Nothing to do with Mallacoota but a link I could not ignore. Also a reminder that not everyone in Pakistan is an Islamic fundamentalist nor a sabre-rattling war mongerer.
 
And after all...
     Everybody's doing it, doing it, doing it
      Picking their... click here

For my money, fuel reduction burns are up there at the top of the snot index, as in your teacher is full of snot. Today I have developed a stinker of a headache while the dense smoke from this morning's fires hung around all day. God help people with real respiratory issues.
 
How long do we have to endure this anachronism? How often do the approaches to Mallacoota have to be reduced to blackened ugliness? Ditto our local walks. Must the local bushland be utterly changed by this regime of regular burning? And further more changed to promote fast growing, quickly dying weedy vegetation that adds to the fuel load so rapidly.
 
We are no longer living in the twenties and thirties. We have computers to predict the behaviour of fires. We have heavy lift helicopters that can dump gallons of retardant in the blink of an eye. We have satellite infrared imaging to pick out hot spots. It should be obvious that these technologies are more than a match for the average wildfire.
 
And as for major firestorms such as the one that devastated Canberra last summer, the sad fact is that they are still very hard to control and always will be. The combination of eucalypt forests, gusty hot winds and low moisture levels will always mean trouble and in this context little bits of autumn and spring fuel reduction burning off seem exercises in futility.
 
So why do we still do it? Why are limited land management resources wasted in this manner? Fear, I suspect. Sometimes doing something however pointless, brings a sense of comfort that doing nothing at all cannot bring.