Fireproofing our future
Professor David Bowman is a pyrogeographer, one of the world’s leading fire experts. He has studied wildfire for more than 40 years but this fire season in Australia has made the hair on the back of his neck bristle. It has frightened him.
“This is a nation-defining, historical event,” he says, with some urgency, from his post at The University of Tasmania. “I said that in November. I knew it, even then, because the sorts of things that were happening in northern NSW were so extraordinary, so extreme. Extrapolating that, it was easy to see it moving down as a wave – it was inevitable.
“There has been terrible loss of wildlife, biodiversity, farmland and homes, but we have also been lucky. Both good fortune and the skill of the firefighters
