A 1,000-year ecological reconstruction reveals that Australia’s ongoing wildfire crisis stems from the colonial disruption of Indigenous fire management rather than climate change alone, according to a study published in Nature. For more than 800 years prior to British colonization in 1788, the Indigenous Gunaikurnai people maintained stable, open eucalypt woodlands across southeastern Australia using frequent, low-temperature “cool” burning, the study says. Researchers analyzed sediment cores from Purghagoolah (also known as Lake Elusive) in the East Gippsland region of southeastern Australia and found tree cover averaged roughly 10% under Indigenous stewardship. High-temperature crown fires and severe soil erosion were virtually nonexistent, according to the researchers. However, that long-term stability collapsed after colonization in the 1840s forcibly severed Indigenous care for Country, the Indigenous concept of a holistic, living entity encompassing the physical land, waters, skies, and all living things. Without cultural burning, woody fuels accumulated and eucalypt tree cover — oily and highly flammable — roughly quadrupled to 34% by the 1970s. Once-open woodlands thus became dense, flammable forests, the study says. Evidence of more intense burning emerged alongside this transition, in the form of high-temperature charcoal, whose abundance doubled or even tripled. Its presence indicates a shift to canopy-consuming crown fires that also destroyed ground vegetation and exposed the topsoil to erosion. Crucially, these changes occurred long before modern human-caused climate warming began, suggesting that the buildup of woody fuels under colonial forestry practices had already rendered the region more prone to severe fires, according to the study. “The…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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