the opposition leader didn't quite have it together. How unfortunate. So think of us this weekend is as it is going to be catastrophic.
There is a realisation that we may not fully recover from this and that it might become the new normal.
Jon commented January 3, 2020
The little seasonal rain we get
and the persistent elevated temperatures turn our incredibly flammable gum and Eucalypt bush into a massive fuel load. The periods in cooler months have been reduced significantly due to warmer temperatures preventing fuel reduction and back burning due to the severe dangers to property.
When we do get rain, the fuel load increases quickly and the cycle continues.
Most fires are started by dry lightening strikes, failed back burning attempts arson and complete stupidity.
Yes we get bushfires a lot. It's part of life here. I was very close to the black Saturday fires and witnessed first hand the utter devastation. You can still see it now 10 years on.
I have never seen anything on this scale in my lifetime. And we still have at least 8 more weeks, and January is the hottest month of the year. The rain is coming, but not until April at this stage when it is usually here late Jan/Feb.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say climate change. You may want to live in the false hope that it isn't because it's too challenging to face, but the sooner you let go and realise the consequences of our actions over the past hundred years or so are here to collect for all our greed and consumerism.
RBR commented January 2, 2020
What it is extremely painful to watch, is all the fauna so particular to Australia suffer due to human irresponsibility.
Hugh Garner commented January 2, 2020
In a lifetime in Australia, I have never seen anything like these fires. The Prime Ministers vacuous comments only add fuel to the flame of public contempt. The Federal Government is climate change denying, like the Trump government. The smirking image of the Prime Minister standing in the Federal House of Representatives, holding up a large lump of coal, mocking those who were warning of disasters due to climate change will always live in my mind, like his contempt for asylum seekers. The current government got back into power in the last election, because of a fear campaign aimed at working and lower middle class voters afraid of losing their jobs if green policies were enacted. Now it’s all come back to bite them in the most vicious way. The world, particularly the US should take note of the Australian bushfire situation. What is happening here, and recently in California and Brazil, will sweep many climate denying politicians down the gutter in a flood of contempt into the cesspit of the beyond worthless, where they belong.
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Birdygirl commented January 2, 2020
Australia has a long fire history. Like California, the deadly fires in Australia increase in intensity and frequency for similar reasons: climate change, poor land management practices, building in fire-pone areas, Mediterranean climates, and a host of other parallel factors. Both places used to have indigenous traditional ecological knowledge of using and controlling fire. Had European settlers listened to indigenous peoples, perhaps we would not be in this terrible situation.
PosiThis commented January 2, 2020
Washington State
Jan. 2, 2020
Times Pick
My husband and I were going to spend Christmas in Sydney. We cut our trip short and returned US on December 13 because of the air quality issues in the city. It frankly was scary watching the smoke haze envelope the city and it wasn't even close to what is happening now. Not once in out 3 week visit did we see the Sydney of but sky and blue water.
Diana commented January 2, 2020
So Mr. Morrison cut short a vacation to "offer comfort". How very noble of him. I am certain that those devastated by the fires and fleeing for their very lives appreciate his empty words. It is the equivalent of the meaningless "thoughts and prayers" we get here in this country after yet another mass shooting.
What is going to happen to those who are displaced and have lost everything? Does Mr. Morrison have a plan? Or is he just going to offer words of comfort? Will he continue to deny what scientists have been warning about for years now? Why are conservatives making climate change a political issue (other than to appease big business donors) when lives are being ruined and our planet is in a death spiral? Big businesses don't have a plan B for saving the planet. They have a bottom line.
Once a tipping point is reached, there will be no way turning things around. The clock is ticking.
Is there any way we can help those in Australia? Are there organizations to which we can donate funds? I wish that had been included in this article. I will search online.
David
Sydney, Australia
Jan. 2, 2020
As an Australian citizen, resident and volunteer firefighter can I ask that visitors from other countries do not come here. Ignore the tasteless commercials from Tourism Australia - a large proportion of the cute marsupials featured in the film are dead or are now dying of starvation. Several cities are, or have been, wreathed in smoke for weeks. Large areas of the country are running out of water. The fires will burn for months. I know that the loss of tourist dollars will affect many local businesses and people will suffer. But there is something much bigger at stake - a true existential threat. We are at the absolute front line of climate change. In the face of this our Prime Minister wants more coal mines more coal exports and continuation of coal-fired electricity. He cannot see a future for this country that is not based on coal. Our politicians are not listening to pleas from within the country and need to hear strong messages and actions from outside, particularly if there are economic consequences. So please help us by staying away and make it clear why you are taking this action.
liceu93
Bethesda
Jan. 2, 2020
This is unreal. Words like catastrophic are inadequate to describe what we're seeing in the photos and reports. The destruction of property, livelihoods and wildlife is heartbreaking. Although it's an overworked phrase, I'm sending my thoughts and prayers to the people of Australia.
However, as we watch this catastrophe in horror, we need to be mindful that this is a fate that faces parts of our country and other places in the world if we don't get serious about addressing climate change. Oh, I know that the climate change deniers want to blame this on poor forest management, but they're ignoring the effects of years of rising temperatures and drought.