How not to do it 2: the problem is…

Maybe as important as all of the above is this: workers should be fully briefed.

The golfer’s artless comment that ‘there aren’t any plants’ in a recently burned patch exactly replicates the comment made by one of the workers to Maldon Landcare: ‘they were grooming weeds and dead stuff.’

Those ‘weeds and dead stuff’ were healthy native plants, many of them obviously in flower.

It comes down to two things:

First: all the land management policy documents and protocols in the world are useless if the workers on the ground are not well informed about the job, and fully on side with the conservation side of it;

And second: fire protection should never be seen as completely separate from (or even in opposition to) biodiversity and ecological health. As long as these two are separate we’ll  continue to get disasters like this one.