…from The Australian…

“WHEN Europeans first encountered Australia, they saw a continent ablaze as Aboriginal ‘firestick farmers’ lit up the bush with controlled burns that prevented destructive wildfires. Now a hi-tech version of the land management practice, which is possibly tens of thousands of years old, could form part of Australia’s strategy to tackle a modern problem: global warming.

“The prescribed burning of the future probably will be ‘a combination of traditional knowledge and Western science’, says the CSIRO’s Heckbert.

“‘It would include a fire management plan based on sophisticated GIS (geographic information systems), precision weather forecasting and biomass models. Implementation of the plan would involve the deployment of helicopters and fire crews using the latest equipment, and the effects would be monitored with high-resolution satellite imagery.'”

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