PHOTOGRAPH: STEVE RYAN
At the time of going to press, downpours were being prayed for in Australia. Record-breaking temperatures and months of drought had created a winter fire season of a scale barely seen before, with 17 million hectares of countryside burned, and over 2,000 homes lost in New South Wales alone. While our understanding will continue to develop of the unprecedented conditions fuelling the bushfires and the impact of climate change on them, in this issue you’ll find insights shared about how fire can actually be used to manage the land and limit the ferocity of unplanned bushfires (p90) - a traditional knowledge gathered by the indigenous people of the Northern Territory, who have been there for 65,000 years. Also in this issue you’ll hear from astronaut John Herrington (p30), the first Native American to complete a space walk. When we met in recent weeks he talked of the journey his Chickasaw ancestors had completed, from being forced from their lands in the southeastern USA to settling in Oklahoma - a line of resilience that spurred him through his career with NASA, and while facing the question every astronaut one day has to: where to go next?
@peter_grunert petervg73