Jim Hoggett milks goats at his farm west of Gloucester in northern eastern NSW, he is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and he had the feature letter in last week’s The Land (16th February). It read:
Last weekend we had the routine “alleged illegal land clearing” scare in the Sydney Morning Herald, fostered by the Wilderness Society. It was alleged that the equivalent of 6 Sydney Cricket Ground pitches were being illegally cleared in NSW every hour of every day.
The greatest threat to nature in NSW is not scrub clearing in the central West. It is fire, especially fire in the National Parks.
In the few weeks prior to the SMH report an area perhaps 10 times the area of alleged illegal clearing went up in wildfires across the eastern States. And the season is not over yet. To use the much loved
Green cricket pitch analogy, that is the equivalent of 60 Sydney Cricket Grounds every hour of every day. The difference is that the fires consume the pristine, national heritage, wilderness rather than Central-Western scrub.And this is as nothing to the 2003 fires (900 cricket grounds per hour for NSW and the ACT alone) where the jewels in the crown were burned to the ground – if that is not too mixed a metaphor.
I have not heard a peep out of the Wilderness Society about all this. Nor has anyone to my knowledge ever attempted to measure this truly massive, recurring ecological damage. Not to mention the annual risk
to the lives of firefighters. No doubt there is a lot of silent hand wringing but I hear no solutions.And we will no doubt find that much of the alleged illegal clearing was of regrowth. The interval between the two photos in the SMH report was only 3 years. So much of the area may well have been previously cleared. Perhaps we could direct the satellite to take a survey of reafforestation in NSW. We might well find that the total area and density of NSW native vegetation has actually increased with regrowth and forest thickening. Let’s look at the stock as well as the flow.
What is the net gain/loss?
Even better, instead of spending millions of dollars on satellites to spy on its own citizens, government could divert the money to programs which would prevent the mass destruction of our fauna and flora. Then we could possible simplify the absurdly restrictive Native Vegetation Act and work on a program of serious fire mitigation in our Parks.
Incidentally, the alleged illegal clearing amounted to less than one hundredth of one per cent of the area of NSW.
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Republished with permission from Jim Hoggett.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jen,
As an IPA stooge his views should be completely disregarded as biased.
He is obviously under the influence of the goat lobby who are known contributors to the IPA and therefore unreliable when it comes to first-hand experience of goat/land related issues.
ANYTHING he says can be ignored on the basis of this relationship.
The concensus of experts is that burning native flora is caused by goat milkers for profit.
The observation that ‘the alleged illegal clearing amounted to less than one hundredth of one per cent of the area of NSW’ is not a ‘view’: it purports to be a statement of fact. I will accept Jim Hoggett’s statement of fact unless and until the anonymous Jim or someone else shows it to be untrue.
As a matter of record, the Qld DNRM detected about 60,000ha of “potential” illegal clearing involving about 1200 properties. This supposedly serious abuse was used to justify a whole new suite of powers and a whole new loss of fundamental rights of landowners in the state.
See an earlier post on this blog by Prof Suri Ratnapalla of UQ.
This was also used to justify a whole new recruiting programme to take badly needed senior police officers off the beat so they can deal with this supposedly more serious criminality.
But when last heard, only about 6 cases actually went to court so only 0.5 of 1% (1 in 200) of these “potential” illegal clearing events had any substance. The rest were exempted under the various “routine” and “essential” management provisions or were lawfull forest practices etc.
And one must question whether investigating a sequence of 200 to 1 long shots is the highest and best use of experienced police officers at a time when the state government has admitted that the Qld police force is under considerable pressure from poaching by NSW to help clean up it’s own law and order fiasco.
I would suggest Hogget is either woefully ignorant or dishonest. There is a massive difference between permanently removing remnant patches of vegetation from private land and the affects of a bushfire.
Remnant vegetation on private land serves a vital ecological function in lieu of proper corridors connecting nature reserves. For example if facilitates species migration.
Much of the Australian bush needs fire to regenerate. I am a keen native gardener and I regularly apply “smokewater” to seedlings and put the seed cones of various banksia, hakea and other species in the oven since they need the heat to open and be stimulated into action.
Recently burnt out areas offer fresh green pick for herbivotous fauna and provide an opportunity for small plants to exploit the window of opportunity presented by the lack of competition from other plants, nutrients from the ash and the extra sunlight hitting ground level.
My belief is that land owners should be paid “rent” for the ecosystem services offered by their land. This could be funded by abolishing disaster assistance funding for droughts, floods and so on.
The Government doesn’t provide “disaster assistance” for a city dweller whose business goes bust. Nor should the Goverbnment provide such assistance for farmers, who are rural small businessmen.
All of this is common knowledge and I can only wonder about the integrity and motives of this man Hoggett.
Receiving a handout from the Govt will hardly increase bushfire management or decrease floods, most likely lead to inflated cost of real estate and a new class of tree changer retirees. The lack of timely burning is not because people wont do it, it is more that the paper work is too onerous and the legisation too repressive.
Just filing these possible links between global warming and bushfires here:
http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/standard/ps17j,,.html
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/hennessykj_2005b.pdf
Well, if warming climate does tend to produce more bushfires, then that is all the more reason to do more prescribed burning, which is the only way to mitigate the danger and destruction of extreme bushfire. Try patch burning as often as it will carry a fire, say every 2-4 years, as the Aborigines did, or is that too sensible? Change the law, so such fires can be left, unattended, trickling on all summer, where no human settlements are at risk. Someone here in WA has suggested we call it ‘green burning’ – not a bad idea. That is exactly the effect it has on the bush, as opposed to the blackened desert after inappropriately long fire exclusion. It is odd that, in the US, conservationists such as the Sierra Society are actually in favour of restoring Indian patch burning, which was very similar to that by Aborigines here. I suppose the penny will drop with our eco-savants one day, perhaps when their house burns down, and all the old growth forest and possums are stone dead, due to some very intense local warming, due to their eco-mumbo-jumbo.
Davey, I think you will find that the overwhelming majority of people and organisations involved in conservation support controlled burns and in particular mimicking pre-colonial burn patterns.
However you talk of burns every 2-4 years is way too simplistic. The burn regime has to be based on the extant ecosystem. Same banksia and hakea open forest communities for instance would be wiped out with such frequent burns. There is no “one size fits all” solution.
People sometimes forget that “controlled burns” are very tricky. Fire can never really be tamed and controlled burns sometimes turn into destructive wildfires.
It seems that city folk have a very simplistic understanding of these issues.
Thanks Steve,
I am a conservationist, so I am glad to hear that many conservationists support controlled, and quasi-Aboriginal burning. That’s not the impression I get here in WA, where the Conservation Council, and WA Forest Alliance, seem to favour a reduction in controlled burning, despite the obvious damage to nature by recent uncontrollable bushfires in long unburnt fuel. Perhaps eastern states (I assume that’s where you are) conservationists are better informed.
It’s a complicated topic, so don’t be fooled into thinking my advocation of 2-4 years is simplistic. It is based on over thirty years research – however, I am a lazy publisher. Fire mosaics have a self-organising tendency (look up Richard Minnich’s work in California if you have not already) and burning, patchily, as often as the bush will carry a fire, can be shown, by simple geometry, to be a sound option. In fact, from my fiddlings with fire geometry, it appears to be the only option for maintaining a rich, diverse, patchy mosaic. Burning large areas at long intervals leads to the obvious destruction of patchiness in a holocaust fire. Burning at random intervals, advocated by some, is equally disastrous. Attempted long fire exclusion, over large areas, with our climate and vegetation, is simply daft. If I heard the news correctly (I’m a deaf old bugger), we have just had over forty lightning fires in a single day. Imagine if there were no fire brigades, roads, farmland etc. – those fires could burn on for months.
When land is declared wilderness, reserve or park (prescribed land) it falls under the jurisdiction of various laws including the Wilderness Act and any burning (prescribed burning) by the RFS must comply with the relevant Fire Management Plan.
The declaration of an area as “wilderness” precludes road or track construction making access difficult.
RFS must act to prevent excessive or lingering smoke and damage to biodiversity, cultural, historical and heritage elements.
How all this constitutes “support” and “mimicking pre-colonial burn patterns” by conservationists is beyond me. And this is in NSW.
Steve Munn appears to have a one word vocabulary for fire. He fails to distinguish between hot and cold burns, claiming it is all beneficial on the basis of his oven treatment of banksia seed.
Experienced land managers have a very large fire vocabulary based on humidity, fuel load, aspect, slope, landform, access, wind speed, natural constraints, man made constraints, time of day, crew fatigue and, above all SCALE.
And his suggestion that, “There is a massive difference between permanently removing remnant patches of vegetation from private land and the affects of a bushfire”, reflects that ignorance.
He is trying to suggest that the clearing is worse than the fire but it is highly unlikely that any forest clearing in our history has notched up a contiguous 2 million hectares of habitat destruction in a single year the way the recent wildfires have done. At that scale there is no-where for any dependent species to escape, let alone provide connective corridors for migration.
Even when the Big Scrub was cleared on the NSW North Coast, the 50,000ha involved was divided into 400 properties of about 125ha each. And it took 70 years from 1880 to 1950 to complete so average annual clearing was about 714ha spread over 400 properties. This averaged 1.78ha on each property each year. In fact it was probably closer to 3ha/pa because the properties that started first also finished first.
This rate of habitat decline, coupled with the extent of the dispersal of impacts, meant that dependent animals rarely actually died as a result of the clearing. The normal range of variation in animal populations in untouched forests in this area has been shown to exhibit 80% declines due to drought and corresponding five fold increases in good seasons. So the animals died in the same proportions as in any other drought but when the good seasons came the rate of population increase was modified by the slightly smaller habitat due to clearing during that cycle.
And this is nothing like the broadscale, contiguous population decimation caused by wildfire. And if Munn knew anything about farms he would know that the landuses that replaced the forest often provided equal, if not superior habitat value to the removed forest. Only the most specialised species were seriously disadvantaged.
But instead, Munn resorts to blatant defamatory statements like “woefully ignorant or dishonest”, and, “I can only wonder about the integrity and motives of this man Hoggett”, because the facts Jim has presented are at variance with Munn’s perspective from the klingon home world.