Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

About the webinar

VFA have a webinar coming up with Angelique Stefanatos who developed the Green Fire-Walls project back in 2019 with a Gippsland Landcare Grant. This project came out of Angelique’s experience of severe respiratory illness and the impact of ‘planned burns on her health and welfare. It took 2 years to research and develop the fire-walls ‘toolkit’, which was then distributed to Gippsland Landcare groups and has now been picked up and adapted in other states.

Hear Angelique describe this critical project for how we educate ourselves and others about how to understand fire and forests:

• What is a green fire-wall & why this project was created
• Green Fire-Wall design for farms and roadside reserves and importance of native vegetation in the landscape
• Fire-wise garden design using rainforest as inspiration
• Concerns about planned burns and their failure to prevent wildfires, their risks to human health, as well as their threats to biodiversity 
• And some indigenous perspectives

Presenter Bio

Angelique Stefanatos grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne and studied Biological Sciences to become a zoologist. Her career and life were seriously impacted when she contracted a serious lung disease which left her with  life-long reduced lung capacity. After moving to the Northern Territory fort her dream job at the Alice Springs Desert Park, Angelique moved back to Victoria and settled near Lakes Entrance on a Trust For Nature property.

In 2015, having never experienced a Victorian planned burn before, she was unprepared for the fire that was lit along her boundary line, which smouldered all night, creating thick smoke and settling in her valley, nearly asphyxiating her while she slept. (Angelique calls herself ‘the human canary’ when it comes to being a living air quality monitor, due to her reduced lung capacity.)

This incident was devastating on her health and took months to recover, but was nothing compared to the emotional trauma and eco-anxiety she experienced in 2017, when Forest Fire Management Victoria cleared many linear kilometres of roadside vegetation on her doorstep, including recorded Greater Glider habitat. This was the ‘last straw’ for Angelique, and she deeply experienced what Professor Glenn Albrecht calls ‘Solastalgia’: the loss of solace and subsequent nostalgia for the environment to go back to how it was before a destructive event.

Angelique tried everything to stop the roadside clearing, including meetings with fire-managers and local politicians, newspaper articles, radio interviews, letters to state politicians and finally a mini blockade, but it was futile. Up until then she had felt ‘at one’ with her local environment, but due to of her sense of powerlessness, she experienced the 2017 roadside destruction of her plant and animal companions as a devastating soul-trauma, and found it more unbearable than the physical asphyxiation from the smoke in 2015.

The phrase she heard parroted back repeatedly from the fire managers was: “The public want more burning to feel safe.” So this is when she realised that she would have to create a non-threatening tool to help educate farmers, home gardeners and the general public, to help change the narrative. And that’s how the Green Fire-Walls project was born, thanks to a Landcare grant in 2019. It took 2 years to produce the fire-walls ‘toolkit’, which was then distributed to Gippsland Landcare groups and has now been picked up and adapted in other states.