Wyrm: Sometimes you can get fire ecology across to the yuppies by explaining 'firestick farming', because Aboriginal culture is sort of trendoid, but mostly there is just the Ug the Caveman level response of "But Fire Bad!". I remember when Walmsley first started Warrawong Sanctuary, there was a lot of opposition on the grounds of fire safety, because his plantings emulated the local forest as it had been before settlement, which was quite dense. Every few years until the trees got their growth he would do a controlled burn, a 'cool' fire, which kept the underbrush down. Then when enough of an ecology had established to support them he introduced the numerous small marsupials he had been breeding up, bettongs and bandicoots and bilbies, antechinus and hopping mice and the like, as well as the more usual koalas, wombats, quolls, platypus, wallabies and kangaroos. Apart from the quolls which were in enclosures, and platypus in the water, everything else was turned loose to hunt, graze, forage, dig and burrow, as a result of which the underbrush stayed at safe levels.
A few years later, when an unsupervised rubbish fire at Stirling dump got loose and swept across the Hills in a firestorm, the firetruck crews took refuge on Walmsley's place and didn't die, because the fire had swept through, burned the open underbrush, hadn't been hot enough to take on the trees, and died off. All the area around the outside of the sanctuary burned to ashes. His methods became more accepted after that.
