It will be Easter soon and if you live in Australia you can buy a chocolate bilbie instead of a chocolate rabbit to celebrate the occasion.
I understand that rabbits are traditionally associated with Easter because they represent fertility. Bilbies are not particularly fertile, in fact they are listed as endangered, but hey, it is all about helping an Australian native marsupial that’s doing it tough.
There were once two species of bilbie, but one is recorded as extinct since 1931 (Macrotis leucura). Bilbies have soft silky fur, long noses, long ears and they do not need to drink water.
I was sent a link to a story on ABC Television in Western Australia last week about a women struggling to save horses on a property purchased by government with the intention of putting it back how it was before European settlement. This involves removing artificial sources of water including dams.
Draining the dams has had the effect of starving and dehydrating many feral animals, including wild horses while presumably favoring native animals like bilbies that don’t need a drink.
The transcript is worth reading, it raises issues of animal cruelty, but also how one state government agency is trying to achieve some of its longer term objectives for wildlife management in Australia’s rangelands, click here.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
The same stunt is being pulled here in Qld when properties are taken over by the Parkies. Their main achievement is to reduce the stocking rate of ‘roos which forces most of them to move onto the next farm. And in so doing completely destroys the farmers plans for conserving fodder reserves.
This will then be followed by all sorts of moralistic finger pointing by the host of visiting shonkademics and departmental planeteers who lament the degraded state of the farming neighbour’s soil in contrast to the abundant ground cover in “their” new park.
It is the classic smoke and mirrors show. It looks good but delivers only a fraction of the habitat value of the so-called degraded farmland. It is the moral equivalent of suggesting that a full uneaten plate in an African refugee camp is of greater moral merit than one that has been licked clean. The former may still have it’s ‘sustainable potential’ intact but the other has saved a life.
But for landowners there is some glimmer of good news here. At least we have implied official recognition that the number of native animals on farmland is well in excess of the “natural” density. The pity is that they will never let you know what this “natural” density is so you can cull every animal in excess of that density.
The other glimmer of good news is that a policy of water denial, or “culling by thirst”, has been sanctioned by the Director General of the EPA as fully compliant with one’s (his) “environmental duty of care” under the EPA Act.
And this means every farmer with an excess wildlife problem is free to turn off the water and drain any watering points from paddocks in the rotation that do not currently have cattle or sheep in them.
And this goes to the very heart of the greens “turning Queensland into wasteland” adverts that gave Beattie his fraudulent mandate for the last draconian vegetation controls. If this so-called ‘wasteland’ is capable of supporting a substantial increase in the density of a large number of dependent species, then we have clear evidence that Beattie has obtained an electoral benefit by deception.
Horror stories like this are not unknown in our National reserve system. Many in the community question the priorities, resourcing and management of the reserves.
The purchasing of land to add to the Nation’s reserve system that is already extensive is also open to debate when considing health, education welfare and infrastructure needs.
Currently the Senate is conducting an Inquiry into Australia’s national parks, conservation reserves and marine protected areas.
A report is due by 30 November 2006.
Terms of Reference are:
The funding and resources available to meet the objectives of Australia’s national parks, other conservation reserves and marine protected areas, with particular reference to:
the values and objectives of Australia’s national parks, other conservation reserves and marine protected areas;
whether governments are providing sufficient resources to meet those objectives and their management requirements;
any threats to the objectives and management of our national parks, other conservation reserves and marine protected areas;
the responsibilities of governments with regard to the creation and management of national parks, other conservation reserves and marine protected areas, with particular reference to long-term plans; and
the record of governments with regard to the creation and management of national parks, other conservation reserves and marine protected areas.
The Committee invites written submissions from interested individuals and organisations, preferably in electronic form sent by email, to ecita.sen@aph.gov.au. The email must include full postal address and contact details.
Alternatively, submissions may be sent to The Secretary, Senate Environment, Communications Information Technology and the Arts References Committee Parliament House, CANBERRA ACT 2600, or faxed to 02 6277 5818.
Submissions should have been received by Wednesday, 1 March 2006. However, late submissions are being accepted. Please contact the Secretariat if you wish to make a late submission.
Submissions become committee documents and are made public.
This is about people’s ideas of nature, which are inevitably subjective, but which often appear to them to have unique moral force.
There is a great book about this, “In a Dark Wood” by Alston Chase. Chase shows how many different political systems have justified themselves as being in accordance with nature, and how attitudes to nature in turn reflect political, moral or ideological stances.
Most concepts in the field – ecology, the balance of nature, preservation values, the wild state, the state of nature, animal welfare – are without scientific foundation. They are moral “shell” concepts that on a practical level can be filled with a wide variety of personal preferences.
Management strategies for wild areas, of various types, typically fail to foresee key consequences, come to be judged as failures and are replaced with…new management strategies. A potential case in point is the recent fetish for national parks. This led to the 2003 fires that represented one of the largest habitat destruction and animal slaughter events in Australian history, as your IPA colleague Jim Hoggett pointed out in http://ipa.org.au/files/IPAbackgrounder16-2.pdf. Will the next strategy be any better?
Damn the dams, there is a real chance that the supply of the endangered Easter bunny will peak;
“With chocolate consumption increasing at a rate of 25 per cent a year in the Asia-Pacific region, and 30 per cent in China, chocolate makers fear that coco bean growers will not be able to keep up with demand. The unstoppable growth of China has aroused fears of future conflicts over natural resources such as oil, gas and water. Now a new and unforeseen catastrophe presents itself; global chocolate wars.
Shock Horror! Peak Chocolate!
I’m going to have to switch to carob bilbies?!? Eeeeuuuuw!