• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Jennifer Marohasy

Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

  • Home
  • About
  • Publications
  • Speaker
  • Blog
  • Temperatures
  • Coral Reefs
  • Contact
  • Subscribe

On Pious Hope & Queensland’s Rangelands

June 29, 2005 By jennifer

The following note on rangeland management is from a reader of this blog who lives in western Queensland. The note was followed by the the comment that, “a major problem of rangeland management is that politicians and bureaucrats have undying faith in the efficacy of pious hope and regulation to rectify problems now largely caused by previous doses of pious hope and regulation”.

He writes,

“Among the myths of rangeland management are:-

1. that rangelands are fragile

Wrong on either meaning of “fragile”. In the sense of Wedgewood china, wrong because the organisms involved have had some millions of years of the vaguries of semi-arid and arid regions and are basically as tough as old boots.

In the ecological sense of “fragile” (having frequent changes in species composition), wrong because “resilience” is the ticket in these regions, not “stability”

2. that things happen slowly in the rangelands

Wrong – more that nothing much happens, then things can happen very rapidly and then nothing much happens – (but you don’t get to see this if your rangelands watching is by intermittent visits). Contrast “state and transition” vs “Clementsian succession”.

3. that one size fits all (the shifting spanner of management)

Lower George Street (in Brisbane) has a bad case of this at the moment.

So fire or not depends on what we have to manage. Pretty well documented that lack of fire got us to the current woody vegetation increase problem. And New England and Southern Africa experience says fire for managing some pasture species. Unusual to need fire every year for such management.

And (for rangeland) one of the Charleville Pastoral Laboratory results is that out here we are looking at about 90 percent of the dry matter by about the end of March, and we shouldn’t be aiming to use more than about 30 percent of that via grazing animals over the next 12 months – so there is the rest for roos etc and insects and mulch. And on the economics side, at least 90 percent of the net income will come from around 70-75 percent of the stocking rate.

I’m afraid we didn’t doo too well on this score for the last 4-5 years. But there is hope – a warm winter so far and 119mm in May and 72mm so far in June, and the pasture species are finally responding (even buffel seedlings in June), so we may be able to get back to the above.

This note follows the posting by Graham of 28th June which was Part 2 of ‘Managing our Rangelands’.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bushfires, Rangelands

Primary Sidebar

Latest

Complicating the IPCC Planck Feedback, Plank #4 of Climate Resilience Theory

June 1, 2025

The Moon’s Tidal Push

May 30, 2025

How Climate Works. In Discussion with Philip Mulholland about Carbon Isotopes

May 14, 2025

In future, I will be More at Substack

May 11, 2025

How Climate Works: Upwellings in the Eastern Pacific and Natural Ocean Warming

May 4, 2025

Recent Comments

  • Don Gaddes on The Moon’s Tidal Push
  • ironicman on The Moon’s Tidal Push
  • cohenite on The Moon’s Tidal Push
  • Don Gaddes on The Moon’s Tidal Push
  • Karen Klemp on The Moon’s Tidal Push

Subscribe For News Updates

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

PayPal

June 2005
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930  
« May   Jul »

Archives

Footer

About Me

Jennifer Marohasy Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method. Read more

Subscribe For News Updates

Subscribe Me

PayPal

Contact Me

To get in touch with Jennifer call 0418873222 or international call +61418873222.

Email: J.Marohasy@climatelab.com.au

Connect With Me

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2025 · Genesis - Jen Marohasy Custom On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in