North Rosedale two weeks after the New Year’s Eve fires, clearly showing the conflicts of habitation structures and characteristic local vegetation. Photo credit: Penelope Allan & James Melsom
At an event at the Sydney Opera House in February 2020 about the catastrophic 2019/2020 fires on Australia’s east coast, two incisive comments – amid the stories of death and destruction – identified what had been missing in the media, which had until that point focused almost exclusively on destruction, how the fires started and who was to blame*.*1 The first comment related to the “politics of fire”:
‘…such a disastrous event inevitably uncovers a set of underlying conditions often decades in the making. To understand the event, you need to excavate the forces that led to the moment of crisis.’2
The second challenged its “dominant values”:
‘A lot of people say “Were you OK?” and “Did your house burn down?“. I live in a forest. As far as I was concerned my house was replaceable, but the forest was not. The fire showed us what we try to preserve and therefore where we place value. I am OK and this house the legal system says is mine is OK. But we must recognise that these are embedded within systems of human and more than human relationships which have been devastated by the fire, by the drought that preceded it and the perilous future we’re moving towards, that are very far from OK.’3
Footnotes
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J Gordon, ‘Some Coalition MPs say arson is mostly to blame for the bushfire crisis. Here are the facts’, ABC News, 15 January 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/is-arson-mostly-to-blame-for-the-bushfire-crisis/11865724, (accessed 27 May 2020). See also D Anderson, P Chubb and P Djerf-Pierre, ‘Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian ‘Fire Continent”, Environmental Communication, vol. 12, no. 7, 2018, pp: 928–941. ↩
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E Mossop, ‘Session 1: Relief and Response’, panel discussion, The Bushfire Catastrophe: What Now?, Sydney, 16 January 2020. ↩
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D Celermajer, ‘Session 2: Future Thinking’, panel discussion, The Bushfire Catastrophe: What Now?, Sydney, 16 January 2020. ↩