Windy Days and Consequences

I live not far from the coast close to the top of a hill and my house is oriented pretty much to the north. This means there's only with only a small part in full sun at any time of the day. The front where the afternoon sun would otherwise beat down on the front of the house is shaded by a huge and very lovely marri tree. And I'm used to windy days. They are part of what makes summer living here so pleasant.  We get the cool easterlies from inland in the summer - well, they're cool in the early mornings until the land heats up by mid morning and then the The Doctor - the sea breeze - arrives around midday or a little later and cools it down again.

Sounds great and usually it is but this year is not quite the same. I mentioned a while back that we've already hit 40° C several times and, while this is not unheard of, it is more common in February, not December and early January. Then there's the wind - and recently it hasn't been our friend. 

Early in the evening of New Year's Day quite suddenly after a warmish humid day the wind decided it was tired of gentle breezes and sent us a blast of furious and hot easterly gusts which have only just started to ease a little. The gusts were so strong they blew down the shade cloth covers over my veggies, tore small branches off my neighbour's trees while each gust rattled the windows making sleep difficult and the sea breeze? Forget it. 

While all this wind has been exhausting there are other consequences. We've had bushfires in several outer suburbs with mass evacuations required while several are raging out of control a bit further up the coast to the north of the city. We have bushfires every summer, some years worse than others - a couple of years ago a whole town was destroyed - so fires aren't unexpected and fortunately so far at least they are nothing like the scale of those that wreaked havoc on the east coast last summer. Folk there are slowly rebuilding their lives with many still living in caravans and sheds - and for those in the mountains it was a long, cold winter. However, it's only the start of the bushfire seasons so we can't afford to get complacent and the fierce winds are making any fire control difficult to impossible. 

The truth is the British who came here as colonists made some bad mistakes as far as farming and other land use was concerned. While fire has always been present here - most of the continent is hot and dry and always has been - the indigenous people those colonists supplanted had had something like 60,000 years of living with and managing it. Instead the newcomers disrupted systems that had sustained many generations and tried to transplant European land management to an alien and completely different landscape. It was successful for a time - Australia was supplying large amounts of meat, wheat and wool to the world market for more than a hundred years - but now the consequences of that form of agriculture and the logging of our old growth forests are showing in salinity, dust storms and out of control bushfires.

How we are going to deal with these problems I don't know - successive governments have shown little ability to grapple effectively with them - but we certainly need to. It's probably too late to go back to the indigenous systems but we certainly need to do something. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not. It will bring more damaging fires and other consequences. We ignore it at our peril.