A Glimmer of Hope: Emerging from the Ashes of the Australian Bushfires

October 26, 2020

“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let’s try to make something uplifting.”

— Fred Kaufman, executive producer, PBS Nature

After the fires, there was a glimmer of hope.

Only a glimmer, mind, but there it was: A patch of green where Adrina Selles’ home still stood, surrounded by the blackened devastation of January’s wildfires that ravaged vast tracts of wilderness across Australia’s state of New South Wales. A now semi-retired nurse, Selles had opened a homegrown wildlife care centre several years earlier, little thinking that one day she would be in the centre of a firestorm — literally — and yet now there she was.

This Wednesday, on an hour-long documentary on US public broadcasting’s PBS Nature showcase (Australian Bushfire Rescue, Weds. 8E/7P), science filmmaker Anja Taylor takes viewers on a personal journey through Selles’ story as she tries — and in some cases succeeds — nurturing wombats, wallabies, kangaroos and other wild animals badly injured in the bushfires back to health. The idea is that, eventually, the animals may be released back into the wild, or what’s left of it.

It’s an affecting program that shows that while one person can only do so much, it can still make an important difference to making this a better world. The program, although scheduled months ago, could not be better timed. Fierce wildfires are once again ravaging large tracts of wilderness area across the US West, even as climate deniers insist it’s all some kind of hoax driven my a Machiavellian desire to kill the oil and gas industry and create fake jobs in green energy projects that conservative right-leaning climate deniers insist are government featherbedding schemes.

The number of animals killed in the fires — in both far-flung US and Australia — is estimated in the billions, not tens or even hundreds of millions. This is no hoax.

Australian Bushfire Rescue focuses on Selles’ animal sanctuary and her rehabilitation efforts in the immediate aftermath of the fires. Her home doubles as a centre for rehabilitating injured and orphaned animals for eventual release back into the wild.

It was miraculously spared from the fires that swept through the area on New Year's Eve, and went on to serve as an emergency hub for rescue volunteers and vets. Since the fires, local and international support for Selles’ sanctuary has resulted in new enclosures, including a new triage centre for wildlife. Selles now has around 40 wallabies and kangaroos in her care.

The program itself is an encouraging glimpse into human resilience, and the humanity that reveals itself through catastrophe. The program gives one hope for the future, something we can agree we all need a little bit more of these days.

In a Zoom conference call with TV critics this past summer, Selles spoke at length — despite it being 6am local time Down Under — about her experience and her memories of those fateful days. This is not the first time wildfires have ravaged wilderness in Australia, and it will not be the last, just as wildfires are devastating the US West right now. This will happen again, and the very thought angers her.

“Going through the fires and these kinds of emergency situations really highlights everything and teaches you about the care and the needs of these little guys,” Selles said during the Zoom call. “It makes you more aware of their needs and environmental needs, what these animals hear and what they see, the disasters like the fires and floods and everything else. It highlights everything. Things like: what are we doing? What are we doing to our environment? What are we doing to these animals? Makes you question a lot of things.”

Selles said she learned a lot about herself during the experience.

“It’s funny how, at times, even though you feel your energy draining away, you have other people you can rely on. Somehow, with all the people working there, there's an understanding of the support that comes out, not only the physical support, but the emotional support that everyone gives to each other.

Adrina Selles ©Anja Taylor/WildBear Entertainment

“The wombat and the joeys surviving was just amazing. That was the respite. We had one little joey come in the middle of that devastation. Every kangaroo was burnt. But this little joey was perfect, its feet were beautiful, not a mark on it. Somehow that little joey became our mascot.

“People needed respite, so they would go and say, ‘Okay, it’s my turn to feed this joey.’ And they would look after it. There was another one, and then another one. They kept coming in.

“I have a group of volunteers that come in and help, and they are a really good team. They are out here all the time because I live there. They understand that. They will say, “Okay, it's time. You got to go away. You have to go on to something else and we'll do this. We'll take over.’ There's a kind informal backup.”

This isn’t about keeping house pets. The animals will have to be released eventually. At least, that’s the hope.

“That's where the carers need to be trained to go through that process. In the beginning, obviously, when the animals are (injured), they’re handled quite frequently. As they get bigger, we step back more and more, to prepare them for release, to the point where we might be in their enclosures only once a day.

“We have a couple of ways of releasing, some of which what we call a hard release. They have to be a bit older and have more weight on them. The hard release is, we just put them out there and push, and hopefully they have enough skills and weight on them and things like that so that they are going to survive.

“The other option is a soft release, where you — I can just open the gates at my property and they'll go as they please, and I support them. They slowly take their time. They do. They return to the wild.

“They won't actually let you touch them anymore. After a while, they’re only coming for food.

“They’re only coming for food; they are not coming for you anymore. They make that break themselves.

“Especially the boys, they leave and go elsewhere. Some of the girls will stay around. They’re only coming around for food, though. If I stopped feeding them, I wouldn't see them anymore.”

Veteran Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman — the program has been on the air for 39 seasons now — says the decision to produce Australian Bushfire Rescue was a no-brainer, even given the competition from other ideas for natural history programs. Especially now, during these trying times.

“There’s a very poignant scene in the film where the carers are out there and a mother kangaroo is trying to care for two young ones,” Kaufman recalled. “The mother was really very injured and she would not have survived. That kangaroo had to be put down.

“One of the keepers, rehabilitators, goes back to his truck and he gets a rifle and he shoots the kangaroo. We just had to take that out of the program. Even though every care was taken to put her out of her misery, it's just too hard to watch. We just couldn't go with it. But we made the point that that particular kangaroo had to be put down.

“While making this film, I really wanted us to highlight the work of Adrina and so many others caring for these animals, because it is very grim and the footage can be very disturbing and very hard to watch, and yet the work that the carers do, rehabilitating the animals and caring for them, just gives us all hope.

“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let's try to make something uplifting.”

Australian Bushfire Rescue airs Wednesday in the US and Canada on PBS at 8E/7C.

“Insta”-gram from California: On Heat Waves, Firestorms, a Teenage Climate Activist and Now, “Firenados.”

August 19, 2020

“This is the moment we need to save November, to save the planet.”

— Alexandria Villasenõr, climate activist

Ironies abound. The first time I learned of the teenage climate activist Alexandria Villasenõr, age 15, was on Twitter, when I happened to be following the better-known teen activist Greta Thunberg.

Villasenõr, demonstrating against climate change at the time, was huddled with a hand-made sign on a bench outside a New York museum during one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history. Horrified museum workers begged her to come inside; she refused, and they sent her hot coffee instead while she tweeted a series of real-time updates, tapping her smartphone in a whirlwind of driving snow. I sent a tweet of encouragement, assuming it would vanish into the ether, and she replied immediately. The power of social media. I’ve followed her, through thick and thin, ever since.

Fast-forward 18 months.

Villasenõr, now in California where her family lives, where she was born, grew up and went to school, has been active again on Twitter these past few days, because she’s now in the middle of another weather-driven firestorm.

Only this firestorm is literally that — a storm made of fire.

The on-going heatwave across California and up the coast all the way to the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, has sparked some of the most violent fires in a region already known for its volatile summer fires.

The climate crisis, as we all know, doesn’t exist — it’s a Chinese hoax, perpetuated by libtards, bunny huggers and radical lefties hidebound determined to sully the environmental record of the US Trump administration — the eternal sunshine of spotless minds! The Trump administration — paragons of virtue, educated, well informed and true believers in empirical evidence and the power science — never enact policy without first thinking of the public interest.

Right.

The facts are these: This past weekend, the US National Weather Service’s automated weather station at aptly named Furnace Creek — in equally aptly named Death Valley, just inside California’s border with Nevada — registered a record breaking high temperature of 54.4Cº.

That might not sound like much but it is the hottest reliably recorded temperature since temperatures first started being recorded by equipment specifically calibrated to take precise measurements — as opposed to, you know, taking a wild guess.

The record high — which equates to 129.9ºF, roughly speaking, in New World money — was registered at 3.41pm, confirming my theory (anecdotal, but scientifically unproven) that late afternoon is the hottest time of day, not high noon, regardless of how high in the sky the sun might be at any given time.

The official world record, according to the World Meteorological Organization, remains 56.7ºC

(134ºF), also taken at Death Valley, on 10 July 1913.

Private meteorological services, though, have challenged the validity of the 1913 figure. Weather monitoring instruments at the time were not what they are today. 1913, after all, was only a year after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, and just one year before the outbreak of the First World War. Twitter was not a thing, and neither were GPS tracking devices and smartphones.

More importantly for 2020, the latest temperature record coincides with a scorching heat wave that has burned its way across the entire west coast of North America, especially Southern California — no stranger of late to summer drought and violent, weather-driven firestorms in the peak summer months of August and September. (Little-known fact: September is traditionally the driest, hottest month of the year in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, ahead of June, July and August. Now you know.)

The ongoing heatwave has sparked numerous fires, one of which news sources local to the area dubbed a “firenado.”

Firenados are rarely recorded. They occur when the hot air from a fire on the ground rises in a tall, tornado-like column and rotates in winds higher off the ground, creating what appears to the outside eye to be a tornado made of fire.

Even in a region already baking from successive summers of fire and record-breaking heat, firenados are uncool.

Villasenõr again, on Twitter, mere hours ago.

“Crossing ‘eavesdropping on my parents while they discuss where they can drive me if the smoke outside gets worse”’ off my 2020 Bingo card.”

If this keeps up, one will no longer be able to see the forest or the trees — quite literally, because there will be no forest or trees to see.

What does this all mean? It seems crazy to have to say this in the year 2020, but one thing it means is that the climate crisis is not a hoax, Chinese or otherwise, and the libtards, bunny huggers and Trump doubters may be onto something after all.

It also means that when Villasenõr, Thunberg and other teenagers around the globe say something needs to be done, and done now, we need to listen. Never mind their future. The future health of the entire planet is at stake.

“In 2018,” Villasenõr posted in a pinned tweet on Aug. 11 of this year, “scientists said we have 12 years to reduce emissions and address catastrophic climate change. Since then we’ve only gone backwards. We can’t wait 4 more yrs to change the course we’re on, we have to do it now.”

And how.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/19/another-two-years-lost-to-climate-inaction-says-greta-thunberg

How Vincent van Goat Saved the Presidential Library

November 02, 2019

“It was darn smart of us to do that.”

— John Heubusch, executive director, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute

Bring on the goats. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is the repository of presidential records from the administration of Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States, and the burial place of the President and First Lady, Nancy Reagan. And this past week, it was saved from the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles Basin by — wait for it — a herd of goats.

The library is in Simi Valley, Calif., about 64 km (40 miles) northwest of downtown Los Angeles and 24 km (15 miles) west of Chatsworth. The somewhat oddly named Easy Fire broke out early Wednesday morning in the parched hills surrounding Simi Valley and burned through some 1,300 acres by daylight, according to the Ventura County Fire Dept. The Easy Fire, one of several California wildfires burning in dry and windy conditions for the past two weeks, threatened some 6,500 homes and forced numerous school closures before burning toward the Reagan Library, propelled by strong winds.

Interestingly — and by design — a herd of 500 ravenous goats was introduced to the area surrounding the library this past May, with the idea of creating a fire break by munching away at brush that otherwise might have served as kindling to any potential fire. Fire breaks slow the flames in any potential fire and buy firefighters extra time to respond.

Southern California, SOCAL to the locals, has been the site of terrible wildfires for the past three years running, owing to the seasonal Santa Ana winds that sweep down from the parched mountains every October. Due to climate change, some say, the winds have been more capricious, intense and unpredictable in recent years. This season has proved particularly bad — winds topped 160 kph (100 mph) miles an hour in some areas, triple the norm, or whatever passes for normal these days.

That there are fires should come as no surprise: The Los Angeles Basin is essentially a huge bowl of

sand, and the regional population — in an area that has little to no natural water sources — now tops 10 million.

The goats, naturally enough, have become stars. The “caprine contractors,” as BBC dubbed them in a news story Thursday, include Selena Goatmez, Goatzart and the unofficial ringleader, poster boy and public face of SOCAL goat herds everywhere, Vincent van Goat.

The goats work (relatively) cheap. A local company, established last November, supplies the goats and charges around USD 1,000 per acre for grazing brush. The Reagan Presidential Library grounds required around 13 acres of land to be cleared — a bargain, considering the Easy Fire burned through 1,300 acres before firefighters had a chance to tackle the fire head on.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles was also threatened by fire this past week; in that case, valuable scrub-clearing work was carried out by museum staff. The company that supplies the goats is already talking about having to double their herd, just to meet demand.

The bigger picture tells a valuable tale. Using goats to clear unwanted brush is a natural way to fight nature’s fires, though the California experience shows that most of these fires were started by human encroachment, mainly downed power lines in high winds that flame out and spark the underbrush, as opposed to dry lightning, which is responsible for most of the wildfires north of California, on the BC West Coast, for example, and in the coastal mountains that separate the Pacific region from the Rocky Mountains further inland.

The goats proved invaluable, as it turned out. The Ronald Reagan Library grounds cover some 700 acres. At its height, the Easy Fire came within 27 metres (30 yards) of the complex. If not for the goats, there’s no telling what might have happened.