Things are getting desperate down there:
Aircraft are being used to drop thousands of kilograms of carrots and sweet potato to hungry wildlife stranded amid the Australian bushfire crisis.
The New South Wales government commissioned the service titled ‘Operation Rock Wallaby’ which aims to feed the state’s colonies of brush-tailed rock wallabies and help the state’s population of marsupials survive.
They're burning through tons of cash in an effort to address a problem that they themselves have created.
Much as in California, the wildfires are a direct result of "feel-good" environmeddle policies, or as President Trump has correctly observed in the case of California's wildfires, "poor forest management".
The Australian state of New South Wales, where both Sydney and Canberra are located, declared a state of emergency this week, as worsening weather conditions could lead to even greater fire danger. But a 50,000-year-old solution could exist: Aboriginal burning practices.
Aboriginal people had a deep knowledge of the land, said historian Bill Gammage, an emeritus professor at Australian National University who studies Australian and Aboriginal history. They can feel the grass and know if it would burn well; they knew what types of fires to burn for what types of land, how long to burn, and how frequently.
"Even though people can see the Aborigines doing the fire control, and could see the benefits, they couldn't copy it," he said.
Now, the juxtaposition is clear.
"Where the Aboriginal people are in charge, they're not having big fires," Gammage said. "In the south, where white people are in charge, we are having the problems."
We have the same problem in the American West: a failure to learn effective forest management from the natives who successfully practiced it for centuries.
