this may be a hard pill to swallow for some people but like. 90% of the fires in australia wouldn’t be happening right now if people had just fucking listened to indigenous peoples
literally just. give us our FULL sovereignty back over these areas half of them aren’t even inhabited and almost none of them have ANY cultural significance to white australia (not that that should even matter cause it’s. aboriginal land and it always will be but whatever). give us control over them and shit like this won’t happen and our communities will heal.
Is OP implying the fires are the result of some kind of Aboriginal curse or something? Is the continent itself breaking out in fever in an attempt to cleanse itself of white people? Do the Aboriginals have some effective anti-wildfire strategy that the white people are too arrogant to listen to?
we had landcare practices to prevent shit like this. we’d burn the forest litter/hazardously flammable stuff in the cooler months to prevent massive forest fires happening. when our lands were invaded we could no longer implement these practices and now the leaf litter will build up and set on fire again and again and now the forest fires will be huge.
Its scientifically proven that Aboriginal people didn’t suffer from wild bushfires, pre invasion. And its also proven that back burning (burning parts of the land per season) actually encourages new life and promotes animal breeding. Aboriginal science outweighs white science.
Followers, ☝️ This 100%. Happy to send people the studies and papers and stuff (or just have the conversation with sources) but by looking at tree ring scars, we can see that some areas had fires once every 80 years - and now those same regions are burning every few years. It’s un-natural for Australia, this isnt a continent meant to be chaotically and uncontrollably burning forever.
The intensity of fire is increasing bc of biomass is changing, plant species are changing, rivers diverted and drying up. Soil salinity is spiking, soil erosion is getting worse - and a thousand other things that aboriginal activists and people have been warning about for centuries.
Areas under native title where mosaic burning happens HAS LESS/NO OUT OF CONTROL FIRES. The evidence is literally right there.
Part of the out of control fires are climate change, part is european settlements and farming practices causing absolute fucking chaos on local ecosystems. these fires are not sudden or out of the blue or anything - they’ve been a long time coming from systematic environmental neglect and intentional environmental fuckery. You reap what you sow.
“aboriginal curse” it’s the colonial curse of ignoring indigenous expertise
the colonial curse of ignoring indigenous expertise
my fam is doing our annual rewatch of the lord of the rings movies and i’ve come to the conclusion that when they’re trying to go over the pass of caradhras and gimli is like ‘we should go through mines of moria instead’ and there’s that long saruman speech about how gandalf doesn’t want to go into moria because he knows what the dwarves awoke there, and then gandalf … immediately doesn’t say any of that to any of the party
…that’s basically the equivalent of, in dnd, if the dm had just given a whole prepared monologue of information to gandalf’s player of things gandalf should already know …
….and then when they go ‘so do you tell the rest of the party that?’ gandalf’s player just goes ‘no.’
It’s a phenomenon unofficially known as “reader’s accent” and it’s very common! Because English has so many words (in fact considered to be the language with the greatest number of words) lots of people, and in particular those who read a lot as children, will encounter a word in writing long before they hear it spoken. They’ll develop the idea of what the word will sound like in their head, and only realize when they hear it spoken that their idea was different than the common pronunciation.
I’ve even had it where I’ve known words as spoken words, and I’ve known words as written words, and it’s taken me a significant amount of time to realize that they were the same word. One example I can think of is the word indictment. I always thought “indictment” was pronounced “in-dict-ment,” and it was only when all these police indictments started happening on the news (with the news crawls below the words being spoken) that I realized it was “in-DITE-ment.”
So yeah, never feel bad for discovering that a word in English is pronounced differently than you would’ve expected. English has had influence from SO many other languages over the centuries as it developed, and as a result, many of our pronunciation “guidelines” are borrowed from the languages the words originally came from. It’s massively inconsistent, and it’s one of the reasons that learning English as a second language is so difficult.
As my favorite poster in the campus writing center used to proclaim:
“English: A language that lurks in dark alleyways, beats up other languages, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.”
You will not believe the amount of times I’ve read an English word and thought of a pronunciation and then continued to pronounce the word that way in my head for years only to discover that it has a completely different pronunciation and I would’ve made a fool of myself if I had ever pronounced that word out loud
it wasn’t until an adult that I realized that colonel and spoken word “kernal” were the same word
