Thought I'd share something which while, not exactly a new LoRaG entry, gives some insight into how different the LoRaG world is from OTL Australia.
It seems to have been covered around the world that Australia has been having significant bushfires this summer. An area of over 186,000 square kilometres has been burnt, or to put it in BBC measurements, an area over three-quarters the size of the United Kingdom. There has been substantial property destruction and tragic consequences for many of the native fauna (and to a lesser degree, flora). Some of the smoke from the bushfires was projected to travel all of the way around the world (over South America) and return to Australia from the other side.
I was asked a question in another thread about how bushfires happened in LoRaG Australia, and I thought it would be worth useful to repeat and develop that answer more in this thread. This has been aided by a recent demonstration of how effective Aboriginal peoples' use of managed fire was at reducing the risk of fire destruction of inhabited areas.
There are three reasons why bushfires are less of a threat in LoRaG Australia than in OTL Australia (though still a threat, certainly). I've ranked them from least to most important.
Firstly, arson. This has become rather a political topic of late due to certain media commentators within Australia attributing the current bushfire season damage to arson rather than any possible effects of climate change. I'll leave the political aspects of that to the Chat forum, except to note that that fact-checking in response to this has corrected some misconceptions on my own part. The evidence indicates that about 1% of the area burned in the current and recent fire seasons has been due to arson. The percentage of fire started by human activity may be higher, but the most damaging ones have other or unknown causes (lightning strikes, accidental human activity, etc).
However, whatever percentage of fires are caused by arson in OTL Australia, this is much lower in Aururia. Arson is less of a concern amongst Aururian societies because they have a much harsher approach to anyone suspected of lighting fires at the wrong time of year. (Short version, they don't wait for a court to decide.). Punishment in some form extends to the broader family, not just the individuals. Harsh, and not exactly fair by modern standards, but it has the desired deterrent effect.
The second reason why bushfires are much less destructive to Aururian peoples is that the nature of Aururian agriculture is that their dwellings are usually a good way from bushland. Aururian farmers clear the land around them for various agricultural purposes. In OTL Australia, houses are very rarely destroyed if they are more than 500 metres from the bush, and almost never if they are more than 650 metres. In ATL Aururia, actual home dwellings are usually further from the bush than that. So with most Aururian houses outside of that range, the damage to dwellings is much less.
The third and by far the most important reason is that because the Aururians developed from previous existing cultures, they have retained more of a tradition of land management to minimise the risk of uncontrolled fires. Aboriginal peoples had an extremely complex system of doing controlled burns of the forest at chosen times of year, taking into account type of soil and vegetation, times that plants flowered, and a lot of other things. ATL Aururians have preserved that tradition - it's not the sort of thing that they would give up.
To over-simplify, this means that Aururians do things like controlled burn-offs in cooler months to reduce the vegetation load around their agricultural regions, which means that bushfires are much less devastating when they occur. Their method of doing burn-offs is also distinctly different to modern hazard reduction-burning, being (among other things) less intense and less inclined to get into the tree canopy. While different, it works very well.
The effectiveness of Aboriginal peoples' methods of controlled burning was rather convincingly demonstrated in a recent case during this bushfire season. I've linked to the full newspaper article below, but in brief what happened was that in one part of the Hunter Valley in NSW, a homeowner had to evacuate his bushland property due to a spreading firefront. He came back a couple of days later expecting everything to be in ruins, as had happened to other properties in the area. His main dwelling was entirely untouched by fire, and surrounded by a small patch of green vegetation.
The reason for this is that three years earlier, the area surrounding that property had been given a controlled burn in the traditional manner of Aboriginal peoples. This meant that because the undergrowth had been (mostly) cleared, the fire didn't spread to that region, leaving this owner's main dwellings intact. The only building that was burnt was a shed 500 metres away which was outside the area of the controlled burn.
In ATL Aururia, while there will of course still be times when bushfires get out of hand and cause destruction, they will be much less than in modern Australia.
Short version: Aboriginal cultural burning works.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...ing-saved-their-property-20200103-p53okc.html