Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change.…

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1 https://t.co/znHfnOAlX8

We’re European tourists in our own land, still. Most of Australia is classified as ‘the outback’. A meaningless concept, when you unpack it. For us most of our continent is a Crocodile Dundee theme park. Here’s the true genius of Aboriginal Australia, the ‘gap’ to close. /2 https://t.co/86tJKghEve

The paternalistic interpretation of how they managed to live here for tens of thousands of years (!!) is that they were ‘hunter-gatherers’. In other words, they did little and just foraged for berries and ate the odd kangaroo, and nature provided. /3

Ironically this paternalistic rubbish is OUR model for now managing this continent. We leave most of it empty, that fabled ‘bush’ or ‘outback’, and what happens? The whole thing collapses, rivers clog and run dry, the flora explodes into catastrophic fires. /4

It’s the clearest empirical proof that Aboriginal Australians actively engineered the landscape. The entire continent. It was a dynamic, engineered equilibrium. Stripped back to the basics, here’s the genius. We only exist because of our land, it feeds, waters and shelters us. /5

We do the feeding and watering thing the same way we do mining. As an extractive industry. Most of our farming is soil and water mining. In historical terms, that quickly leads to total depletion of the ‘resource’, as we see right now. And then what? We have no idea. /6

It’s like a madonna-whore complex, for landscape. We either fence it off as ‘pristine nature’, in national parks, or treat it as a mine. The true genius is finding a way to both get sustenance from the landscape, *and* enrich it for everything that lives in it. /7

That’s what Aboriginal Australians did. It’s the greatest achievement of all human history, tens of thousands of years of achievement longer than any other culture. Nothing is more complex or sophisticated. Our ‘technologies’ are childishly simple by comparison. /8

I strongly encourage everybody to read Gammage’s book, for a window into what that looked like, before we turned most of the continent into a quarry for food stuffs and minerals. It is THE most remarkable story on Earth. Firsthand accounts of what Europeans found here. /9 https://t.co/oPzafjYrDO

What they found was nothing like what we call ‘the bush’ today. The bush and the outback are that same beautifully engineered landscape left to wrack and ruin. Read the settlers’ own descriptions of the astonishing Eden they found here. /10

They were too prejudiced mostly to understand that the Eden was MADE. They thought it was a ‘natural’ wonder. Within only a handful of years of them treating it as a mine, the whole thing started to collapse. We’re living in the ruins. /end