Facing our future of fire

As Australia struggles to contain today’s ‘unprecedented’ bushfires, how can we start to prepare for tomorrow?

Guest: David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, The University of Tasmania

Broadcast in ABC Saturday Extra on November 23rd, 2019.

Hi David,

I agree with your thoughts on changing summer school holidays to a better time of year. My first thought as I woke to terrible news of fires around New Year’s Day was ‘what a dreadful shame there are so many families and holiday makers at the scene’.

As a primary school teacher I would propose that an extra week gets tacked onto autumn and spring breaks (currently 2 weeks) and then a 4 week winter July break. Xmas would then just be a short break in-line with North America and Europe.

The benefits would be more than just a sensible adaptation to the new normal re climate change but also that:

Students would not succumb to Summer Reading Slump, children would have more chance of an active lifestyle in non extreme holiday weather and lastly, all children would start at 5 years olds (as the new school year start would be late July or early August, thus bringing all Kindergarten kids to school at age of 5 years.)

So it is a simple solution.

Having seen a good deal of anxiety from the kids and parents in our school recently due to extreme weather (we suffered a 10 minute mini tornado which caused lots of damage) I feel like we owe it to the next generation to ‘use our noggin’, as my primary teachers used to say…

1 thought on “Facing our future of fire”

Giulia Mamott says:

January 6, 2020 at 1:28 pm

Hi David,

I agree with your thoughts on changing summer school holidays to a better time of year. My first thought as I woke to terrible news of fires around New Year’s Day was ‘what a dreadful shame there are so many families and holiday makers at the scene’.

As a primary school teacher I would propose that an extra week gets tacked onto autumn and spring breaks (currently 2 weeks) and then a 4 week winter July break. Xmas would then just be a short break in-line with North America and Europe.

The benefits would be more than just a sensible adaptation to the new normal re climate change but also that:

Students would not succumb to Summer Reading Slump, children would have more chance of an active lifestyle in non extreme holiday weather and lastly, all children would start at 5 years olds (as the new school year start would be late July or early August, thus bringing all Kindergarten kids to school at age of 5 years.)

So it is a simple solution.

Having seen a good deal of anxiety from the kids and parents in our school recently due to extreme weather (we suffered a 10 minute mini tornado which caused lots of damage) I feel like we owe it to the next generation to ‘use our noggin’, as my primary teachers used to say…