David Bowman Key Centre for Tropical Wildlife Management Northern Territory University

1. A recipe for belonging to northern Australia:The roles of traditional, scientific and adaptive ‘knowledge’ David Bowman Key Centre for Tropical Wildlife Management Northern Territory University

2. Sustainable development • Depends on appreciating environmental realities • Learning from hard won indigenous knowledge • Undertaking research to create new knowledge • ‘Adaptive management’ to perfect the application of different types of knowledge systems • Ultimately, the development of a ‘land ethic’

3. Illustrate argument with the case of fire management in northern Australia

4. ‘If you think knowledge is expensive try ignorance’ Native bamboo has flowered – a once in 40 year event

5. Creation of a fire hazard?

6. Government proposal to burn bamboo on riverlines • Research has shown dead bamboo is difficult to burn • So the attempted aerial burning program would have been a waste of money • If the program had succeeded it would have • reduced the density of the regenerating bamboo • encouraged more flammable grasses exacerbating the fire management problem

7. Fire management regulations • Despite sharing the same environment the laws concerning landscape fire use in Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia inconsistent • The common aspect is the control of fire • Burning in early dry season is favoured • Fires late in the dry season typically prohibited

8. Regardless of the intent of the laws fires are lit in the late dry season • few if any prosecutions • rights of Aboriginal landscape burning uncertain

9. Aboriginal landscape burning

10. Arnhem Land study showed • Burning was very patchy • Concentrated in the second half of the dry season • Contrary to the view that early dry season burning was a key characteristic of Aboriginal fire management

11. Grass – fire cycle • Increased frequency of burning favours more flammable species • A positive feedback • Increase in biomass of native annual grasses like Sorghum • The grass – fire cycle will accelerate with the spread of exotic Africa grasses like mission and gamba grass

12. The futility of fighting grass with fire

13. Fire management is everyone’s problem • Recent work has shown a strong association between asthma and increasing bushfire smoke levels • The grass – fire cycle will result in a significant public health impact given national air standards are already exceeded • Nationally significant issue

14. Adaptive management • Managers and ecologists think about landscapes at contrasting temporal and spatial scales • Too much store placed in fire management ‘folklore’ • Too many incoherent ecological details • Inability to see ‘fuel’ as biodiversity • Inability to see ‘biodiversity’ as fuel • Critical evaluation is required to identify systems and interventions that work and those that don’t work • Controlling the grass – fire cycle requires ‘learning by doing’ – adaptive management

15. A land ethic • Aldo Leopold's ‘land ethic’ was based on three principles • People must have an ecological, historical and geographic appreciation of where they live • People must interact with landscapes such that landscape and humans have a shared history and memory of each other • The interaction between land and humans must be ethically based and socially moderated

16. Land ethics and adaptive management • Remarkably similar to systems that regulated indigenous resource usage • The landscape we seek to preserve was the creation of generations of indigenous peoples’ regulated labour • Adaptive management will not only change the modes of management but the mentality of managers • With a land ethic would we have introduced African pasture grasses?