In August 2019, an unprecedented wildfire swept across Australia, and in the face of the disaster, Morrison, who was the prime minister of Australia at the time, left behind important disaster relief work and went directly to Hawaii in the United States for a vacation!
Due to the Australian government's passive and lazy response, the fire, which began in the northeast of Australia, quickly spread to the whole country, forming a super fire that lasted for nearly seven months, with a total area of more than 20 million hectares and more than 3 billion animals affected.
This super bushfire is the worst bushfire event ever recorded in Australia and the worst natural disaster in modern history!
The superfire released up to 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the thick smoke obscured the sun as the southern hemisphere monsoon circled the planet, dramatically accelerating global warming.
The burned area is so large that a satellite view of the entire area of Australia can clearly be seen in the sky showing a frightening dark red.
And this super natural disaster is not only a natural disaster, but also a complete man-made disaster, because the birth of this super wildfire has been traced from the beginning.
2019 was the driest and hottest year in Australia's history, so the Australian Bureau of Meteorology gave a forecast and stern warning at the beginning of the year about the scale of fires in this year's bushfire season.
However, the Australian Morrison government at that time did not take the warning of the professional department to heart, due to historical factors and environmental impacts, a number of bushfires of different sizes broke out in Australia every year, so the Australian government just continued the previous fire prevention and control plan step by step.
It is precisely because of the systematic negligence of the Australian government from top to bottom that Australia, which had the world's most advanced equipment and experience in wildfire firefighting, was slow to respond and had a negative attitude at the beginning of the fire in August of that year.
After three consecutive states of emergency in New South Wales, the Australian federal government was able to mobilize firefighting forces and personnel to rescue the fire.
But it was too late, and the wildfires spread rapidly to a scale that could not be resisted by manpower, and began to spread further along the dense forest.
If the Australian government can mobilize firefighting forces in time and call in more volunteers with firefighting experience to assist in disaster relief, then at least the fire can be contained in the east coast and northern regions to prevent it from developing into a national super fire.
But in times of crisis, the Australian government has once again shown an alarming sluggishness, indulging in paperwork that passes the buck to each other, with few government officials actually putting the effort into co-ordinating.
It was not until the end of December 2019, four months after the fire, that the fire had spread across the country and formed a global disaster of the century, that the Australian government belatedly announced the financial subsidy policy for firefighting volunteers, trying to call on more volunteers to actively participate in the fire extinguishing work.
However, the policy is no longer a drop in the bucket for firefighting, and the only thing Australians can do is to watch the fires smash their forests and homes, and pray that the temperature drops and the rainy season will put out this super fire.
So why are there fires on such a terrible scale in Australia? In addition to the influence of many natural factors, there is also an inseparable link with human factors such as Australia's national history.
In fact, almost every year, there are several bushfires in Australia, large and small, and a large part of this is related to the widespread eucalyptus trees in the area. We know that the eucalyptus tree, which is mainly found in Australia, is a tall broad-leaved tree and the main food of the koala, Australia's national treasure.
But what many people don't know is that eucalyptus is actually a very aggressive tree species, and has acquired the ability to actively induce "fires" in its long evolutionary history, which is one of the main reasons for the frequent bushfires in Australia every year.
Unlike other types of trees, eucalyptus is not only poisonous, but also secretes large amounts of flammable oil. In a hot and dry environment, the slightest open flame or lightning strike and other ignition factors will cause rapid forest fires in eucalyptus forests. As a result, other trees and plants growing near the eucalyptus tree are burned by forest fires, leaving more room for the eucalyptus tree to survive and thrive.
Seeing this, you may ask, so that the eucalyptus tree itself was burned to death by forest fires? This shows the special feature of eucalyptus trees in the evolutionary process, eucalyptus seeds have extremely fire-resistant shells, which can help them survive fires.
After the fire, a large amount of ash has become a natural high-quality fertilizer, helping the eucalyptus seeds remaining in the fire to germinate and grow better. Therefore, it is through this competitive strategy of using forest fires that eucalyptus trees have successfully expanded their living range and made themselves the absolute dominant species on the Australian island.
Although eucalyptus is very aggressive in this survival strategy, the total number of eucalyptus trees is relatively stable under natural conditions because there are not many factors that can cause bushfires in nature, and there are many creatures in Australia that eat eucalyptus fruits and leaves. At the same time, as long as the eucalyptus forest is not too dense, local wildfires can bring more nutrients to the forest and promote the circulation of the natural environment, which is a positive ecological model.
However, the emergence of human beings has upset this natural balance, and human beings will create many fire sources that are not originally natural, such as lit cigarettes, barbecue bonfires, and beverage bottles that form lenses through drinking water. In addition, birds that like to collect shiny items often enter people's gathering areas and use open fires as collectibles to bring back to their nests in the forest.
As a result, bushfires that started by chance have become more frequent and intense as Australia's population expands and increases, resulting in a rapid increase in eucalyptus populations. In turn, the massive increase in the number of eucalyptus trees has led to more violent and frequent wildfires, forming a vicious circle of shock.
In fact, there is no solution so far, since the number of wildfires and eucalyptus trees has increased due to human activities, and if appropriate intervention is carried out, it is possible to curb the frequent occurrence of disasters.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to send people to regularly trim and cut down eucalyptus forests, so that the total number and growth density of eucalyptus trees do not become too high. Without the most basic flammable materials, the chance of wildfires is greatly reduced, and the Australian government has long maintained a monitoring of native eucalyptus forests to reduce the cause of bushfires in the first place.
This was originally a very correct environmental protection strategy, but in the 20th century, because of the major so-called environmental protection organizations active in the West, it was severely questioned and resisted, which triggered a series of bad chain reactions.
Most of the international extremist environmental groups, supported by the major chaebols, are only aimed at restricting the development of developing countries and suppressing their own competitors. At the same time, in order to better win the attention of people from all over the world, the slogans and behaviors of these extreme environmental protection organizations are completely worthy of the word "extreme", but there is no professionalism at all.
Extremist environmental groups active in Australia have been fiercely criticizing the Australian government's fire fighting strategy of cutting down eucalyptus trees under the pretext of protecting animals and forests since its inception. Because eucalyptus leaves are the food of the national treasure koala, and the cute and cute koala is very popular in the hearts of the Australian people, so the proposal of these extreme environmental groups has been widely supported by the public.
Not only did they launch surveys and petitions on their websites, but they also called on members to go into the woods to stop the loggers from doing their jobs, or even tied themselves to eucalyptus trees, or simply hung like koalas on the branches of eucalyptus trees that were about to be cut down to stop them from being cut down.
On the other hand, because of the influence of vote politics, in order to win more votes to support Australian politicians, they have also begun to openly support these extreme environmental organizations to enhance their political image. Due to the accumulation of various objective factors, the number of eucalyptus trees in Australia has increased exponentially since the beginning of the 20th century, and the frequency of bushfires has also increased year by year to a new high.
On the other hand, the budget of the fire department, on the contrary, because of the weakness of the overall Australian economy, there has been a significant reduction and decline, after all, for politicians, real money to improve the fire protection efforts that ordinary people do not notice, how can it be more convenient and direct than shouting two environmental protection slogans. Although high investment in firefighting can reduce the number of wildfire disasters, it will make people question the need for firefighting investment because of the reduction in the total number of disasters, and save this money to invest in environmental protection and other face-saving projects, which is the most cost-effective deal in the eyes of Australian politicians who only vote for the picture.
But when politics becomes a transaction, disasters are often not far away, and when all kinds of hidden dangers accumulate to a tipping point, all that is left is a spark that ignites this explosive keg. In 2019, when the extreme weather reached a new height, everyone was caught off guard, and disaster suddenly came!
At first, the Australian government also regarded the bushfires that occurred on the east coast and northern regions as ordinary fires in the previous bushfire season, and after receiving the report, they did not pay attention to it at all, thinking that they would naturally be extinguished as long as they waited for ten days and half a month. However, because of the large number of eucalyptus trees, which provided excellent supplies and assistance for the spread of the fire, coupled with the strong winds caused by local high temperatures, the wildfire spread wildly at an unprecedented speed.
At the same time, the Morrison government in Australia, which is indulged in political entertainment and votes, simply has no ability to organize large-scale fire relief work, let alone the ability of Australia's fire department to deal with such a large-scale fire because of the annual financial contraction.
Even now, the Australian federal government's priority is not how to extinguish the fire as soon as possible, but how to shift the responsibility for the fire to the local government departments, and whether to mobilize the federal government's firefighting force to support the local government. At the same time, it manipulated domestic public opinion and forcibly downplayed the serious damage caused by the fires, so that when the scope of the disaster was further expanded, the people in the affected areas did not receive timely and effective warnings.
Seeing that the fire was becoming more and more uncontrollable and attracted widespread attention from the international community, Morrison, as the top leader of the Australian federal government, the prime minister at the time, simply did not do anything, and fled Australia on vacation to Hawaii in the United States under the pretext of vacation. And his subordinates are still arguing to the media at the moment that the prime minister's itinerary is completely compliant and legal, and he is on vacation according to the official holiday, completely ignoring the super wildfires that have affected the whole of Australia and even the world environment as if they were nothing, and this operation is really jaw-dropping.
It is undeniable that the extreme weather in 2019 did have a certain impact on the generation and final outcome of this wildfire. But the root cause of such tragic consequences is that the Australian government and the people's long-term wrong concept of environmental protection, and the chaotic and evasive attitude in the face of disasters, have made this disaster that could have been controlled develop into one of the worst natural disasters in history.
Comparing the tens of millions of hectares of land burned and the nearly 3 billion animals killed and injured in the process, we can see how stupid and ridiculous the self-proclaimed "environmental protection" behavior of Australia's extremist environmental groups was. The Australian super wildfire incident is undoubtedly a resounding alarm for countries around the world!