Photos coming out of Australia showing bush regrowing in areas recently devastated by fires are giving hope to thousands of online users who are reeling from the ongoing crisis, reads the opening lines of a recent wakingtimes.com article.
Photographer Murray Lowe snapped the photos on Monday in the Kulnara area of New South Wales’ Central Coast region.
“Ventured out into the fire grounds today to capture some images of how the Aussie bush responds to fire, and the way it regenerates itself and comes back to life,” said Lowe.
“Even without any rain, life bursts through the burnt bark from the heart of the trees and the life cycle begins again. It’s so heartening to see the bush coming back to life again.”
Since posting the photos to Facebook, the images have been shared over 40,000 times.
One Facebook user commented:
“Thank you for sharing these pictures, it gives a glimmer of hope through these dark days.”
While another wrote:
“As the indigenous people of our country say… Australian country depends on fire to regenerate. It just needs to be managed by people who understand it.”
The resilience of the vegetation and the almost immediate regrowth is testament to the decadal ravaging of the land by fire. It’s all part of the natural cycle of life in Australia.
Everything in nature is cyclic, driven mainly by the sun.
Looking at the chart above, we see the worst NSW fires in the modern era were back in the 1970’s–a decade that experienced very weak solar activity, similar to that which we’re witnessing today:
And turning our attention to the more distant past, the situation was even worse.
The ‘once in a century drought’, which ran from 1891 to 1903, caused an ecosystem collapse affecting more than a third of the country. The drought was one of the world’s worst recorded ‘megadroughts’, which at its peak saw much of the country receive less than 40 percent of its annual rainfall, with 1902 remaining the driest year on record.
CSIRO researcher Dr. Robert Godfree said:
“In New South Wales, most rivers stopped flowing and dust storms filled dams, buried homesteads and created ghost towns as people fled.
“Wildlife and stock starved or died of thirst. Native birds and mammals died under trees, in creeks, and on the plains.
“Tens of millions of sheep and cattle were killed, and hundreds of millions of rabbits died of starvation after stripping the landscape of its plant life,” Godfree said.
The ‘megadrought’ of 1891-1903 lands between weak solar cycles 12 and 14, cycles very similar to the one we’re currently in the record-deep solar minimum of now, cycle 24:
The voices of Australia’s indigenous people have fallen on deaf ears regarding the correct management of the bush. Hopefully this disaster will readdress the balance, and the authorities will allow the vital controlled winter burns to take place and prevent this scale of devastation in the future. But in the end, great plays of the cosmos have the final say — man is eternally fallible, and no empire lasts forever.
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