North Queensland flood devastation evidence of serious past damage to Australia's environment

Overloading Australia (Envirobook) 2008, by Mark O'Connor and William Lines states, "We Australians are currently unable to sustain our present population without doing deplorable environmental damage" (p95).

Further evidence of unacceptable environmental damage caused by our population numbers and their ever more intensive activitiesis, lies in the devastating floods in North Queenslandat the moment.

According to hands-on conservation biologist, Hugh Spencer, resident of far north Queensland, the scale and speed of the floods is the result of past clearing of land for grazing and cropping. In the past, much richer, denser levels of vegetation prevented much of the downpour striking the ground directly, retained far more water and greatly diminished run-of, by mechanisms which included transpiration.

Not only do such floods destroy homes, roads, and other infrastructure, they also provoke a constant bleeding-away of rich soil, both inland and onto the Great Barrier Reef. On top of coping with large volumes of silt, the Great Barrier reef has also to cope with chemical fertilisers and herbicides and poisons used in the growing of sugar cane. In the longer term soil loss from the Atherton Tablelands cannot be sustained.

The only way we can hope to prevent further and increasingly severe damage by flooding is to re-afforest the many previously denuded parts of Queensland. This is what Hugh Spencer believes that a good deal of the Federal Government's $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan should be put towards.

Of course, a price to be paid is that not as much land will be available for current grazing and monoculture-agriculture and our ability to either feed ourselves or to earn export dollars will be reduced, but that will occur, anyway in the longer term, if our land is not protected.

Rather than seek to further increase our population as the Federal Government, business leaders and the media are still recklessly endeavouring to do, this country desperately needs to stabilise and, if possible, reduce its population. This must happen at least until such time as we learn how to provide for the needs of the current population without inflicting further harm on this continent.