Miranda Devine, the danger of the trees, and feed a greenie to a dog or cat today

(Above: feed a greenie to your dog. Guaranteed to please, the original smart treat).

Thank the lord, Miranda the Devine has joined my campaign to turn the world into a giant concrete and tar car park, designed to service malls and mega cities.

Yep, You can't see the danger for the trees is the mild-mannered, deeply concerned header for her column, when we all know that deep down what she really means is that you can't see the danger for the greenies.

You see, the Blue Mountains is facing a catastrophic bushfire to rival or even exceed Victoria's February disaster. Hey anything Victorians do, we can do better.

So the first step in our joint campaign will be to kick out all the greenies, so we can burn all the trees to the ground in the Blue Mountains.

You see, people head off to the Blue Mountains for the stunning vistas, and the acres of untouched bushland, and even go so far as to build their homes amongst the trees, knowing that the noble gum is likely to go up in flames like a cigarette dipped in petrol.

So what's the solution? Well apart from nailing greenies to the ground with stakes (if silver bullets fail you) then clearing the bush of trees and undergrowth is surely the only solution.

Poor Miranda anxiously scanned the 70 odd submissions published on the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission website, but could find only four which mention hazard reduction or prescribed burning. 

For a moment there I thought there was some kind of conspiracy going on, but fortunately a free text search revealed that only three submissions mentioned climate change and only one global warming. (Should you be interested, you can view all submissions here by clicking through under the submissions header).

I guess the rest of the submissions dealt with issues without being refracted through either climate change, global warming or government land and parks hazard reduction paranoia.

Never mind, four submissions are way plenty enough if you want to select a slab of text that perfectly reflects your own thinking.

Not that Miranda is picking and choosing, picking and sticking, like Alan Jones in search of friends. No, she just wants to select the text which best amplifies and justifies her prejudice, and to hell with the rest of you moderates and cardigan-wearers wanting a balanced view.

A pretty neat trick indeed, especially if you want to dance around things you don't believe in.

Whether or not you go along with the green view that global warming played a crucial role in the fire intensity, what we do know is we aren't going to stop global warming before summer. We have control only over ground fuel.

Of course not, because global warming isn't happening!

And there's no way that people can control or affect their environment. Let's not go into that tedious, expensive environmentalist nonsense about trying to preserve a little bit of nature, or saving the world from the effects of human activity. Don't these greenies realize that nature's out to get us? We have to fight back hard.

Well it seems that they're mad as hell in the Blue Mountains, and they want to get into it, and do a lot of burns as the way of defusing the time bomb waiting to go off.

So it's burn baby burn, and never you mind what that rogue and charlatan Phil Koperberg, MP for the Blue Mountains region and a former firey has to say:

Koperberg, a former RFS commissioner, played down Nott's fears yesterday. "NSW is not Victoria," he said. "One should not assume that a fire the magnitude of Victoria will occur in the Blue Mountains."

He estimates only a quarter of his constituents want more hazard reduction. "You can't just run around dropping matches … We don't have the luxury of our indigenous forebears in wide-scale burning across the landscape."

But Nott and his fellow firefighters don't want to torch the entire landscape, just to do the sort of regular mosaic-style burns they used to do.

They are foiled by "green tape" they say has been imposed by authorities to appease green groups who claim to support hazard reduction while limiting its effectiveness for biodiversity reasons.

Part of the problem, Nott says, is that many Blue Mountains communities are "dormitory suburbs where people are not up on their bushcraft, don't want to look at black trees and are fed a whole lot of stuff by greenies".

Green tape. Ah yes, it's always the government, standing in the way of the will of the people, until you actually want someone to turn up and run a hose over your burning home.

Well those Blue Mountains residents are certainly better off listening to dormitory columnists who live absolutely nowhere near the actual Blue Mountains, but who love to listen to anyone at all saying anything, so long as it bashes greenies.

As for the Blue Mountains, here's luck to them as they try to resolve their community differences, and here's hoping they develop a strategy for preserving the charms of the landscape along with the charms of their communities. But if the debate turns into  a political controversy, and all that's achieved is a political solution, then Miranda the Devine won't have helped much at all.

Demonizing one interest group while hunting through the literature as a way of celebrating another interest group gives a whole new twist to fair and balanced, unless of course you happen to think Fox News is fair and balanced. A pretty neat trick.

Which reminds me, once we've got rid of the trees, I'm thinking of sending in the 'dozers to flatten the mountains. Sure it's a big job, but really they're more hills than mountains, and it's going to be damn hard for north shore and eastern suburbs people to find a park on their weekend treks up to look at the new malls, without wandering off road and getting a little dirt on their wheels. 

In much the same way as some of these city slickers understand the world through ideology rather than experience, and blithely talk about bushcraft and their understanding of the bush, by looking up what others have to say in submissions to a government inquiry.

(Below: your dog not interested in greenies? Why not cook them up in catnip, add a tempting tuna flavor, and feed them to your cat? Sure to please).