Not so many years ago Australian farmers where forced to clear their land of trees, it was a condition of many leases. Some areas were over-cleared particularly in Western Australia.
Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung in completely the other direction, with legislation now essentially outlawing tree clearing on both leasehold and freehold land.
In Queensland and NSW the new legislation has been driven, at least in part, by relentless campaigning from the Wilderness Society. As their name suggests, this environment group believes in ‘wilderness’ and is against the active management of landscapes. Yet, to quote, Deborah Bird Rose :
“A definition of wilderness which excludes the active presence of humanity may suit contemporary people’s longing for places of peace, natural beauty, and spiritual presence, uncontaminated by their own culture. But definitions which claim that these landscapes are ‘natural’ miss the whole point. Here on this continent, there is no place where the feet of Aboriginal humanity have not preceded those of the settler. Nor is there any place where the country was not once fashioned and kept productive by Aboriginal people’s land management practices.”
The reality is that before white pastoralists moved into western NSW and Queensland the country was “kept productive” by aboriginals and their firesticks. They burnt the land which favoured some grasses and limited the establishment of what many pastoralists now refer to as “woody weeds” including species of native cypress pine and acacia.
Current land management practices compounded by government regulations, policies and expectations, have resulted in large areas of western Queensland and NSW being over run by invasive native scrub, also known as ‘woody weeds’, and this is having a negative economic and environmental impact in many areas.
While the rural press has run hard on the issue it has been ignored by the mainstream media. It has perhaps been assumed that farmers have exaggerated the ‘woody weed’ issue because they want to keep clearing trees until there are none left? Interestingly when I tried to get a piece published by the Courier Mail some years ago, I was told that my suggestion that there were more trees regrowing than being cleared in Queensland was offensive.
But, at last a respectable metropolitan journalist has discovered the issue. This morning Channel Nine’s Sunday Program ran ‘The Great Land-Clearing Myth’ as their cover story. Ross Coulthart made the comment:
ROSS COULTHART: Another reason to be skeptical about the Wilderness Society’s alarming land clearing figures — they don’t include regrowth in their estimate of 100,000 hectares of clearing because no-one is measuring it.
WILDERNESS SOCIETY CAMPAIGNER: That figure doesn’t include regrowth.
ROSS COULTHART: You say a lot of people say to us if you took the regrowth of native vegetation into account the amount of regrowth would far exceed the clearing.
WILDERNESS SOCIETY CAMPAINGER: Sure but the native bush can’t regenerate at the moment as fast as it’s being cleared.
In fact last time I looked native bush was regenerating faster than it was being cleared. That’s not to say that there is not a need for some restrictions on broad scale tree clearing or that woody weed regrowth is equivalent to high value remnant scrub. But until this morning it seemed not a single respectable journalist would explore the issue – there was not honest discussion in the mainstream metropolitan media.
Earlier this year Ross Coulthart went further than anyone has ever gone in exposing the politics of salinity in Australia. This morning he legitimised many landholder’s concerns about woody weed regrowth and perhaps opened the door to a discussion that needs to be had.
You can read the full transcript here: http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/article_2039.asp .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Activists play the same game with Amazon rainforest deforestation. They count the area cleared, but ignore area ‘retaken’ by the forest after clearing. Over the years since the advent of satellite surveillance, the actual net loss of forest is slight.
If you question the claims of “pro-forest” or “pro-natural” people, this makes you anti-forest and anti-natural, and therefore “offensive.” It’s the standard activist argumentative ploy.
So Schiller – given you’re such an expert tell us how much is cleared and how much regrows back to a complete rainforest each year.
Luke,
You and your kind dont’t get it at all, do you? You sit back and demand that people educate you. But you don’t want to learn, you just want to pick nits about the naughty teachers.
You already had an education at others’ expense. Your free ride is over. Come back with some facts and cogent arguments, boy. Whining about your teachers doesn’t make it in the big world.
Schiller.
Well you don’t have any facts Schiller you old codger – that’s my point. The facts are that forest loss mapped by satellite is continuing apace especially in the Matto Grosso. Net loss is continuing.
Typical cop out, Lukeaemia. I seem to recall a report of the Satellite scans that showed the total area cleared in the Amazon to be only 13% of which about 7% had already regrown.
And by the way, the Matto Grosso is about a 1000km south of the actual Amazon River and has no rainforest. Indeed, it is a band of upland tropical Savanah between 10 and 18 degrees South, to the west of Brazilia. And it is experiencing the same sort of thickening events that are present in this landscape all over the world.
But hey, even your attempts at avoiding the issue here in Australia have merely confirmed the nature and extent of the regrowth condition.
What surprised me most was the manifest ignorance of the green spokesman. People seriously expect farmers to work in some sort of “stakeholder” partnership with people with less humanity in their eyes than Pol Pot. What next, “trust me, I’m a psychopath”?
It would be a joke if not for the fact that they are actually taken seriously be the shonkerazzi.
Well done Joe and Gabe, good one Ross.
But, Jen, one must take issue with the very notion that a farmer’s concern or position on an issue only becomes legitimised by it being taken seriously by a main stream urban journalist. I know you are merely making a statement of fact, and Ross is to be commended, but that doesn’t make it any less offensive to farmers.
What it does illustrate is just how out of touch the urban community is with rural issues. And it makes it very clear why, ultimately, the bush will never get the government it deserves until we have “city states” minding their own business and “farm states” with their own parliaments, spending their own share of the GST pie, on their own priorities.
Apart from a few people like Ross, the media does not perform the vital function that is assigned to it in democratic theory, for the bush community.
My kids deserve better than this. Don’t yours too?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050914105508.htm
In the Brazilian Amazon alone,where the growth of cattle ranching and cropland agriculture are the primary causes of forest clearing, about 7,700 square miles of forest are clear-cut and burned each year, or roughly the area of New Jersey.
This study found a marked trend of larger and more extensive deforestationevents between 2001 and 2004 in Mato Grosso State, Brazil, which was later confirmed on the ground.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040524060844.htm
.. . a team of U.S. and Brazilian scientists show that the rate of forest destruction has accelerated significantly in Brazilian Amazonia since 1990. The team asserts, moreover, that Amazonian deforestation will likely continue to increase unless the Brazilian government alters its aggressive plans for highway and infrastructure expansion.
“The recent deforestation numbers are just plain scary,” said William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the study’s lead author. “During the last two years nearly 12 million acres of rainforest have been destroyed–that’s equivalent to about 11 football fields a minute.”
Deforestation has risen most sharply in the southern and eastern parts of the Amazon, where rainforests are more seasonal and thus more easily burned. “Since 2002, forest loss has shot up by nearly 50% in the states of Pará, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, and Acre,” said co-author Ana Albernaz of the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil. “Plant and wildlife species indigenous to these areas are being severely threatened.”
Selective logging–the practice of removing one or two trees and leaving the rest intact–is often considered a sustainable alternative to clear-cutting, in which a large swath of forest is cut down, leaving little behind except wood debris and a denuded landscape.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051023123348.htm
The red areas show where the Asner-led team found selective logging disturbance in Brazil. (The logging region comes from the Carnegie Institution, which is overlaid on image from Google Earth.)But a new satellite survey of the Amazon Basin in Brazil reveals that every year unregulated selective logging of mahogany and other hardwoods destroys an area of pristine rainforest big enough to cover the state of Connecticut. The survey, published in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal Science, was made possible because of a new, ultra-high-resolution satellite- imaging technique developed by scientists affiliated with the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University.
Ian ,
A thread / post on the myopia , venality ,unoriginality and laziness of most journalists would run for several pages I imagine.
But I agree with Jen that if this is the start of some genuine critical analysis of fashionable issues then we should applaud.
So Luke trots out the usual suspects. First up we have a focus on the margins where impacts are most visible but even there there are two very much intact major subcatchments. The image is also too small to even identify the scale but from what I could see the coloured (recently cleared)parts were a very small portion of the remaining resource.
The use of grey to denote all non-forest is also highly deceptive in that parts of that region never did have any rainforest. but the image implies that all the grey has been cleared.
And as for such precise scientific terminology as “the size of Massachusetts”, please, give us a break. Anyone who simply gives cleared area totals without providing a reference to the original and remaining resource, and with no reference to regrowth in a highly regrowth prone landscape, is misleading by omission.
Then we have the beat up (image innuendo) of selective harvesting. What a con. That image merely shows where a gap in the canopy has been detected but it is totally misleading to present this data in this way because it implies that the presence of any disturbance on an area is a synonym for complete disturbance.
It is not a new addition to the arts of deception. It is like mapping the number of farms where soil erosion is present in a way that implies that erosion is present all over the farm when it may only be present at one specific location.
But I suppose, this sort of infotainment qualifies as science for the depart-mentally challenged.
But but but but but .. ..
Luke,
You poor boy. You have now learned that good intentions will not excuse ignorance. Your deportment and approach to scholarship will no doubt be improved from this experience.
Schiller.
Yea sure Schiller – Pol Pot hey – giggle
I find it truly amazing that when an issue that is so important to a few, and has such far reaching consequence to many, the most important information a self proclaimed environmentalist can trot out is about the Amazon & Matto Grosso. The concerted effort the Australian ‘greens’ are making in completely ignoring this issue is absolutely amazing, and terribly disappointing for our rural families. They commit their lives, the futures of their children and the fabric of the rural community in continuing to be the custodians of this wide brown land, and would much rather see it as a wide green land with a great deal of grass and a more balanced ecology. Please wake up and start to value this land as much as the farmers in the west do.
Joan – if the land is valued as much as purported – why do we have 20% of northern Australia with severe land degradation from overgrazing. Why do we have increased problems with woody weeds in the first place – overgrazing, lack of fire, and bulldozer induced regrowth? Why do we have endangered and of concern ecosystems cleared to the extent they are. And why have there been almost 15 years of drought support?
I’m fine with considerable – even substantial development of natural resources – but when is enough enough? And what responsibilities do landholders have (especially lessees) to show stewardship of the estate under their day to day control and leave the soil resource intact and productive?
Tell me there are absolutely no problems at all and no lessons to be learned?
Luke, you persist with this BS about farmers not leaving “the soil resource intact and productive” but still fail to explain why Lake Alexandrina is still the same 3 metres deep that it was in 1920?
The Murray Darling basin is a very big place, with 100 million hectares and if an average of only 0.1 of a tonne of soil was lost from each hectare each year then we would see an accumulation of about 20,000Ml of soil a year. And over the past 80 years that would amount to 1600,000 Ml of deposition in the lake.
And that is roughly the current, and original, volume of water in the lake. So due to the fact that this much deposition is not there, then we must conclude that significantly less than 100kg of soil per hectare in the catchment makes it into the lake.
To put that in perspective, 100kg of soil would be 200litres volume which, when spread over one hectare equals 0.02 of 1mm of soil. If you had it on your arm it would barely make a smudge when wet.
So where has all this ‘non-intact soil resource’ gone, fLuke baby? Oh, I forgot, down the Burdekin into the GBR, no doubt.
Ian Grot – you just descended into the defend-to-the-last idiot industry apologist class – you haven’t heard of deposition have you? Go and get a lecture on deposition ratio etc from Catchment CRC folks still around – your good mates. All depends on stream power, slopes, soil erosivity etc. Not all sediment makes it right through the system. And gee the old MDB system gets pretty flat and long doesn’t it.
And Ian’s envelope is so powerful that crop farmers are wasting their time with contour banks and minimum tillage. Argh !! Just leave your slopes steep and bare. God will protect you. Bolsh!
But half the Gascoyne is in the Indian Ocean. Check out the lovely B horizon. Why is a vast amount of the Marburg Walloon sediments in Moreton Bay. South-west Qld is a disgrace. The Burdekin is a mess. Check out the Ord headwaters. Surveys like Tothill and Gillies put 20% of the northern resource as stuffed. Another 40% looking wonky. Get real and do a windshield check.
Why does DPI have a whole program on Grazing Land Management with a signficant focus on soil cover – must just be to waste people’s time.
And there seems to be an increasing story on bulldozer induced thickening emerging – perhaps you guys need to be looked at more closely. Are you sure you know what you’re doing.
So now you exhibit a comprehension deficit, Luke. I used the word “deposition” only 9 lines above where you ask, “you haven’t heard of deposition have you”?
For the record folks, many people on the soil science (demonising farmers) gravy train have been claiming averages of 12 tonnes/hectare in annual soil loss in the MDB. Others have claimed averages of 40 tonnes/ha from cane fields that never have exposed freshly cultivated soils in the wet season. Indeed, most cane farms operate on a ratoon system whereby cultivation only takes place every third or fourth year but always in the dry season when no heavy rains fall to shift all this soil. But that doesn’t stop the demonisers fronting up for their salary ‘benefit by deception’.
And here, when we provide evidence to indicate that not even an average of 100kg of soil/ha is making it to the mouth of the Murray, Luke suddenly rediscovers the simple fact that most soil movements involve a loss and a gain, as they have done for millenia.
But Luke’s implication that the missing soil must then be clogging up the rivers also doesn’t stack up. This is because the total volume within the cross section to high banks and length of these rivers is no-where near sufficient to hold the 1.6 million megalitres of soil that would result from only 100kg/ha of annual loss over 80 years.
So we have a situation where there is not the slightest evidence that even 1% of the claimed 12 tonnes of annual soil loss has been deposited in the two most likely places one would expect to find it.
And as for all the emotive and imprecise terms like “half the Gascoyne is in the Indian Ocean” and “a vast amount of the Marburg Walloon sediments in Moreton Bay”, give us a break. All this avoidance of any statement on your part that could actually be checked confirms that you really are numerically challenged, aren’t you Luke?
Stick with the departmental articles of faith, mate, they are so shallow you will never find yourself in deep water.
That’s right folks. Soil erosion doesn’t occur in Australia. There are no problems at all. Ian wins. Good night all !
Satellite image of sediment plume extending 50 km from the mouth of the Gascoyne River two weeks after a major cyclone.
SPOT image of 2 March 1995 showing the sediment plume from the flooding Gascoyne River, WA. Seriously degraded inland areas can also be seen in this image.
Source: WA Department of Land Administration, Remote Sensing Services
http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/2001/land.html
Moreton Bay (MB) is a large semi-enclosed coastal embayment, located on the east coast of Australia adjacent to the Queensland capital city of Brisbane. The MB catchment is ca. 22 000 km2 while the bay itself is ca. 1500 km2. This represents a catchment:bay ratio of ca. 15:1. Within the MB catchment there are over 85 rocktypes with the most abundant, the Marburg Formation, constituting only ca. 12% of the catchment area. Detailed landscape analysis and a reconnaissance soil sampling program in combination with major and trace element and Sr, Nd and Pb isotope geochemistry were used to identify the major sources of sediment delivered to MB. A Bayesian linear mixing model allowed the proportion of sediment sources to be estimated. Model estimates suggest that there are substantial differences in the proportions of sediment being delivered into MB by the two major tributaries, the Brisbane and Logan Rivers despite both rivers containing a similar suite of major rocktypes. Over 50% of the sediment delivered to MB is derived from soils developed on the Marburg Formation. This equates to a catchment area/bay sediment deposition ratio of ca. 5. Basaltic soils of the Main Range Volcanics (Brisbane River catchment) and Lamington Group (Logan River catchment) and sediments from the Walloon Subgroup (present in both catchments) are on average also enriched in MB relative to the catchment by a factor of ca. 2.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/hydr/2003/00000494/F0030001/05124258;jsessionid=7br6fjrbm41k9.alice
Unfortunately I can start this item with that quote that goes along the lines that “The thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history”.
Like a couple of things being overlooked here:-
1. Semi-arid and arid pastures have low basal areas – a good mitchell grass pasture has around 5% basal cover, similar for mulga. Below about 2% is cause for concern wrt run-off and erosion.
2. After about 6 months without rain, the perennial grasses start to die out EVEN IN THE ABSENCE OF GRAZING. Thus they have to start again from seed, when seasonal conditions are suitable. And that can be in its own good time.
As I read the transcript from this program, most of the area is in the Western Lands area. This was famously bureaucratic (Western Lands joke – Why do Western Lands graziers wear elastic sided boots? Because Western Lands regulations will not allow them to tie their own shoe laces.) Yet obviously the woody weeds didn’t heed the regulations, nor “God’s bulldozer”.
I also note no mention of the effect of various decrees of previous doses of officialdom in Qld (living areas too small, carrying capacities too high and other developmental conditions imposed), which have obvious impact on current rangeland condition.
To quote from elsewhere on this blog, “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. And dryland salinity isn’t the only beat-up”.
My question to Luke and fellow pro-regulators is:-
What magic potion makes you think the future of rangeland management under more regulation is likely to be any more successful than under previous examples?
Ian Beale
Agree with a lot of what you have said except
(a) did I say I was pro-regulation. I am arguing there are problems – that’s all.
(b) is there really a case with prosecutions forcing management on leasehold land – or is this a cop-out – serious question. Has there been any historic prosecution of lease condition under the Lands Act?
Luke
Not sure about Qld leasehold re prosecutions. But there is plenty of references available as to potential loss of freehold selection for non-fulfillment of conditions, including removal of prickly pear from PPL’s. I’m pretty sure I know of one who met a similar situation re development on a mulga lease. Also apparently the Lands Dept of the time didn’t feel it needed any input from the then DPI’s research on brigalow for the brigalow development scheme.
Point is that I’d be suprised if Western Lands didn’t prosecute, and if so it didn’t deter the woodies. Maybe another reader can provide details.
Ian Mott and Luke – re deposition.
See my comments re silting and desilting in a local creek at http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001492.html.
Then check out “bandal” (and nothing to do with TKD) – you may have to read Eric Newby’s “Slowly down the Ganges”. Seems to me a possible mechanism for the waterholes in these creeks silting up with encroaching woody vegetation. Experience is that the silt load from the cleared waterholes is spat out either side of the ends of the waterholes. The bottom end of this creek certainly hasn’t risen notably.
Ian B – I reckon none or virtually no prosecutions under the Lands Act on flogging.
On erosion – I suggest there is plenty of experimental evidence of the effect of cover on erosion – but the old RUSLE will also have rainfall intensity, soil erosivity, slope length, gradient, management practices as well. Deposition RATIO is an interesting thing – how much is moved downhill – how much gets into the stream, how much moves around in bedload, how much goes right through the system. Complex shite.
Agree thickened trees with no perennial grass cover, cryptograms etc is not good for soil protection. How’s the stream condition of the Ward anyway?
The Ward?
Luke, You seem to be missing sort of summary of western Qld and western NSW given by Marie Fisher (Chair of the 1984 NSW Joint Parliamentary investigation of Western Lands) which was to the effect that NSW thought they were controlling everything and Qld had basically not controlled very much and they’d ended up in pretty much the same place.
Ward River near Charleville.
I know, Luke, but I’m not, nor is that the creek
Ian,
Grasses evolved with grazing, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that total exclusion of animal impact has a negative effect on rangelands.The mentality behind ‘lock em up national parks’ will be detrimental in the long term because it eliminates a vital component of the system as a whole.
Over-grazing however is equally as bad.
I have seen plenty of good Mitchell grass country go through dry summers without dying off. They simply become dormant and re-shoot from the butts when sufficient moisture is available at the right time of the year. In set stocking systems very little grass survives as a new seedlings due to the stock picking it out first. Most regrowth is from tillers and more strategic grazing can encourage the spread of the actual basal area as well allowing new growth to suvive.
I also think that the most important aspect of rangeland management should be the retention and improvement of ground cover.
Desertification and erosion cannot occur without there first being a loss of ground cover and soil bio-mass.
I agree, Graham, both “lock up” and overgrazing produce negative outcomes and there is ample evidence that they exacerbate each other.
But from a macro perspective there is substantial room for doubting the claimed scale of the impacts. For if only 50kg/ha of soil is lost each year in the MDB then this volume, over the past 80 years, would have been more than enough to either completely silt up all the river and stream chanels or half fill Lake Alexandrina. As neither is anywhere near the case then we can only conclude that this volume does not make it into the streams at all.
And that leaves the other smoking gun. If total erosion is much greater than this then it is undergoing a process of erosion and deposition that is largely completed before it gets into the smallest drainage lines. For once into the drainage lines it would then either continue into the larger chanels or silt up the smaller ones.
None of these are apparent so one can only reasonably conclude that the incidence of erosion is not significant enough to produce off-site outcomes. And this can only mean that the vectors that are claimed to be producing erosion are not significant enough or widespread enough or enduring enough to produce detectable environmental harm.
That is, unless one regards ground cover itself to be an environmental value. But even so, it would only be an on-site diminution of value without significant wider implications.