environment

Radiocarbon-testing has confirmed that a giant rare old-growth Eucalyptus regnans located in its natural forest habitat on East Gippsland's Brown Mountain has been chainsawed by VicForests, despite it being scientifically confirmed to be at least 500 years old.

No regard has been made for the existence value of a Victorian 500 year old natural asset, nor the habitat requirements for the typical arboreal animals and forest owls dependent on this old growth habitat tree or its associative forest dependent habitat. Under State-sanction, ignorant VicForest butchers have plundered, ransacked and run.

Manager, Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, Orbost, Steve DeVoogd, has been formally advised that this chainsawing of rare old growth forest is an offence committed under the section 46(1) of the Sustainable Forests (Timber) Act 2004. The action is also a breach of Code of Forest Practices (CFP).

VicForests Chairman, Warren Hodgson, Board members Monica Gould, Jim Houghton, Fiona McNabb, Bob Smith, Susan Walpole, and Chief Executive Officer David Pollard should all be sacked forthwith. VicForests token 'vision' 'purpose' and 'values' which profess motherhood notions of 'sustainable', 'environmentally responsible' and 'ethical' are but Mugabean. This 500 year old tree epitomises the reality of Brumby's 'Sustainability Charter for State forests.

Botanist Steve Mueck has worked for the Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment and is now a consultant in the private sector. He says radiocarbon dating of eucalypts is unusual and the result in this case is significant.

"Current forest managements practices are looking at harvesting on rotation times in the vicinity of 80 to 120 years with the perception that that's a particularly long period of time," he said.

"Now it is, I suppose, in the context of a human lifetime, but it is a very, very short period of time in comparison to the age in which many of the components that live in these forests can in fact get to in a natural system."

Back in the 1860s timber workers and naturalists emerged from the forests with stories of massive trees towering to immense heights and as wide as houses. Government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller recounted the existence of a tree as high as the Egyptian Pyramids at 480 ft (144m) and another fallen tree in the Dandenong Ranges over 400 ft (120m). A giant was sighted in the Otways with a girth of 64 ft (19m).

VicForests senseless decapitation of one of the last Victorian giants is a harbinger of extinction to Victoria's old growth forests. It's like grabbing an old ANZAC from the march past and slitting his throat.

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. ... unaffordable housing drives young families into debt slavery (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires)... strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services... traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives...hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve... water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms... pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment; greenhouse gases ...and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.
Click here to purchase book
"Review by Katharine Betts of Mark O’Connor's and WilliamJ. Lines's book,Overloading Australia,"
People and Place, vol. 17, no. 1, page 76.

Australia’s population is growing rapidly. In March 2009 it stood at 21.6 million. The current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, takes it for granted that it will grow to 35 million by 2051.[1] In 1999 when Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration he told Australians that there was no need for a population policy because we were unlikely to grow much beyond 23 million. He added that the ‘nation cannot afford to return to [an immigration] program characterised by big numbers and little thought’. [2] Nonetheless the current growth surge, keenly embraced by the new Labor Government, began quietly under the Coalition soon after Ruddock’s 1999 statement.[3]

Much of Australia’s growth is directly due to immigration (nearly 60 per cent in 2007–08) and much of the growth from natural increase is attributable to the Australia-born children of immigrants. For example, in 2007, 25 per cent of all births were to overseas-born mothers.

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. There is the unaffordable housing that drives young families into debt slavery [4] (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires).[5] There is strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services, and to traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives. [6] There are hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve;[7] water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms;[8] pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment;[9] greenhouse gases that refuse to abate;[0 ]and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.

But while stories of water shortages and degraded infrastructure abound, few of the public figures who comment on them acknowledge the role of population growth in creating these problems and making them harder to overcome. Here Mark O’Connor and William Lines have done us an important service; they have joined the dots between these social and environmental ills and our rapid growth.

From the picture they create a reader could, at first, believe that Australia’s pattern of growth was promising. It is mainly due to government immigration policy, so shouldn’t it be relatively easy to rein it in? Besides immigration is not popular; support for the post-2000 increase is minimal among both the Australia-born and migrants themselves.[11] But as O’Connor and Lines make clear, immigration in fact makes it harder to halt growth because the businesses that profit from it lobby for it, and property developers with deep pockets appear to have bought the favour of some of the politicians who create it.[12]
High migration means more customers, cheaper labour, and minimal training costs. All of these boons intensify pressures from self-interested groups to keep the numbers coming. As O’Connor and Lines put it: ‘It is no surprise that the housing industry lobbies not for the size of housing industry that Australia’s population needs but for the size of Australia’s population that the industry needs’.[13] The concentrated benefits enjoyed by special interests (on the right of the political spectrum) trump the unorganised interests of the majority who bear the costs.

At the same time many opinion makers on the left are quick to decry criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as scapegoating immigrants, even as racism.[14] As if this were not enough, business interests fund academic research into demography and immigration, naturally channeling their money towards those likely to produce results friendly to growth. This is a chilling circumstance at a time when universities are starved of money and academics are under crushing pressure to bring in research grants.[15] Other sources of research funds include state and federal government departments, most of which are committed to the growth targets set by politicians.[16] Researchers who might otherwise point to the costs of growth are unlikely to win such grants; they also risk the disapproval of their left-liberal peers.

The authors point out that the left’s fixation on seeing criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as racism is ‘a good cloak for elitism … the people must not be given power because their views are barbaric’.[17] Thus even though high migration is unpopular, a pro-growth right and a left that is anti-anti-growth mean that voters are unorganised and voiceless.
The authors marvel at the way in which the motives of the occasional reformer who questions growth are earnestly probed while no one examines the growth lobby as it enjoys the handsome profits brought to them by each plane load of new consumers. O’Connor and Lines assert that left-wing xenophobia hunters are not interested in old fashioned rent seekers despoiling the community for their own advantage; they prefer to enjoy the comforts of their moral superiority.[18]

Why must O’Connor and Lines be the ones to point to the damage done to Australia by this blend of greed and snobbery? Why have the media failed to show it to us? Here the authors have a telling vignette about Ian Lowe, a distinguished scientist who takes population seriously. He is also president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a frequent media commentator. O’Connor asked him why he so seldom spoke out about population. Lowe replied that he often did but that when he did he was ignored. He also told O’Connor ‘how he was sacked as a columnist from one paper for insisting on it. He [Lowe] found that the most biased media were the grossly pro-growthist Murdoch papers’.[19]

Media silence on the question is not always an accidental byproduct of pleasing pro-growth advertisers while deferring to the sensibilities of the intelligentsia. It can be deliberate.[20] O’Connor and Lines argue that just as other vendors to the domestic market have a product to sell, so too do the commercial media; it is always easier to sell to a growing market rather than to compete for market share, or indeed to export. The commercial media have their own vested interests in growth. While the ABC should be immune from these interests, it is more likely to be infected with the racism virus, the infection that makes its host see any scepticism about growth as racism in disguise.[21] Nonetheless, perhaps because it does not profit from growth, the ABC has proved more receptive to Overloading Australia than have other media outlets.

Both authors are accomplished writers and the book is brief and clear; so far it has achieved a fair degree of media coverage. It was launched in February 2009 by Bob Carr, former premier of New South Wales, and a rarity among Australian premiers in that he is a critic of growth. At the launch Carr said: ‘There is a hardly any significant process at State or Federal level today that is allowed to proceed without an environmental impact statement ­ except the pushing up of population’.
O’Connor’s account of the launch goes on to report how Carr ‘spoke of his frustration, when he was Premier, at having a vastly increased Sydney population forced upon him by decisions made in Canberra. … He was then in the invidious situation of having to destroy amenities and allow developers to invade protected areas. As he put it, people don’t want Sydney to be crowded and built up, but they also don’t want it to expand into places like Kuringai Chase and Botany Bay; yet one of those two things has to happen if a million extra people are put into Sydney’.[22]

Some of the media reports have been neutral [23] or even favourable. For example O’Connor was invited to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald,[24] and the Adelaide Advertiser.[25] He was also interviewed on the ABC Radio National station on Counterpoint,[26] Breakfast [27] and Late Night Live.[28] But press coverage has been more ambivalent and its tenor bears out the authors’ analysis.

A former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, said that ‘the extent to which population influenced environmental policy depended on how selfish Australians wanted to be’ and that ‘some people citing environmental reasons for reduced migration were simply opposed to immigration’.[29] Charles Berger, in a generally sympathetic piece in The Canberra Times, wrote that: ‘Overloading Australia … has sparked another round of debate about Australia’s population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. …’[30] He did, however, go on to exonerate O’Connor and Lines.

Brigid Delaney in the Melbourne Age was not so generous. She wrote that to rein in growth was to risk ‘the development of our inner lives’ because immigrants energise their adopted countries. But there was worse:

Environmental issues can be a handy Trojan horse with which to wheel in policies and debates about immigration that we are too squeamish to discuss baldly. After all, no one wants a rerun of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 that led to race riots across England, nor Pauline Hanson’s polarising comments on immigration that brought Australia to the brink of a spiritual crisis.[31]

But O’Connor and Lines do not advocate an end to immigration, just a balanced intake which would still leave room for refugees.[32] This is a humanitarian position; they write that deliberately ‘pushing up our own population … cannot be justified on environmental grounds. It could only be justified on international humanitarian grounds if we could believe that it would leave us, somehow, very much more able and more willing to help our neighbours’.[33] They also point to the immorality of Australia continuing to pirate doctors and other health workers from poor countries to compensate for our own reluctance to invest in local training.[34] Xenophobia hunters, however, are more interested in displaying their self-righteousness than in understanding and debating an opposing point of view.

How can serious advocates of a moral and sustainable position on population growth cut through in such a climate? One way is to write the kind book that O’Connor and Lines have written, well researched, cogent and readable. Another is put forward a shocking policy proposal.

This concerns both sacrifice and exploitation. We can see its outlines in debate about the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. This will cap Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions through the sale of permits to industry, but it will also set a floor under which emissions are unlikely to fall. As community awareness of this has spread many householders are dismayed; their individual sacrifices to lower emissions are not only going to count for nothing, they will actively help polluters to pollute. Private spending on solar panels, solar hot water, and on low-emission cars will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases; it will just enable dirty industries to emit more. But the same can be said of many sacrifices that individual Australians make for the environment; they are all nullified by the extra people brought in to pander to the growth lobby.

Here O’Connor and Lines put forward their suggestion. Instead of washing up only once a day and letting the garden die, we should all waste water. Saving water just makes it easier for growthists to increase the population. (They do say that would never suggest that we waste a non-renewable resource.)[35] But why struggle to cut your shower to less than two minutes when the Government is bringing in more than 200,000 extra people a year?

The answer? Take a deep bath and bring the crisis to a head. And while you are enjoying your bath you could read this excellent book.

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines, Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobook, Sydney, December 2008, ISBN 9780858812246, A$19.95

Available online from , and .

References
1 See Rudd quoted in M. Franklin, ‘Rudd warns Australia must prepare for emerging arms race across Asia­PM flags major naval build-up’, The Australian, September 10 2008, pp. 1, 6
2 P. Ruddock, ‘The Coalition Government’s position on immigration and population policy’, People and Place, vol. 7, no. 4, 1999, pp. 6–12
3 See P. Kelly, ‘Restocking the nation’, The Weekend Australian, 3 August 2002, p. 28.
4 J. Hewett, ‘Under mortgage pressure’, The Australian, 20 October 2007, p. 21; B. Day, ‘How to plan for a fiasco’, The Australian, 22 April 2008, p. 14
5 Editorial, ‘A tragic week in Australian history’, The Australian, 14 February 2009, p. 16
6 AAP, ‘Heatwave claims lives’, The Age, 1 February 2009; AAP, ‘Qld: Labor plan to cut southeast traffic conges­tion’, Australian Associated Press General News, 26 February 2009; J. Gordon and R. Sexton, ‘National road chaos looms’, The Age, 8 March 2009, p. 1; C. Lucas, ‘Connex hit with commuter squeeze’, The Age, 5 March 2009, p. 10
7 R. Wallace, ‘Hospitals fail to meet most targets’, The Australian, 3 October 2008, p. 7
8 G. Roberts and P. Murphy, ‘Recycled sewage “will have bugs”’, The Australian, 29 October 2008, p. 9; B. Doherty, ‘Water plan may not go far enough’, The Age, 23 October 2008, p. 1
9 M. Clayfield, ‘There’s a hole in our suburb, dear Labor, oh dear’, The Australian, 7 March 2009, p. 5
10 G. Readfearn, ‘Pollution skyrockets ­ Coal and gas for electricity blamed’, The Courier-Mail, 12 January 2009, p. 11; T. Arup, ‘Emissions heat up in economic meltdown’, The Age, 14 March 2009, p. 4
11 See M. O’Connor and W. J. Lines, Overloading Australia, Envirobook, Sydney, 2008, p. 107.
12 Others may not need persuading. See ibid., pp. 4, 8–9, 26, 88ff, 98, 106, 145, 162.
13 ibid., pp. 125–6
14 ibid., pp. 141ff, 160, 164, 167, 172–3
15 For the role of the Scanlon Foundation with its mission to create ‘a larger cohesive Australian society’, see ibid., p. 82 and p. 205 n. 199. The Foundation believes that the future prosperity of Australia is ‘underpinned by continued population growth’. See accessed 9/3/09.
16 For example academics critical of the high growth trajectory of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne 2030 strategy, and who are likely to apply to it for research contracts, are well advised to keep their criticism to them­selves. A public servant conveyed this warning, as a friendly gesture, to a group that I was a member of in late 2003.
17 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 144
18 See ibid., p. 145. 19 ibid., p. 171
20 ibid., pp. 38, 133–34
21 O’Connor and Lines devote a chapter to the pro-immigration bias of the ABC. See ibid., pp. 158–164 and p. 141ff.
22 Email from Mark O’Connor to [email protected] 10 February 2009
23 See P. Ker, ‘Population Australia’s “big threat”’, The Age, 24 January 2009, p. 3; P. Ker and A. Morton, ‘Popula­tion debate booms’, The Age, 30 January 2009, p. 2.
24 M. O’Connor, ‘Many in denial over rising population’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2008, p. 27
25 M. O’Connor, ‘Australia’s bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our worst problems’, The Advertiser, 3 March 2009, p. 18
26 Monday 1 December 2008, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
27 Wednesday 28 January 2009, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
28 Tuesday 5 March 2009, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
29 Quoted in Ker and Morton, 2009, op. cit.
30 C. Berger, ‘Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration’, Canberra Times, 13 February 2009, p. 15
31 B. Delaney, ‘Murky agenda behind this green debate’, The Age, 27 January 2009, p. 11
32 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 72ff
33 ibid., p. 57
34 See ibid., pp. 69, 110.
35 ibid., pp. 182–184

Gold Coast & Hinterland Environmental Council Media Release

Monday, 30th March 2009

A group of community associations and environment councils are urgently calling upon the Premier to withdraw the Draft SEQ Regional Plan 2009-2031 because it has been rushed, is reckless and will ruin the environment of SEQ.

Due to interruption of the consultation period during the election, the review of the South East Queensland Regional Plan, out for public comment until this Friday, 3rd April, has been rushed and the Premier should withdraw it and have it rewritten in line with current climate change and biodiversity protection measures, say conservationists.

Lois Levy, spokesperson for Gecko -- Gold Coast & Hinterland Environment Council, said that "The new draft should be re-released later in the year, when the Review was originally planned, after all policies called up by the Plan have been completed and the community has been adequately consulted in line with social justice principles. Too few people are aware of the implications of this Plan for their lives and future of the region."

A submission from the Redland City Council, available on their website, concurs, calling for an additional eight weeks for consultation and further commitments from the State Government regarding detailed studies on climate change, peak oil and carrying capacity. This submission further states that the strategies, studies and other pieces of work that would inform this review are still to be completed and it is critical that these be put in place and that the Regional Plan needs to be aligned with these strategic documents.

"The contradictory provisions of the Plan, for example, the competing directions of accommodating growth and protecting biodiversity, have no hierarchy or effective way of resolving conflicts," said Ms Levy. "This is just not good enough for a document that will determine the future of our region and its communities and biodiversity over the next 22 years."

"As this Draft Plan will have a major impact on the communities and environment of our region, we urgently request an extension and delay of the implementation of the Plan until these issues have been resolved.

For more information, please ring Gecko at 5534-1412 or direct: Lois Levy 5534-3706 or 0412-724-222

Gecko - Gold Coast and Hinterland Environment Council,
Gecko House, 139 Duringan Street, Currumbin Qld 4223
Phone: (07) 5534 1412 Fax: (07) 5534 1401
Email: info [ AT ] gecko.org.au Website: www.gecko.org.au

Since Black Saturday - Feb 7, 2009 - when Australia's worst-ever bushfires on the hottest day in Victoria's recorded history completely destroyed all infrastructure at Wildhaven animal rescue and release center, Alan and Stella Reid have had a few visitors, including Steve Irwin's father, Bob Irwin, and Maryland Wilson of the AWPC, and four kangaroos that also escaped with their lives. Allan Reid tells an incredible story of his own survival as the place burned to the ground leaving him and perhaps four kangaroos alive. Please consider donating money for hay and rebuilding.See alsoImportant Wildhaven Shelter in St Andrews NE Victoria perished needs rebuilding and video.

Bob Irwin of the Australia Zoo between Alan and Stella Reid at Wildhaven 11 March 2009

Phone and electricity still not reconnected

Although the Reids at Wildhaven have had a number of visitors wishing them well, after thirty-one days since the fires on February 7, they would very much appreciate a visit from Telstra to reconnect the land-line and they desperately need an electrician to come and inspect their telegraph poles and certify that the electricity may be reconnected.

Bob Irwin's visit and the Department of "Sustainability" (DSE)

I have lots of film of my own recording a visit on March 10 to Wildhaven, but I was glad of this photo I was sent of Bob Irwin with Allan and Stella Reid. It was taken when he visited them at the devastated Wildhaven site yesterday (March 11, 2009).

Bob Irwin's visit probably means a lot to the Reids because it shows that their serious and significant work supporting wildlife has been recognised by people respected world-wide in the hands-on wildlife-help and species-preservation community. Ironically so, since I also know that the Reids were quite hurt recently to be passed over for a small amount of funding by the Victorian Department of Sustainability (DSE), apparently with a remark that the applicant 'lacked experience'.

Do DSE realise how much damage their lumpen conduct towards wildlife and so-called 'Greenies' does?

I am probably not the only one who thinks that that remark reflects pretty accurately where the DSE is at. Stella and Allan have been running their wildlife shelter for 22 years. DSE could learn from them - that is, if it could first master its arrogance. The Reids built Wildhaven 11 years ago and must have wondered what hit them when the ignorant knockback came.

Wildhaven on March 10, 2009

It is worthwhile noting that the DSE insult still comes to the Reids' minds, even after having Wildhaven totally wiped out by the Black Saturday fires, and almost being wiped out themselves.

Few of the wild creatures they lived for survived

Both of them weep every time that they mention the animals that died - "the kids" - as they refer to them affectionately, although the rest of the time they put on a brave face. Something like sixty-plus injured wildlife they were treating or in the process of releasing, of which each one was an individual with which they had a close relationship, will probably never be seen again. The dam below was full of the bodies of animals for whom the water did not prove sufficient shield against this super-hot fire. The CFA and the police helped the Reids to collect tens of dead animals and then took them away.

Between three and five kangaroos they knew probably survived. Alan wonders if they crawled into wombat holes. A doe, her joey and her adult daughter (known by names I cannot recall) came back to Wildhaven with burned paws. They were darted with anaesthetic so that the Reids could send them for treatment to a wildlife-rescue place that hadn't been burned out. They have all recovered, but, worryingly, the doe jumped the fence of the wildlife-hospital with her joey and has not been seen since.

When he was driving down the hill in the evening away from the scene of the fires, Alan glimpsed a male kangaroo he knew well, travelling alongside his car, and was amazed to see that the roo appeared unscathed. (I cannot remember his name either; it seems very disrespectful of me.)

The Reids also hope that the big male kangaroo with mending burned paws, who has been eating hay on the outskirts of the camp, is who they think he is - "Boof" - pictured below in happier times, with Stella.

Stella & Boof in happier times

Grass is starting to grow back, but it is very short and still brown, because there still has been little rain. There is absolutely nothing for animals to graze on. Even the micro-biota in the earth (representing a lot of carbon) were burned and the top layers are sterile. Stella and Alan are buying bales of hay (at about $17.50AUD each) and putting them out for the animals that survived. The Department of "Sustainability" does absolutely nothing for these animals, on pseudo-scientific macho grounds. Since its main job is to grant licences to shoot and 'harvest' our pitifully sparse wildlife, it is not surprising that its policy is to let them die, even though a million or more of Victoria's animals died in these fires, many from threatened species. The Reids walk into the burnt stick-like trees at dawn and at dusk, looking for old friends who may have survived and for any animal they may be able to help. The Reids deserve the salaries currently going to DSE CEOs. They survive on handouts at the moment. Don't get me wrong - they are not complaining - I am.

Thousands of wildlife photos lost

Stella's wildlife photos are much admired because she can get so close to the subjects and the animals look her back in the eye affectionately or with recognition and readable, respectful expressions. She lost thousands of such extraordinary animal photos in the fires, but almost immediately she was able to get her hands on a computer, she put together a CD of the photos she had received back from correspondents over the years. There is so little left now of the youngsters and adults she knew and loved so dearly. She takes us later into the caravan they are living in now to watch it and tells us the names of the animals in the pictures. It is very sad.

Donations

I brought some warm jumpers (because we are entering autumn) and a doona. Alan said they don't need clothing but Stella accepted these and said she will put the doona in the back of the ute for when she transports animals, to make a soft bed. It is good that my doona will be appreciated. Mostly they need money to buy food and treatment for animal survivors for the next few months to two years. The temporary camp they are living in on the burned site is made up of a caravan, a temporary showroom and a porta-potty which have been lent to them.

As I approached the camp I was struck by the surreality of this view, and I started taking stills.

The portable showroom which was lent as shelter to the Reids, looked like a tiny stage-set in a vast empty landscape and the people preparing afternoon tea there looked like dolls in a dolls' house. Stella and Alan had stayed up half the night painting the concrete block in front green, so it looked like a pretend-lawn before a very neat dolls' house, set down by some giant careful child in a vast neglected yard. I set the tripod up again with the digital camcorder running and when I look the film later that night, it is like watching people walking on and off-stage and hearing them talking. I almost find myself listening for clues to some other scripted drama.

It was hard to tell whether it was a strain or a pleasure to receive visitors. Stella had bought a mobile phone to alleviate the isolation. We had come with a visitor from England who is interested in kangaroo-rescues and the Reids have transformed this open temporary building into something like a pleasant lounge and dining-room. We felt very welcome and at home, and probably that's the way they make the wildlife feel.

Stella has been a member of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) for about 9 years and she had been with Steve Martin (the blond man in the beige top pictured above) fighting a fire on a distant ridge while Alan, her husband, was at home with the animals. She had looked across when there was a sudden burst of fire from that direction, wondering if it was Wildhaven. Others thought that it probably wasn't. But it was. Alan saw the fire coming from the hill where, unbeknowst to him, his wife was, and thought he had about 20 minutes. He says he found out he had only seven minutes. I am putting a video up with his story and footage of Wildhaven at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td6tWKDC62s for anyone who is interested.

The Future

We all hope that Wildhaven will soon be back in working order. When that happens the future will take over from this terrible past and slowly the scars will heal. They must be very deep and painful scars though, after 11 years in this place, with a past composed of very close connections with the secret lives of thousands of individual creatures, animals that most humans don't even notice, let alone care about. Indeed the Reids have spent 22 years in this region doing this work, all told.

Animals one lives close to are almost a part of one. My dog Nero died after 16 years recently and it was like a door slamming shut on the past and a familiar star disappearing from the sky. Although his elderly sister is still alive, my life seemed to make no sense for months. Even now it doesn't feel right. How difficult it must be then to see an entire galaxy disappear and the ground change irrevocably underneath your feet.

You can send money for hay and equipment etc here:

by direct transfer

Bank details:

Stella Reid
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
BSB: 063 222
Account: 10262617

By cheque

Postal Address

Stella and Alan Reid
c/o St Andrews Post Office
10 Caledonia Street,
St Andrews
Victoria 3761
Australia

By PayPal

PayPal address : [email protected]

Please state there: "for Stella's kangaroos"

The PayPal option might be the most convenient for International donations.

(Comment available on the following topic - Geoff Brown 0431 222602)

Residents everywhere need to support each other against giant development companies

Penrith Council is set to vote tomorrow night to approve 2 new suburbs totalling 3420 dwellings at the former ADI Site. Council planners are urging councillors to approve the plans.

Residents that have fought a 16 year campaign against the development of property giant Delfin Lend Lease are calling on councillors to defer approval due to the general public having no idea what is going on. Councillors are being asked to hold a series of public meetings so that fair dinkum community consulation takes place

.

There are multiple problems with the development ranging from environmental, bushfire, traffic, noise, access, provision of parkland. Essentially this development looks like a disaster to us.

Council overshadowed by authoritarian State planners

Council cannot amend or reject the development plans of Delfin without first getting the approval of Planning Minister Kristina Keneally. They must be seen to be advocating on behalf of the public and take this planning mess back to Kristina Keneally. The NSW gov allowed most of the problems with pro developer zonings suggested by Delfin.

Councils report outlining amongst other things the issues raised by public and Government Dept submissions can be found here http://203.221.255.19/pccbps/Open/2009/PRC_09032009_AGN_AT_WEB.HTM
You may note want to look at comments about DECC's submission. They have raised concerns about development close to bushland. They are also trying to get out of managing wetlands (featured heavily in the Daily Telegraph) zoned Regional Park by Frank Sartor.

Below are just some of the issues that we notified local residents about this weekend when letterboxing

· 3420 dwellings with apartments up to 8 storeys (PCC 2008 Report) high ruining our landscape. Building blocks as small as 125sq/metres with tiny setbacks
· 10,000 residents meaning 5000 more cars on our choked roads
· 362 hectares of land will be cleared which is largely endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland. Sensitive wetlands home to endangered waterbirds to be surrounded by housing
· The fracturing of a biodiversity corridor which currently links ADI to bushland north of the site. Housing will fracture the existing corridor
· Delfins tree survey identifies a staggering 20,000 trees within the development areas that may potentially be removed
· The entire development is classified as a bushfire prone area
· The Central Precinct is another Glenmore Park and the only access is by one east west road which will cut through the 900 ha bushland area. This is poor planning resulting in a public health and safety issue.
· Bushfire Asset Protection Zones of only 25 metres
· The obliteration of the Northern Rd bushland view
· 4 new roads entering off the Northern Rd
· Housing will surround Xavier College and there will be a road behind it
· Delfin need to provide 19.46 ha of public parkland in the Western Precinct yet they are only offering 15.63. This means Council is allowing them to rip off the public and profit from developing this extra land
· The list goes on and on. More info at www.adisite.org

There is still time for Council to fix up this planning mess. Call your local Councillors to demand a public meeting and urge them to defer their decision until they have fixed up the development plans of Delfin Lend Lease. Attend the Council meeting this Monday night at 7pm

Clr Kathryn Presdee 0418 288488, Clr John Thain 0411 427812, Clr Ross Fowler 0419 738484, Clr Ben Goldfinch 0401 678509, Clr Kevin Crameri 0401 995 825, Clr Jim Aitken 0418 288488, Clr Greg Davies 0419 177259, Clr Jackie Greenow 96232366, Clr Mark Davies 0416 085597, Clr Tanya Davies 0421 600 025, Clr Prue Guillaume 0401 678520, Clr Karyn McKeown 0401 995945, Clr Kaylene Allison 0401 995843, Clr Marko Malkoc 0401 678512, Clr Robert Ardill 0401 678505

It seems that the people who have managed to get into power in this country simply cannot take seriously the importance of the natural world to climate, aesthetics, society and human survival. Money eclipses everything in their Growth Lobby paradigm, including democracy.

Today this dreadful news arrived from Geoff Brown of the ADI Residents' Action Group:

Keneally gazettes green light to Delfin Lend Lease to bury last grasslands in vast suburbs

Kristina Keneally the NSW Planning Minister on Friday gazetted amendments to the SREP 30 the zoning plan for the ADI Site. Under the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act the Minister could, based on submissions received from the public, amend SREP 30 any way she saw fit. We called on her to use her planning powers to protect a further 100 ha of Cumberland Plain Woodland by rezoning land from urban to conservation (E2 Environmental Conservation was proposed - therefore no cost to government). Nearly 300 ha of regenerating bushland is zoned urban by SREP 30 and will be cleared so our proposal was a compromise in the hope that we may just get some support from the NSW Government. It would of reduced the development by 1000 dwellings = $100 million that Delfin would of lost.

As a result of Fridays gazettal of SREP 30 Penrith Council now has the green light to approve Delfin Lend Leases massive Western and Central Precinct Plans (suburbs). This equates to 3400 lots. Council planners are now rushing to prepare for next Monday night the 9th March when a Report will come before the full Council urging that they approve both plans.

Government by cynicism

We recently met with Council Planners about Delfin Lend Leases abysmal plans. Despite raising numerous issues it was obvious they just don't care. They had no valid responses to our questions. Talking to them was like talking to the developer. Q's such as 'Delfins tree survey identifies 20000 trees - will these be removed? Answer - Don't know. Q's What are you going to do about the fact Delfin have a 3.8 ha shortfall in the provision of public parkland (open space) within the Western Precinct. Answer - Delfin can use the Regional Park to cover the shortfall. Apparently only 40 comments were received on the Precinct Plans so they are cocky that there will be little public opposition from here on. Personally I am quite disappointed that such a massive ecological disaster could only attract 40 comments.

So if you are not completely over it and still have some concern then do what you can. It would be good to wind up this 16 year campaign (arguably one of the longest resident campaigns) next Monday night with a packed public capacity giving Penrith Council what they deserve.

Info on the planning disaster that Council will approve and the issues we raised with Councils Planners are here http://www.adisite.org

You may be interested to know that Blacktown Council refused to commit to the acquisition of the Norman St bushland at Prospect. Council voted unanimously. They came up with some excuse to make continued representation to State and Fed Gov'ts to obtain funding.

see Candobetter review here of Peter Andrews' book on Natural Sequence Farming
By Duane Norris (Natural Sequence Farming)[1]

The present circumstances around the country pose a huge headache for Governments with devastating fires in Victoria and floods in Queensland.

Once this Australian landscape ran itself.

The fire cycle, prior Aboriginals, was once in every 300 years. Today, it is once in every 2-3 years (regardless of the cause).

Inground water and a dense cover of fire retardant, biodiverse plants once cooled the Australian landscape.

Today, our landscape is drained, dried, desiccated, barren of plant cover except for incendiaries of Eucalyptus trees waiting to vaporise like petrol tankers.

The answers to the problems we are witnessing are there for all to see...they are simple solutions. Solutions given to us by Nature and available for all to see.*

The floodwaters and fire regimes could be far better managed if only authorities understood these simple landscape processes.

The national landscape catastrophes currently facing our country need to be addressed at the highest levels including the Premier's proposed Royal Commission.

Premier, you will be inundated with experts and eyewitnesses on the ground saying this solution and that solution will be the best.

THE ONLY SOLUTION THAT MATTERS, IN THE END, IS THE ONE THAT WORKS.

The Key is WATER!!

This is the only ingredient that saved lives and houses in the terrible recent events across Victoria.

We need to rehydrate the Victorian landscape like it was once.

This simple proof can be dramatically illustrated by doing a simple test.

"If you purchase two copies of The Age this Saturday, soak one in the bath overnight and read the other. Think of the copy coming out of the bath, as the landscape prior [to the impact of repeated fires] and the dry paper, as the landscape is today." (Article by Duane Norris for Natural Sequence Farming)

If you purchase two copies of The Age this Saturday, soak one in the bath overnight and read the other.

Think of the copy coming out of the bath, as the landscape prior and the dry paper, as the landscape is today.

Next day, put both copies out in the Sun for a few hours. Then take a match and see which paper catches fire.

It’s as simple as that.

There are models available where this information can be dramatically demonstrated as to how our landscape once functioned under a wet rehydrated paradigm.

We would encourage you to see it for yourself.

Duane Norris

* Peter Andrews’s books ‘Back from the Brink’ and ‘Beyond the Brink’ say it all.
[1] This letter was originally sent to Premier John Brumby as a 'Special Message', on 17 February 2009, by Duane Norris, Workshop Coordinator and Personal Assistant to Peter Andrews, originator of Natural Sequence Farming It is republished here with permission. If you would like to participate in the Natural Sequence Forum, go here.

Andrew Bolt's story, "Green rules, black forests" is one of many mainstream media sources to keep alive the legend of the brave Sheehans' fight for justice and safety against their philistine greenie neighbours. But there is even more to that story than the press have so-far published. Read on...

The story so far:

"THEY were labelled law breakers, fined $50,000 and left emotionally and financially drained. But seven years after the Sheahans bulldozed trees to make a fire break — an act that got them dragged before a magistrate and penalised — they feel vindicated. Their house is one of the few in Reedy Creek still standing....

Mr Sheahan is still angry about his prosecution, which cost him $100,000 in fines and legal fees. The council’s planning laws allow trees to be cleared only when they are within six metres of a house. Mr Sheahan cleared trees up to 100 metres away from his house." (Source: Andrew Bolt, "Green rules, black forest"

But the plot thickens...

Apparently NO journalist has contacted the Mitchell Shire Council to investigate its version of the Sheahans' story. However close investigation reveals a much more interesting side to life by the forests and how communities can pull together or apart to preserve or destroy their environment and themselves.

People may read the records for themselves here:
http://www.mitchellshire.vic.gov.au/Files/12_Sept_05_minutes.pdf

The Council records show that before November 2003 the Sheahans cleared an environmental overlay of 1.2 Ha old growth eucalptus (past their fire-prone growth - as could be demonstrated from their size and age), adjoining State forest. In so-doing the Sheahans also created flat ground for their horses.

The Sheahans apparently fell afoul of the local council because neighbours complained about what they had done, which was against the law. So the Council was acting on complaints from neighbours of the Sheahans.

Far from being 'dragged into court' the Council records seem to show that every attempt was made to keep the matter out of court and to resolve it with the least hassle for all parties.

Victims of their own actions?

The records seem to show that the Sheahans were the ones to cost themselves and the Council time and money.

For instance, in an attempt to settle the matter without great cost, the council sought the Sheahans' agreement to pay $2,500 in council costs and to plant some more vegetation. In 2003, they agreed to pay this $2,500 Council and to repair some of the damage by revegetating.

They then failed to do what they had said they would. The council attempted to renew dialogue.

"Get stuffed!"

In 2004 the Sheahans responded to attempts to communicate further on the issue with a letter telling Council and residents to 'get stuffed'.

In 2004 the court case could no longer be avoided.

The Sheahans attempted to convince the council that their motive for felling the old-growth trees in the environmental overlay had been to remove fire-danger. They had, however, left logs piled up in the area where the healthy old trees had been. There is a 2004 photograph which shows that these logs had later been involved in a fire following a couple of bad fire-risk seasons. .

Although the Sheahans have claimed that they bulldozed logs to create a fire-barrier, this was not the opinion of a fire-hazard inspector, who reckoned they had created a fire-hazard. The Council issued the Sheahans with an order to remove the fire-hazard from the property.

Magistrate also not convinced about the 'fire-break'.

In court, the Magistrate held that the Sheahans' claim of a fire-barrier was not plausible because they had “only sought to consider exemptions under the Mitchell Planning Scheme after the fact”.

Due to the efforts of the council and the CFA the pile of burnt logs was removed from the Sheahan property. The fact that the Sheahans survived the most recent fires may be in part due to the removal of the fire-hazard they had themselves created out of trees which had survived many fires intact.

A sore loser by any other name ...

That would make them ungrateful sore-losers, if placed in a kindly light.

It therefore seems to me - going by these records - that, failing some other well-based explanation, it is fair and reasonable to label the Sheahans 'law breakers'.

It also seems reasonable to label the press in this matter, 'pot-stirrers', or something much worse, perhaps, given the gravity of grief and loss in Victoria - the most cleared state of Australia.

What do you think?

In their coverage of this story the mainstream press seem again to demonstrate that they are the mouthpieces of narrow commercial interest by the opportunistic and unbalanced manner in which this matter has so far been reported. Their silence - ABC and commercial alike - is deafening on the truth, which was that the most 'managed' and back-burned forests burned the hottest, whereas much old-growth survived these and many other fires.

With press like this, who needs enemies - or even 'Green terrorists'?

Crucial investigation must not be highjacked by Melbourne's planners and developers

The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is currently conducting investigation into Crown and Public Land in the Melbourne metropolitan area. Track record of such inquiries mean that only a naive Melbourne citizen would expect anything from this one, other than excuses to confiscate and give away to developers more and more of Melbourne's public land.

For this reason it is important for alternative forums to give as much publicity as possible to the issues in hand. We do this here via one excellent submission, from Jill Quirk, on behalf of the Victorian Branch of Sustainable Population Australia. (Below this report the submission is reproduced in its original form.)

This investigation springs from competition for land-use due to the pressures of population growth

Ms Quirk states, "SPA (VIC) with its particular focus on the interaction of population levels/lifestyle and the environment notes that the investigation into public and crown land has most likely sprung from the pressures of population growth on land use and the increasing importance and competition for the use of this land to a growing population with diminishing private open space available to it."

Ms Quirk's submission highlights what should be the outstanding priority of the report, the problems caused by the State Government's obdurate engineering of a much bigger population. Without this massive population, Victoria's water supply would probably be adequate and the city would be cooler, because there would be fewer buildings, less industrial activity and more trees and green spaces.

Purposes of the Investigation

The purposes of the investigation which the SPA VIC submission addresses are to systematically identify and assess the uses, resources, condition, values and management of Crown land, and public authority land in metropolitan Melbourne; to assess values of Crown land, and public authority land for areas not committed to a specific use, and report on appropriate future uses relevant to Melbourne's livability and natural values; and to report on the contribution of Crown land, and public authority land to Melbourne's livability and opportunities for enhancement of this contribution.

Ms Quirk explained that SPA VIC would urge a broad approach with particular consideration given to the pressure on land- of a rapidly rising population with diminishing private open space.

Melbourne 2030 creates the problems it then purports to resolve

She observed that, "Diminished private open space is prescribed by the Melbourne 2030 urban consolidation blueprint necessitated by projected massive population growth, and she also notes that this projected population growth was under- estimated at the time of design.

On current trends, problems are exponential

This situation makes it necessary to contend with the problem of a very much larger population in the future in Victoria with no end of this growth anticipated.

"At current rates of growth Melbourne could have 8 million people well before the end of the century", Ms Quirk warned.

The problem of encouraging population growth with no end in sight is further complicated by the declining state of the Victorian natural environment (as noted in the 2008 Victorian State of the Environment report).

Urban heat island effect increases urgent need for trees to modify temperature

The inevitable increased urban temperatures in Melbourne from an increasing proportion of built up areas, (Urban Heat Island effect) make the "need for open space with vegetation, especially trees to mitigate or modify increased temperatures at local levels", especially urgent.

Urban water management

"Open space which is not concreted or paved allows maximum absorption of water in to the ground which is important for the health and survival of vegetation in the surrounding area. It is therefore imperative to consolidate and increase permeable open space," Ms Quirk observes.

Democratic representation a factor in environmental degradation

Ms Quirk has called the Enquiry's attention to the fact that democracy is a victim of Melbourne's recent land-use changes. "The impact on democratic rights and democratic structure of centrally engineered changes in use of public land and reduction of public land," she said, and referred to http://candobetter.org/node/628.

Pure environmental value of open land-

Ms Quirk points out that, "There is a pure environmental value of open land."

"A fundamental contribution of land that has not been built over is its capacity to absorb water. Once it has been built over it cannot serve this function. In addition, water shortages through drought and increased demand on our water supplies have resulted in noticeable loss of green areas both in public and private gardens. Thus any that remain are crucial to the health of Melbourne’s urban environment..

"The other contributions of land with vegetation (especially trees) are to cool the immediate environment via shade and transpiration. Heating up of the urban environment has occurred through expansion and densification necessitated through population growth (Urban Heat Island effect) as well as because of global climate change. The cooling attributes of trees and other vegetation create a microclimate of relief in an environment which is otherwise incapable of modifying the effect of summer heat. They thus reduce the need for inside use of energy using air conditioners and other cooling systems.
It must also be remembered that birds and small animals require habitat to survive. e.g. every Grevillea Robin Gordon that disappears removes food for several wattle birds. Public open space has become even more crucial for our wildlife than it was before the massive loss of private open space i.e. private gardens that is well under way.

Public open space has become even more crucial for our wildlife than it was before the massive loss of private open space i.e. private gardens that is well under way.

Value of open space to residents of Melbourne

"With a rapidly increasing population (largely socially engineered by governments- notably state governments by designating nearly all areas in the state as in need of immigration) over the last 10 years, (see http://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au) there has been noticeable pressure on both public and private land. This trend will continue with bipartisan pro population growth stances. Private gardens are being lost at an alarming rate as houses on generous blocks with trees are bulldozed for units and town houses , resulting in a far greater coverage of the land with impermeable surfaces and building, loss of trees, shade and other vegetation This leaves neighbours with less and less relief from built up areas and often owning no garden themselves people rely more and more heavily on public land for recreation. The benefits of open space to people may not always be accurately measured by the number actually on the land at a particular time. The benefit to some may be simply in the relief and reassurance of walking past an open space."

"The value of open land is so much more than the dollar price estimated in terms of what it would yield if subdivided and sold to developers or built on to create a revenue raising venue. It is a defect of our land valuing and legal system that it fails to account for many damages to quality of life through changes to land use."

"We were fortunate in Melbourne that our founders were far sighted in setting aside areas of land for Melbourne’s people. Unfortunately their provisions for future generations have sometimes been exploited for short term objectives (according to Coasian economic values) at the expense of the general population.

These considerations should be uppermost when making assessments with respect to –uses and values of public land. Democratic rights and structure at a local level should be strengthened as opposed to their removal to distant government and commercial forums."

The Final Recommendation made by the SPA Victoria report is that there should be no erosion or loss of public open space from our current situation. It asks that the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council focus on maintaining and maximizing the natural attributes of any land under consideration for the benefit of Victorian citizens present and future.

"We ask that the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council focus on maintaining and maximizing the natural attributes of any land under consideration for the benefit of Victorian citizens present and future."

ORIGINAL SUBMISSION BELOW

The Secretary
Metropolitan Melbourne Enquiry
Victorian Environmental Assessment Council
Level 6
8 Nicholson Street
East Melbourne 3002

16 February 2009

Dear Sir/Madam

Re Investigation into Crown and public land

Introduction:
I am writing on behalf of Sustainable Population Australia: Victorian Branch (SPA VIC).
SPA is an environmental organization whose aims and objectives are:

.To contribute to public awareness of the limits of Australian population growth from ecological, social and economic viewpoints.
.To promote awareness that the survival of an ecologically sustainable population depends on its renewable resource base.
.To help promote policies that will initially lead to stabilization of Australia’s population by encouraging near replacement fertility rates and low immigration rates.
.To promote urban and rural lifestyles and practices that are in harmony with the realities of the Australian environment, its resource base and its biodiversity.
.To advocate low immigration rates while rejecting any selection based on race.
.To help promote policies that will lead to the stabilization, then reduction of global population.

SPA (VIC) with its particular focus on the interaction of population levels/lifestyle and the environment notes that the investigation into public and crown land has most likely sprung from the pressures of population growth on land use and the increasing importance and competition for the use of this land to a growing population with diminishing private open space available to it.

With reference to the purposes of the investigation

(“The purposes of the investigation are to:
(a) systematically identify and assess the uses, resources, condition, values and management of Crown land, and public authority land in metropolitan Melbourne;
(b) assess values of Crown land, and public authority land for areas not committed to a specific use, and report on appropriate future uses relevant to Melbourne's livability and natural values; and
(c) report on the contribution of Crown land, and public authority land to Melbourne's livability and opportunities for enhancement of this contribution”)

SPA VIC would urge a broad approach with particular consideration given to the following:

1. The pressure on land- of a rapidly rising population with diminishing private open space. Diminished private open space is prescribed by the Melbourne 2030 urban consolidation blueprint necessitated by projected massive population growth (which as it turns out was under- estimated at the time of design.)

2. A very much larger population in the future in Victoria with no end of this growth anticipated (At current rates of growth Melbourne could have 8 million people well before the end of the century.)

3. The declining state of the Victorian natural environment (as noted in the 2008 Victorian State of the Environment report)

4. The inevitable increased urban temperatures in Melbourne from an increasing proportion of built up areas, (Urban Heat Island effect) and the consequent need for open space with vegetation, especially trees to mitigate or modify increased temperatures at local levels

5. Urban water management: Open space which is not concreted or paved allows maximum absorption of water in to the ground which is important for the health and survival of vegetation in the surrounding area.

6. The impact on democratic rights and democratic structure of centrally engineered changes in use of public land and reduction of public land. (http://candobetter.org/node/628)

Pure environmental value of open land-

A fundamental contribution of land that has not been built over is its capacity to absorb water. Once it has been built over it cannot serve this function. In addition, water shortages through drought and increased demand on our water supplies have resulted in noticeable loss of green areas both in public and private gardens. Thus any that remain are crucial to the health of Melbourne’s urban environment.
The other contributions of land with vegetation (especially trees) are to cool the immediate environment via shade and transpiration. Heating up of the urban environment has occurred through expansion and densification necessitated through population growth (Urban Heat Island effect) as well as because of global climate change. The cooling attributes of trees and other vegetation create a microclimate of relief in an environment which is otherwise incapable of modifying the effect of summer heat. They thus reduce the need for inside use of energy using air conditioners and other cooling systems.
It must also be remembered that birds and small animals require habitat to survive. e.g. every Grevillea Robin Gordon that disappears removes food for several wattle birds. Public open space has become even more crucial for our wildlife than it was before the massive loss of private open space i.e. private gardens that is well under way.

Value of open space to residents of Melbourne

With a rapidly increasing population (largely socially engineered by governments- notably state governments by designating nearly all areas in the state as in need of immigration) over the last 10 years, (see http://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au) there has been noticeable pressure on both public and private land. This trend will continue with bipartisan pro population growth stances. Private gardens are being lost at an alarming rate as houses on generous blocks with trees are bulldozed for units and town houses , resulting in a far greater coverage of the land with impermeable surfaces and building, loss of trees, shade and other vegetation This leaves neighbours with less and less relief from built up areas and often owning no garden themselves people rely more and more heavily on public land for recreation. The benefits of open space to people may not always be accurately measured by the number actually on the land at a particular time. The benefit to some may be simply in the relief and reassurance of walking past an open space.

The value of open land is so much more than the dollar price estimated in terms of what it would yield if subdivided and sold to developers or built on to create a revenue raising venue. It is a defect of our land valuing and legal system that it fails to account for many damages to quality of life through changes to land use.

We were fortunate in Melbourne that our founders were far sighted in setting aside areas of land for Melbourne’s people. Unfortunately their provisions for future generations have sometimes been exploited for short term objectives (according to Coasian economic values) at the expense of the general population.

These considerations should be uppermost when making assessments with respect to –uses and values of public land. Democratic rights and structure at a local level should be strengthened as opposed to their removal to distant government and commercial forums.

Recommendation: that there should be no erosion or loss of public open space from our current situation and we ask that the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council focus on maintaining and maximizing the natural attributes of any land under consideration for the benefit of Victorian citizens present and future.

Sincerely,

Jill Quirk
President: Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian Branch)

Contact: Via candobetter.org or by post to PO Box 1173 Frankston (for public correspondence)
20 Feb 2009

In Victoria in 1992 some bureaucrat got the idea of changing the name (and focus) of the Department of Conservation and Environment to a Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, then in 1996 to a Department of Natural Resources and Environment, then in 2003 a split to (1) a Victorian Department of Primary Industries and (2) a Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Source: http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/asaw/biogs/A002037b.htm

Currently it's known by its obscure acronym DSE...(Don't Support Environment, or Department of Sparks and Embers).

Across the border in NSW, in 2007, the Department of Environment and Conservation was changed to the Department of Environment and Climate Change (DECC). Rather than forming a dedicated research and response organisation to focus on climate change, the conservation was dropped from the existing department. Cynically, including 'climate change' as a name of one of its departments, government must feel cosy sending a message it is addressing climate change. For a while the department was headed up by The NSW Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Water - a bucket of outdoor type activities that sounded good together.

Across the border in South Australia, they have the Department for the Environment and Heritage (DEH), which sounds borrowed from the federal Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (another collective bucket). It is hard to see how with so many diverse portfolios, a minister can dedicate any leadership to making genuine improvements to what's left of Australia's intact natural environment and its desperate need for conservation.

With all the money spent on names changing, the tens of thousands could have gone into onground conservation activities like fox control programmes.

Eastern side of Wilson's Promontory near where
the fire started. Photo: John Woudstra

I have been monitoring the Jan-Feb 2009 Victorian bushfires from NSW and have turned my attention to the bushfire management in a natural area - Wilsons Promontory. I note satellite observations of the fire with concern showing the lighting ignition on the east coast started 9th February, but had almost extinguished itself by the 13th. Then a wind change drove it out of control. A week later it has burnt out 22,000 hectares (almost 50% of our precious 50,000ha Prom)!

While the Country Fire Authority (CFA) has paid special attention to non-imminent bushfire risks to rather distant private property. The CFA says "the fire does not currently pose a threat to the Yanakie community." Backburning the Prom is given as the only bushfire response strategy. So do we interpret this as a noncommittal response by the CFA for the Prom - that is since no human lives or private property are at threat, the CFA's bushfire response is to just 'monitor' the fire and put out the spot fires threatening private property to the north?

I interpret this bushfire management by Victoria's CFA as one that respects only human life and property, but does not rate the natural asset values of fauna and flora habitat of the Prom with any respect.

The CFA reports read as though CFA policy for active and damaging bushfires in important conservation areas is to wait for rain, but otherwise 'let it burn'.

And yet the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts hot and windy conditions for tomorrow Monday, 23 Feb 2009.

Wilsons Promontory where thousands of hecteres have been burnt.
Photo: John Woudstra

I interpret this bushfire management by Victoria's CFA as one that respects only human life and property, but does not rate the natural asset values of fauna and flora habitat of the Prom with any respect. It seems at best an opportunity for de-facto hazard reduction that it would normally not get permission to do, and at worst an inconvenient distraction for CFA crews.

If this is the prevailing attitude of rural firefighting then clearly the CFA has no interest in natural assets, and no mandate to protect them from fire in the same passionate way it does private property? There seems no difference in approach or skill set by the CFA to that that would be exercised by urban fire brigades.

So why do we have a CFA? Professional fire brigades are expensive, whereas volunteers are cheap is the political answer!

On this basis, it is overdue for the CFA to be incorporated within the urban fire brigade structure. While this initial structural change won't save Victoria's vast tracts of wildlife habitat in the short term, it will sure will remove the false premise to the community that the CFA respects and defends natural wildlife habitats.

What does Victorian Government's Department of Sustainability and Environment have to say for itself? It is charged with the Promontory's protection.

See also: "Crews unable to slow Wilsons Promontory blaze" on ABC online on 17 Feb 09, "Huge blaze threatens the very heart of the Prom" in the Age of 19 Feb 09.

A Gunns' woodchip mill at Longreach in Tasmania

Is the final nail in the coffin for the proposed Gunn’s Tasmanian pulp-mill an economic one?

Tasmanian mills are closing down left, right and centre.

In
“Gunns shuts chip mills”, The MercuryFeb 20, 2009, Nick Clark reports,

“The Long Reach mill will shutdown next week and every Friday until the end of April. The Triabunna mill is closed from midnight tonight until March 9. After that it is closed for a series of Fridays as well as the week of April 10-17. The Hampshire mill at Burnie has had an additional week shutdown added next week and a four day week until the end of April. Tasmania Forest Contractors Association chairman Rodney Bishop said some contractors were carrying as little as 40 per cent of their normal quota.”

Japan doesn't want woodchips now due to the downturn and dropping paper and packaging sales. But, the Japanese company, Nippon, has just bought the Latrobe Valley's Paperlinx factory. It seems like a very risky purchase - even if they got it dirt cheap.

A Buyer’s market or a Fire-sale?

Or is this the same buyer’s market that sees the Chinese making offers for Australian mines, caught in the downturn after overly leveraging on projected growth?

Australians should keep our opportunistic government and Foreign Investment Review Board vigilant not to give in to a fire-sale here. Closing down these unviable industries is what should happen. It should have happened in the 1860s. Let’s encourage these refractory industries to invest in the health of forests by leaving them alone.

Ominous move on Victoria’s protected water catchments

Paperlinx at Maryvale lost a huge chunk of it's 'resource' (trees) in the Victorian bush-fires. At the same time there has been a renewed push by the logging lobbyists to get into Melbourne's catchments, which have been closed to them up until now.
The move to get into our last few protected water catchments is ominous and should not be granted by government.

Victorians should be vigilant about any claims by the logging industry that they are performing a social service of salvage logging and making these areas more accessible for fire trucks.

No fire-sales please

We already know that the worst hit areas in the fires were the logged and wood-chipped ones. On that basis, to let the loggers in to relatively intact forest would be tantamount to increasing Victoria’s fire danger.
Keep an eye on this one and scream loud and long if you get the chance.

Illustration by Gustave Doré for of Jean de la Fontaine's fable of La Mort et le bûcheron

Wood-chip prices way down

On Saturday, February 21, 2009, the Daily Timber News announced a significant down-turn in the wood-chip industry. Defenders of biodiverse old-growth forests are watching closely as events unfold. It is of course not pleasant for people employed in the industry.

Apparently the Japanese pulp industry, up to now faithful through thick and thin, is losing its appetite for pulp. Last year (2008) Australia supplied Japan with the most hardwood chips (36%) in a year when Japan imported “a record 12.3 million BDMT's of hardwood chips”, according to the Daily Timber News.

Surprisingly, the Daily Timber News links the fall in wood-chip imports to the fall in production of “cars, machine tools, electronic goods and mobile phones.”

How so?

Well, all these products “require thick paper manuals,” the report explains.

A number of Japanese pulp mills have substantially interrupted their production. New technology may also be a factor, and the recycling of fibers. [Ed. Does this refer to wood-fiber or something more durable, since wood-fibers are short and recycle poorly?]

Demand may also fall dramatically from China. The industry was anticipating strong growth there because of plans to build more pulp mills and increase capacity in those already built, but these plans are now on hold.

Where to now?

People concerned about the destruction of forests are hopeful that the industry may give up on wood-chipping now. There is a conference coming up which will look at “investigating the possibility of timber concerns investing in the carbon-offsetting trading,” in the light of these declining trends in softwood and hardwood woodchip trading.

The woodchip industry is now facing a huge drop in prices for its chips. It has always operated at a net financial cost to Australians, many of whom have wondered why on earth it has continued for so long. Will the State governments that have for so long protected the woodchip industry try to make Australians pay even more to keep it going? Seasoned conservationists are probably waiting until the fat lady sings.

About the illustration

The illustration by Gustave Doré for of Jean de la Fontaine's 17th century fable of La Mort et le bûcheron (Death and the Woodcutter) might be peculiarly apt. The poem is about an ancient woodchopper, bent over under a huge burden of wood. He is on his way home to his filthy hut and every step is agony; not only from the weight of the wood on his back, but from the weight of his years. Overwhelmed by his problems, he drops his load of wood on the ground and contemplates his sorry predicament. Unable to pay taxes, he must harbour soldiers; he often cannot afford a loaf of bread; he must toil endlessly for his wife and children; he cannot remember any happiness since he came into the world. He decides to call Death for a final solution to his problems. Death comes as soon as She is called, and asks, "What do you need me to do?"

At this question, surprisingly, the Woodcutter says, "I want you to help me lift up this load of wood and get it on my back again. Don't worry, I won't keep you here long."

The moral of this poem is that humans usually prefer to go on doing the same thing, despite the suffering it causes them, than to change. One would hope this were not so for the woodchipping industry.

La Mort et le bûcheron

Un pauvre Bûcheron tout couvert de ramée,
Sous le faix du fagot aussi bien que des ans
Gémissant et courbé marchait à pas pesants,
Et tâchait de gagner sa chaumine enfumée.
Enfin, n'en pouvant plus d'effort et de douleur,
Il met bas son fagot, il songe à son malheur.
Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu'il est au monde ?
En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde ?
Point de pain quelquefois, et jamais de repos.
Sa femme, ses enfants, les soldats, les impôts,
Le créancier, et la corvée
Lui font d'un malheureux la peinture achevée.
Il appelle la mort, elle vient sans tarder,
Lui demande ce qu'il faut faire
C'est, dit-il, afin de m'aider
A recharger ce bois ; tu ne tarderas guère.
Le trépas vient tout guérir ;
Mais ne bougeons d'où nous sommes.
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C'est la devise des hommes.

#DisappearedBunkers" id="DisappearedBunkers">The bush-fire bunker, once common in Australian country towns, has mysteriously disappeared.

Important: See, also, article "How misconceptions about bushfire bunkers may cost lives", which disputes some of the content of this article and comments.

Living in a designated "fire storm" area as I do, I've gone to great lengths to find out how best to protect my home. In fact, the whole house was built with fire in mind, but whether or not it would stand up to the cyclonic wind and fire associated with these latest fires, well, who knows?? You simply cannot prepare for a day as bad as that was. Some say it's a 1 in 70 year event, others are now saying that because of climatic change, it will become a 1 in 15 year event. Time will tell.

The question of shelter is, of course, very present in peoples' minds today.

#ExtensiveUse" id="ExtensiveUse">Fire bunkers were once used extensively

It could be that, the best protection you can have is a fire bunker. These were used extensively during the earlier part of the 1900's around towns and timber milling operations. All they were was simply a ditch dug 3 or 4 foot into the ground, preferably in a cleared area, covered with logs leaving a small entrance and exit at both ends and 2 foot of earth piled on top. The way they work is that under the smoke and running along the ground is a two inch layer of cool air. The fire brings it with it to keep burning. As the fire front passes over the bunker, cool air enters the open ends. Radiant heat travels in straight lines and so passes over the bunker. You don't need doors or anything fancy, although in today's age, you'd need very sturdy beams or logs in case a 4x4 fire truck ran over the thing. In fact, some of the last bunkers to be built were clearly marked both for ease of entrance and to prevent being crushed.

#BelowGround" id="BelowGround">Bunkers should be below ground-level, not in raised banks

I've been advised against tunnelling into a dirt bank. The trick is to get below ground level where the two inch layer of cool air can enter the dug-out/shelter.

I recently read in a book of old Australia where a fire came through a timber cutters camp. The manager, who had a residence and small family in situ, had his men construct a tunnel into the wall of an adjacent hill as protection against a possible bushfire. It had heavy calico or Hessian covering the entrance. In the event of a bushfire, that was the place he intended to shelter with his wife and children. The men, on the other hand, had to make do with an old abandoned mine shaft. It was a 'drive' into an adjacent hill and had a short right angle turn a several feet inside the entrance. It too was fitted with a heavy Hessian flap and a drum of water with buckets was situated just inside the entrance.

Of course the inevitable fire came through and the family took it's place in the specially constructed tunnel, the other workers in the old mine. The workers splashed water from the barrel onto the Hessian for some time, taking it in turns while the others stayed out of the direct path of the radiant heat by sheltering around the bend in the mine. When the fire had passed, the family in the constructed tunnel were found to have perished, the radiant heat which travels in a straight line got to them in minutes.

#SaintFillans" id="SaintFillans">Document indicates lives saved by a big bunker somewhere near St. Fillans.

www.abc.net.au/blackfriday/oral/oral_mick_omeara.htm

"(...) Now he shut the engine off and of course all the blokes were watching him do this and they started to mill around him and somebody said 'Right, well we'd better get to the dug-out'. (...)

"(...) And then he thought, well he'd run down to his house, which I suppose was about 100 yards away from the mill, down a track, like a road, and he ran down towards it, because in his house he had two suitcases on the bed, and the only 50 pounds he had in the world were in those two suitcases. (...)

"(...) Now he was a young man, he'd be 24 or 25 I suppose, he wouldn't be much more and he was as fit as a fiddle, but by the time he got back near the dug-out, he was blind. Blind with smoke. And he didn't know anywhere, he didn't even know where the dug-out was because it was that smoky.

"Suddenly the fire was everywhere and he said it was as black as night. He said he was blind with the smoke and flying embers in his eyes. He couldn't see and the only thing that saved him was that there was an old bloke that he used to work with, a fellow called Sid Smith, he came from Yarra Junction.

"Smithy came out of the dug-out because he knew that Tom had headed down towards his house and he started singing out, 'Over here Tom. Hey, Tom, come over here', because Smithy couldn't see Tom either.

"Tom said that he heard Smithy's voice, and yelled out to him that he was blind and Smithy came out of the dug-out and they yelled at one another, and they gradually got closer and Smithy came over and grabbed him and took him into the dug-out, otherwise he would have been dead. He was very lucky, if it wasn't for old Smithy, he would have been dead.

"About eight hours I think they were in the dug-out. This happened at about nine or 10 in the morning and when they were walking out they had to walk from the mill out to Warburton and they were joking and happy to be alive. (...)"

St. Fillans, is described as "down along the Acheron Way about six miles - where the junction of the Marysville Road and the Maroondah Highway meet."

Editor's note: About the illustrations: The illustrations were mocked up from several photos, mostly from this page, which tells an interesting story. "Possible crash of a B-25 Mitchell in the Bunyaville State Forest, Brisbane on an unknown date. About 60 meters away from the crash site, there is a wooden and earthen bunker structure.

American munitions disposal activities in the forest caused a bushfire in late October 1944 when hot bomb fragments ignited the undergrowth. In July 1945 the Australian Military Forces notified the Forestry Sub-Department that they no longer required the bunker and that Forestry could regain possession of the site.'

Introduction: The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is seeking senate approval for an announced a $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan to support jobs and invest in future long term economic growth. The 'plan' includes "five one-off cash bonuses (of $950) for eligible individuals". These are proposed for Australian workers whose taxable income was $100,000 or less in 2007-08. There is also a Single Income Family Bonus to support eligible families with one income earner; a Farmer's Hardship Bonus paid to drought affected farmers and farm dependent small business; owners receiving exceptional circumstances related income support; a Back to School Bonus of $950 per child from low- and middle-income families; $950 paid to eligible students and people returning study to help with the costs of education and training.

Other measures the Senate is being asked to support are: free ceiling insulation for around 2.7 million eligible Australian homes; building or upgrading a building in every one of Australia's 9,540 primary schools; building more than 20,000 new, low-income social housing dwellings and defence homes; a temporary business investment tax break for small and general businesses buying eligible assets; significantly increasing funding for local community infrastructure and local road projects.

Commentary:

While I appreciate the seeming urgency of the 42 billion dollar plan - I totally agree with the opposition and minor parties' demand that the scheme be at least given a senate review.

Yes we are in very difficult times, but what amounts to a knee-jerk response, while politically possibly advantageous, from a long term view is very foolish.

... I can fairly predict that at least 15% will be siphoned off, to nobody's benefit.

Schemes like this (even though they may have had a far longer gestation period than we tend to be told) are wonderful for the opportunist "white shoe' brigade - and I can fairly predict that at least 15% will be siphoned off, to nobody's benefit.

The only component of the scheme that I can wholeheartedly agree with is the roof insulation - but even then, it requires a far more coherent energy target - as 'roof insulation' can mean damn near anything. Are there any targets - R values, appropriate forms of insulation, what about roof space venting?? Different areas of Australia require different methods - up here in the tropics - simple sisalation (double sided aluminium foil sarking) does wonders - but not on the tablelands - where you need something more substantial, and even more substantial measures are required as you progress south. There is no indication that what we are seeing here is not a 'feel good' "one size fits all" approach - which is exceedingly foolish.

I'm not sure about the primary school improvements - after seeing the 'air-conditioner in every school' issue of last year - which raises the State's carbon footprint significally (especially as most country school buildings were never designed to accommodate A/C - being neither insulated or draft-proofed). Plus the need for A/C is restricted to only a few days a year. Maybe some schools could use some upgrades - but this seems to be a 'pork barrel' issue.

Given the rapidly approaching issue of "Peak Oil", road infrastructure would seem to be the least useful use of the money - and the use with the least useful benefits in the future. Sure - many road projects are "shovel ready" - but that doesn't make them appropriate - Facing the inevitability of a fuel constrained future (very soon) - we need to be putting the money in to the provision of public transport and light rail where appropriate.

Some obvious areas - that would have a huge carbon footprint impact - would be the fitting of solar HWS to as many homes as possible.

Another - creation of "forest regeneration corps" - to re-plant our millions of hectares of marginal land that was cleared - because clearing land was Government policy at the time. Associated with appropriate training - such a corps could be really important for the long-term "carbon -neutralisation' of Australia.

And that's just a start.

photos of Bob Brown by Jill Quirk

Vic Government not doing its job for Brown Mountain

Today Bob Brown decried the situation on Brown Mountain, where amateurs are having to do work which is the responsibility of the government, in discovering and documenting endangered wildlife at Brown Mountain.

Brumby Government doing bidding of big end of town

He said that the Brumby Government is failing the people of Victoria by doing the bidding of the big end of town, and not what is in the best interests of most Victorians.

Brown answers questions on population policy for Australia

Towards the end of his press conference, Bob was asked a few questions about population policy and numbers in Australia.

He pointed out very emphatically that the Greens are the only political party with an environmentally based population policy, and that a population policy is needed for Australia.

He fielded questions about humanitarian aspects of immigration and refugees knowledgeably and honestly, pointing out that business migration was the larger component of the immigration program, and that people with money are more welcomed by the government than refugees.

He was asked how many people he feels that Australia can support. His response was to throw the question back at the interviewer.

He illustrated the combined impact of population numbers and lifestyle on our environment by saying that if living standards were to be at Australian levels, we would need four earths - and we do not have four - we only have one.

Brown appeared comfortable and confident with this topic.

Australian palm forest (photo by Sheila Newman)

Mark O’Connor and Bill Lines’s Overloading Australia has only been out for a short time and the growthists are becoming hysterical. Their arguments are as hopeless as ever. One Telegraph journalist, Tim Blair, has even attacked Mark O’Connor for being a marriage celebrant. In a sort of three-year-old’s idea of getting married,

“Interestingly, O’Connor is a wedding celebrant. How he combines that with his opposition to population growth is anyone’s guess.”

Doesn’t Blair know anyone who practises contraception?

It must be hard working for the Murdoch Press, where no-one writes sensibly about serious democratic and environmental concerns, presumably because they will affect sales on realestate.com.au which rely on continuous population growth of course.

And just when you thought it was safe to read Fairfax again (after the decent article on page 3 on Overloading Australia) they drag the recent expatriate, Brigid Delaney, in from the cold (she has just spent three years in London) to do a number on O’Connor and Lines.

Just an old-fashioned cringe

Delaney starts out with some very old-fashioned cultural cringe. Holding up her subjective ideals of [battered] New York and [impoverished] London as ‘models of innovative and successful cities’, she stigmatises stopping population growth as ‘stagnation’. She implies that O'Connor and Lines's book calls for no immigration. This is not true.

What stopped her from urging Australia to have cities more like Calcutta and Mexico City, I wonder?

This does not compute

She says that Australians live 'high on the hog', then, instead of suggesting we should be less materialistic, she proposes more economic growth and lauds imported 'work ethics'. Is she really so stupid that she doesn't realise that work and economic growth mean more material production and consumption?

She even tries to sell the idea that failing to surrender our remaining quality of life to overpopulation for ‘diversity’ in order to have ‘economic growth’ may ‘slow the development of our inner lives’!

Frankly, if Brigid’s ‘inner life’ is as bereft of originality and cogency as her writing, I would urge her to seriously review her lifestyle goals.

The article reads as if she fell asleep between paragraphs and woke up forgetting what she had just written.

Fails to address content of O'Connor and Lines' book

Unable to counter the environmental concerns raised by Mark O'Connor's and Bill Lines's book, Brigid instead tries to frighten people away from the serious nature of these concerns, by implying that they are dangerous to articulate because they could be used by people to cloak a dislike of immigration for other reasons. She doesn't dare to directly slur the authors themselves, who are both seriously accredited environmentalists; instead she tries to stigmatise their subject as socially dangerous.

At the end she is conflating environmentalists wanting to reduce population with Nazis in Berlin wanting to stop immigration, because one might provide a cloak for the other! To me, it is Brigid’s arguments that are dangerous, because they seem contrived to polarise people away from their democratic right, of voicing their opinions about unsustainable political, environmental and economic policies.

She talks of how immigrants “energise their adopted countries; they bring new skills, culture, views and work ethic,” then later she describes xenophobia as rife in Britain.

Does she not realize that the people she describes as xenophobic are exactly the kinds of British immigrants we are accepting in droves here? People who will tell you openly that they came here to get away from the high immigration there, and, far from hiding under an environmental cloak, express no environmental concern or interest at all?

Cloaked agenda of mass immigrationists

For one with such Macarthyist ideas, Brigid doesn't seem to care that the mass-immigrationists use their purported love of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' to hide their real agenda for Australia, which is to make an enormous amount of money at the expense of taxpayers and grab more political power at the expense of democracy and to hell with the environment. I hate to say this, but those selfish vested interests find most of their support and many of their members, in the mainstream media (which they also own, I forgot to say). Brigid's thesis in her article is unsettling for the reason that she really doesn't seem to know what she is talking about, but she is prepared to slur a seriously documented concern, and by association, the authors of Overloaded Australia, presumably to make a buck.

Australians should all be aware that Fairfax Press makes enormous amounts out of marketing Australian property globally through its domain.com.au, as well as in those forest-destructive pages and pages of real-estate advertisements and consumer lifestyle images.

Sad journalism

It is sad that that is about all that the mainstream press can find as a response to widely shared and felt environmental concerns and despair about wildlife, water, soil and democracy. And it is sad that a journalist shows so little human concern for the feelings and intelligence of her fellows. It seems as if, only those who come from elsewhere, might have intrinsic worth. And, only other cities, not ours, might be worth living in.

Right at the end she comes out with what seems to be a bizarre confusion of high immigration with ecological diversity:

"A society without immigrants will be the social equivalent of what's happening to our gardens — less colour and movement, less diversity, a sort of homogenised, sun-bleached patch where the only things growing are the plants we've seen before."

Blind to real diversity

This isn't Shakespeare. And she seems to be a true ecological illiterate. Apart from the counter-intuitive assumption that people cannot bear to live without constantly changing environments, right to the plants in their gardens, her statement doesn't make any sense.

Fruit bats in an Australian garden (Photo by Julia Buch)

What does she mean by there being 'less colour and movement, less diversity' in our gardens? The only way that is true is where we have concreted them, deprived them of water, and where immigrant plants and animals: pencil cyprus, privet, aloe-vera, African agapanthus; Indian mynas and Euruopean blackbirds, European wasps and cane toads, domestic cats and dogs – not to mention the humans, of course - have taken over en masse and annihilated the indigenous diversity; the quolls, potoroos, snakes, lizards, butterflies, microbats, flower-wasps and rosellas, cuckoo-shrikes, honey-eaters, wattle-birds, magpies and kookaburras, which is so much more intense in Australia than in most places – making concrete New York and grey London seem like dead planets.

Those who care about Brown Mountain are not all high in the giant trees, these protesters at ground level are on the same side as the tree dwellers and are horrified about the destruction of this magical place.

The Star

But, right now, everyone is relying on this little guy:, the Endangered Orbost Spiny Cray (Euastacus diversus), who, if the law is respected, has a right to a buffer-zone of 100 m on either side of the creek he lives in.

Cycling is a popular sport because bikes are less polluting than cars and bike riding is good exercise and a great form of transport. In recent years cycle races have become fashionable, especially for 30-somethings.

Sport needs to show respect for nature

The Tour Down Under is a very large professional cycle race held each year in and around the Adelaide hills in January. It attracts many overseas riders and enthusiastic supporters. But how many of these cycle-sport fans realise that the event is dreaded by wildlife carers in the area because the organisers seem not to take into consideration the impact of hundreds of cyclists, helicopters, police sirens, motor vehicles and screaming fans as they move through roads winding through South Australia's fragile and fragmented bushland with a total impact that recalls the march of armoured tanks?

Wildlife presence clearly signed; why no appropriate planning by council?

The event consists of several races which span over 6 days. Day 2 of the race circuit was around the area of Mylor, Bradbury, Longwood and Stirling. The cyclists travelled along roads which are clearly signed indicating Kangaroos live in the area. The Mylor, Bradbury Longwood section was cycled around 3 times. This is an area where habitat is being eroded in a competition between housing and agriculture. The animals in this area are continually stressed and have no place to run to when the noise of humans and their machines, particularly helicopters, cause them to believe they are under attack.

This charming image of a visiting sports-hero proud to be seen with a baby kangaroo drew unexpected reactions.

A wildlife carer described the experience this year: "Not much to laugh about here. The ‘tour down under’ bike race was hell. The helicopters hovered above my house on and off for 3 hours. The noise terrified the animals I was caring for and obviously disturbed wildlife for tens of kilometers around."

Baby roos trained to wait for mother's return

When mother kangaroos think that the mob is being chased, they deposit their joeys and hop away to attract the threat away from the little kangaroos. Little kangaroos are trained to stay and wait where they are left. When things settle down, the mother kangaroo comes back to get the baby.

Kangaroos panicked; nine joeys missing

The carer told us that, "All the joeys seem to have been separated from their mums in the areas I check. Some of them did not survive. I found a beautiful little joey dead on the main road this morning. A fox had ripped her throat out, then must have dropped her as it crossed the road."

"I am so upset. There are about nine joeys missing from their mums here now."

"This tour down under will be here again next year and this just cannot happen again."

Even Lance Armstrong , the major draw card rider, complained about how low the helicopters were and the trouble the wind they caused made for the cyclists. He also mentioned the continual drone of copters above him during the 4 or 5 hour race.

Mike Turtur designed the race and is the race director.

Photo source: http://nativenotes.net/tag/black-family/

January 19 is Martin Luther King day. It has been my tradition to trot out one of his most unknown speeches. Circulate it widely, please. I was a teenager when he appeared on so many talk shows. Apart from his captivating and stirring speeches, his calm reason and supreme intelligence---on so many issues---still impresses me. He was a giant. And he was more literate than Obama on the ecological facts of life, obviously. But then, so many more were in the late sixties too. See also this article about the 1999 civil trial which found that the US Government conspired in King's assassination.

Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern

by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (May 1966)

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.

There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

UPDATE DEC 2012: If you would like to know more about population science and human political history, Sheila Newman has just published an amazing new theory in a new book, Demography, Territory & Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations (see link). Forensic biologist, Hans Brunner writes of it: "This book takes us to a completely new paradigm in multiple species population science. It shows how little we understand, and how much we need to know, of the sexual reactions when closed colonies with an orderly reproduction system are destroyed, be it people or animals." Two chapters are on multi-species demography, the rest apply the theory to non-industrial societies and the author comes up with a completely new test for the collapse model of Easter Island, which will stun those who thought they knew all about it.

Please see Planned Parenthood's page in which Martin Luther King's acceptance speech was published. (The link previously given here is broken. - Ed)

There is nothing innocent about Peru! People in the world imagine Peru and think of Incas and Machu Picchu and its noble past civilisations. However, this era is well and truly over! Peru is still under the thumb of Colonialism, just the names have changed! Corruption is rife, and so is crime and human rights abuses. Mining companies are making a small minority mightily rich, and the indigenous and rightful owners of the land are suffering torture, death and death threats, loss of land, water pollution and loss of food. This is the 21st century, but all there is from the world is silence! Where is justice? This country is being raped, polluted and people are being abused, all quite "legally".

Many people in Australia are ignorant of what is really happening in Peru. They are still in the agony of Colonialism, despite "independence" since 1821! Only the names of the conquistador thugs have changed! Mining protesters are supposed to be in a democratic country, but the voices of the people are being violently crushed while their land is being confiscated, polluted and raped!

The mining company, Minera Majaz, subsidiary of the English Montericco Metals, is operating illegally on their territories. The license the company is operating with is illegal. The Chinese mining company, Xiamen Zijin Tongguan Development Consortium, since 1989 have 9% of their shares. The national coordinator of human rights has produced stunning pictures of assaults in 29 community sites of Minera Majaz.

27 men and 2 women unarmed protestors, representing the 29 communities from Ayabaca and Huancabamba, have been undefended by police or the legal system since being attacked and left in hell for three days before being released in August 3rd, 2005. Pictures speak a thousand words! They were simply exercising their right to protest.

blog.dhperu.org/?p=1873

The photographic records show how these peasants were attacked and tortured. One of them, Melanio Garcia, was killed. They were kidnapped and forced to walk barefoot on the steep paths towards the mining camp. They were tied up and sprayed with toxic substances that inhibited their breathing. Most of them were stripped, or left nearly bare, thus making them vulnerable to low temperatures and attacks. They were threatened with incarceration in Rio Seco prison with terrorists and drug traffickers and never to return home.

Senesi Jiménez Peña, the head of one community of Yanta, was struck repeatedly on the floor. Jiménez Peña was on the floor face down with his hands tied back. Fear gripped the majority.

They heard a desperate "Help me, God." And police in a mocking tone repeated that there is no God except the police.
The aggression and violence did not stop for three days. Exactly how Melanio Garcia died on August 2nd 2005 is a mystery, but the photos should reveal the extent of the violence and the possible circumstances.

There are now 300 leading environmental protestors facing prosecution in Piura and Cajamarca for “terrorist offences”. They include riot, conspiracy, theft and damage! However, they were simply protesting against environmental destruction of their homes and land and exercising an assumed basic democratic right to protect what is legally theirs!

According to spokesman and coordinator for Vicarate for the Environment, Nicanor Alvaradez Carrasco, the Upper Amazons are very rich in resources and are part of their heritage. Most of the Amazons are being overtaken by foreign companies who exploit them in non-environmentally friendly ways. Some exploit them illegally, like Minera Majaz.

Companies, like Monterrico Metals are contaminating their land, killing peasant leaders, and torturing those active in opposing Minera Majaz. The global community needs to know that these atrocities are going on!

Benefits from the mining are not being shared to the communities in northern Peru. Buckets of gold and copper are being extracted from Peruvian soil each day, but are being transformed overseas. The benefits for their country are very small. Communities are not receiving benefits, and there are no environmentally sound methods being followed. Foreigners are getting richer, while the inhabitants and the land are becoming poorer!

Minera Majaz, like other mining companies, is a threat to the environment, and is unsustainable.
According to Carrasco, after 15 or 20 years, there will be nothing left of the Amazons, or of the culture of the people or the biodiversity of the region. “Two peasant community leaders have been murdered. 50 cases of torture have been reported. 200 of us are being pursued legally and will be imprisoned in the next few months."

Alan Garcia’s government, who recently hosted Kevin Rudd and other world leaders who visited Peru in December for the APEC conference to discuss free-trade, is explicitly and implicitly supporting the mining. This corrupt government is making money and all the land of the Upper Amazons has been requisitioned by foreign countries.

"What is scandalous is that last week, military troops were sent into the region of Yanta, one of the areas belonging to the Minera Majaz concessions. These elite forces were sent there with the intention of opening a pathway for the Montericco Metals company, who had not been let in by the regions’ inhabitants in previous attempts. These peasant communities have radically opposed the mining company and have never let them enter their territories, even when it was the exploratory phase of the project. Now, the military is forcing its way in, which means that in the next few days we can expect the death of hundreds of the active peasant opponents."

There is no justice, and we in Australia should not be supporting APEC or supporting a corrupt and evil government under President Alan Garcia.

www.indymedia.be/en/node/8365
/translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://ipsnoticias.net/nota.asp%3Fidnews%3D42113&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=3&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DMinera%2BMajaz%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
www.indymedia.be/nl/node/8320

Who is liable for the damage done to our society by despotically created 'Authorities'?

In its statement of its values, the representatives of this new horror, the 'Growth Area Authority' state that "we" act "with honesty and openess, are publicly accountable for our actions and are respected for our high quality advice, expertise and impartial decision making."

It is as if the 'value statement' were capable of actually changing the reality. Statements, however, are only words. How can any of us hold the authority to its words? We know that those words will be minced up to suit the values of the authority; not to protect our values.

The Board contains no ecologists, wildlife activists, nurses or doctors, local agriculturalists or permaculturalists, ethicists, civilly concerned social scientists or community activists. It only represents big business.

This board will act to enforce growthism

The problem is that this board can only act in one direction - for overpopulation and inflation linked to scarcity of all resources and against Victorians' human rights for self-government and to maintain a democratic society.

The 'Authority' talks of its 'vision and values', which include 'promoting employment opportunities' and 'foster[ing] the development of communities'. We are going to hear a lot more about 'jobs' because this is the 'carrot' which will be used to cover up the protests against the sticks which such an authority must condone.

"Fostering" community

We will hear more about 'fostering community' too. That won't change the fact that every new development destroys and fragments communities and that local governments have been dismantled and government planning departments have been all but contracted holus-bolus out to corporations of developers, to satisfy Kennett's, Bracks's and now Brumby's growth addiction. This is how our system of democracy has been destroyed by growth. 'Fostering community' will boil down to building new suburbs, importing new people, and sidelining the real communities.

Folks, we are being herded by people who think that they are better than the rest of us because they have managed to seize power from us and call themselves our government. But for nearly two decades now, liberal and labor have had increasingly similar policies and have refused to give the voting public details of differences in policies. Articles at Propaganda Watch, show how the mainstream press and even the ABC have supported this decline in democracy.

Hollow, faulty financial system overwhelms democracy

When it gets down to it, the Victorian government is not governing for voters; it is acting for, financing or defending and supporting developers - financers and builders of new suburbs and infrastructure. Bankers, engineers, construction corporations, acting through the medium of planners - who have recently exploded in numbers, like economics grads and 'financial advisors'. These corporations have made their wealth from high immigration driving up the cost of land and creating an infrastructure boom. This is the system which has brought the Western world to its knees and our government, like the US government, is now a captive of that system.

We must break through. We need to talk about what is happening and reach a consensus to resist this malignant force.

No-one willingly gave the Victorian government this power to hand over our taxes and power to development and finance corporations; they have taken it.

The faces of authority

The following people are the public face of this 'Authority' - the 'Board'. They are in the development business. They are not in the business of government or democracy; they will function to minimise any remaining vestigial opportunities for citizens of Victoria to stand up against the bulldozer of development which is destroying our democracy, our safety and our quality of life.

Their names are public property, listed at the Growth Area Authority site.

Chaired by Chris Banks AM, other board members are Felix Blatt, Frank King, Di Fleming, Ann Keddie and Ian Munro.

The Board reports to the Minister for Planning under the Planning and Environment (Growth Areas Authority) Act 2006.
- Chris Banks AM Chairman.
Chris Banks AM brings a developer's perspective after many years in the housing industry as Chief Executive Officer at Delfin and AV Jennings.

Felix Blatt is the Chief Advisor Project Management for Rio Tinto and has extensive experience managing greenfield engineering projects.

Frank King.
As a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Treasury and Finance, Frank King is a member of the audit committees for the Departments of Treasury and Finance, Sustainability and Environment and Justice.

Ann Keddie.
With extensive experience within the industry, Ann Keddie is a Director of Ann Keddie Architects. She is also a sessional member of VCAT and a member of the Priority Development Panel and Planning Panels Victoria.

Di Fleming.
Di Fleming is a former Victorian Telstra Businesswoman of the Year, associate professor in Digital Design at RMIT University and director of lab.3000. She steered lab.3000's evolution to become the state's first Centre of Excellence in Digital Design.

Ian Munro.
Ian Munro PSM, is a consultant for the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development (DIIRD) after formerly holding the position of Deputy Secretary and CEO, Invest Assist for DIIRD.

Source: http://heykidscomics.com/

The big question

Are these people liable for the impact of their decisions to promote infrastructure for population growth? If not, who is?

Economic house of cards, ecological devastation

That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research. Harper argued that the real estate market would never recover from the current recession until population growth soaks up existing housing inventory and prices consequently begin to appreciate. “If we don’t stimulate population growth…we are going to take 10 years or more to recover from this recession”, he said, “we’ve had a huge overbuilding of the housing sector, there was just too much investment in residential structures.” He therefore advocates an easing of immigration standards to allow more people of higher education and net worth into the country.

Bob Carr

The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.

Bush administration

The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.

One fix never enough for an addict

But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.

Never enough fuel, never enough money

But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.

Royal Bank of Canada

In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.

Financing entropy

So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(they) support environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example“engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year. One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.

Silencing the barking dog

To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.

Failure of environmental flagships

Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.

Ideological myopia and donor bases

The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.

Demographic lockjaw

The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the raison d’etre of the organization, and the environment itself. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.

Arguably then, homebuilding is not the prime mover of ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because big money has thrown them a bone.

Tim Murray,

Quadra Island, BC

December 29/08

This book paints a picture of the ecological mechanics of this continent, using clear, concise prose. It is a painlessly educative book. The bold claim of its subtitle, "How Australia's landscape can be saved," stands up to scrutiny.

Take a new look at thistles, dock plants and other hardy weeds. Enjoy trialling the author's theories in your neglected front garden or replot your broadacre farm. Re-examine the cause of total re-nativisation in the light of galloping desertification. Peter maintains that his simple hydrological theory holds true for the entire continent. He re-interprets the history of this land; he may well be right.

It is a pleasure to read an inspired ecological work by an Australian farmer for Australian farmers. This book is full of practical experience and experiment. The author tells a tale of several farms in his life, of discussions with other farmers and with scientists. He has acted in his life with confidence and conviction, in accordance with his observations. He has learned and remembered lessons, which he knows to be important and hopes to teach the reader. He has lived his research.

If you break down what he says, he is a systems thinker and he has a systemic theory and methodology, which means that his arguments are logical and testable.

Australian deserts are man-made

I found the chapter, "Australia's deserts are man-made" very satisfying because it linked the removal of trees to the drying of climate. God knows why this isn't being shouted from the rooftops everywhere. (Well, perhaps because you cannot package it and sell it as toilet paper or recycle it as plastic.) Andrews doesn't say this, but I will; we should not wait for climate change policy and practice to be agreed at the global, national or even state level. We can start locally - by paying attention to the landscape and protecting the trees and other plants it already has, and adding many more. Trees lower temperature and increase humidity locally, below and above ground; they are not just carbon sinks.

Peter argues clearly that aboriginal use of fire massively transformed Australia's landscape by changing and reducing the vegetation varieties. The effect of this was drying. On top of this, the effect of 220 years of mechanised agriculture, with industrial fertilisers (like feeding soil vitamin pills and no food, as Alice Friedman writes(1)) and half-baked economic propaganda has brought us right to the brink of ruin.

Landscape Fractals

Without mentioning Gaia - or fractals for that matter - Andrews conveys the idea of Australia as a huge organism with fractal systems which can be managed from micro to macro, using the hydrological properties of trees and other plants, like reeds, and identifying topographical forms peculiar to the Australian landscape. The swale and contour system writ large. But he says it like this, "Unless we all come to understand how the Australian landscape functions and then conduct our agriculture in harmony with it this country is dead. It will collapse, no question."

He describes familiar landscape elements like deeply eroded streams and shows that they are produced by damage to live systems, causing water to flow faster and more forcefully than it otherwise would. The immediate solution is weeds, reeds and trees.[video] The finer choices of trees can be worked out later in cases of emergency.

Reviewer's aside

(Andrews' familiarity with the concepts of erosion, salt and fresh water tables, and transpiration comes as a relief. I could contrast this with three days I once spent at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), trying to defend an ancient coastal creek against more development of its catchment. The question of run-off was crucial. Engineers claimed that they could reduce run-off by putting in mechanical devices - basically holes - to retard the flow of water into the creek after rain. Quite apart from the question of biodiverse habitat, this incredibly dumb and clunky non-solution failed to replace the hydrology that trees provide - in their ability to stabilise the water table, through osmosis and transpiration. It completely ignored the heat and moisture exchanges involved in transpiration above the canopies. It was blind to the remarkable ability of trees to vary the amount of water they pump from the ground and transpire through their leaves according to the weather and the moisture in the ground. After a while I realised that the sitting member and the barristers had absolutely no idea of what transpiration was. What was more they did not intend to find out. That was the point where I gave up on Australia's medieval legal system and just another thing that made me an activist. This kind of self-defeating institution that maintains a fatal system is what Australia is up against.)

Why underground water?

The author retells the story of the importance of Australia's underground water, as part of his theory of Australia as a living continent. Why is so much of our water stored underground? Because of the huge risk of evaporation above the ground. With this principle in mind, he has a whole chapter about farm dams - should we damn them or not? Dig them much deeper and shade them, he suggests, and build them along landscape contours and so that the water can overflow usefully. Make your own little flood-plain. There is much more; simple, practical and effective, in line with his hydrological theories.

At the end of the book Andrews congratulates the reader for coming so far, but I found this a direct and refreshing book. Not a hard read. True, some complex bits, which one can always return to. Secondary school children could and probably should read this book.

Fixing the Murray-Darling

Andrews writes, perhaps tongue in cheek, of "well-intentioned people [who] have come up with proposals for constructing a pipe or canal to transport excess water from the tropics in the north to water deprived areas in the south..." Then he says, "(...) yet the objective - bringing excess water to where it's needed - is certainly a sensible one. What's more, we don't need a pipe or a canal. We already have a conduit capable of moving huge volumes of water from one side of the continent to the other at virtually no cost to anyone. It's called the Darling River."

Peter's recipe for fixing the Murray could be undertaken by the people who live and farm there, together. Once again it isn't top down; but bottom up. It requires careful observation of the natural topography and the lie of clay and sandy soil.

It requires vegetation - trees and reeds. Livestock would have to be managed so that they did not destroy the reeds. Peter Andrews reluctantly suggests that the major part of the early work of fixing the river system could no longer be done by native trees. It could be done by willows - the latest in a series of trees which governments have been ripping out. Remember, our land is dying - any plant is better than man-made desert. If the flood plains were restored, the natives might grow back again; at the moment they are all dying. (For more on natives following willows see Peter Andrews video)

Andrews patiently deals with the issue of trees and reservoirs... Governments have been taking trees away from water-reservoirs in the belief that they use up water. This is totally half-baked, since it completely ignores the greater fact that trees shade water stores above and below ground, preventing evaporation.

As Peter Andrews says, talking elsewhere, about irrigation, "In other words, you want a system where there is transpiration, not evaporation."

Human, not corporate

But he isn't talking about millions of kilometers of expensive pvc pipes and engineering works. That is the only reason, I am sure, that his ideas have not been taken up by government and agribusiness and promoted. The engineering and construction and corporate lobbies want a totally prosthetic environment, paid for by the rest of us, to their great profit. They seem to be trying to turn Australia into a huge concrete drain punctuated by retardant basins. (Consider the North-South pipeline currently being pushed down our throats by the Victorian government, or the costly pipelines they have cruelly inflicted on the Wimera-Mallee farming communities.)

Andrews doesn't say we must relocalise government and economy and get rid of centralised bureaucracies and big-engineering; he doesn't say that we should start using our eyes and ears and stop listening to people who are paid to tell us what their masters want us to believe, but that is the message I get out of this book.

Apparently Peter Andrew's story, when first told as television, was the most popular in the history of the ABC program, Australian Story. Obviously a lot of people care about this message getting out. Andrews has created something very valuable and true, which can unite us, city and country.

Here is Peter Andrew's site, Natural Sequence Farming at http://www.nsfarming.com/principles.html

(1)Alice Friedemann, "Peak Soil" in Sheila Newman, The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Books, UK, 2008

December 15, 2008

Surprise, surprise! The Federal Government has welched on its emissions-cut targets to mitigate climate change.
The Herald Sun reported today that the reason given is that the Rudd Government doesn't believe "the world will get its act together on climate change soon."

The global emergency is being treated like some kind of board game. Why don't they simply cut population growth?

You might just as well ask a bunch of lemmings not to take a running jump.

This is from Monday's ABC radio national PM programme. Kevin Rudd comments on the emissions targets that have just been set: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2446990.htm

" The Prime Minister defends his 2020 target with the option of going higher if the rest of the world moves, saying it's comparable to Europe's response.

KEVIN RUDD: 'The EU's 20 per cent target announced over the weekend is equal to a 24 per cent reduction in emissions for each European from 1990 to 2020. Our five per cent unconditional target is equal to a 27 per cent reduction in carbon pollution for each Australian from 2000 to 2020 and a 34 per cent reduction for each Australian from 1990.

That is because Europe's population is not projected to grow between 1990 and 2020. By contrast Australia's population is projected to grow by 45 per cent over the same period.'

Note that Rudd totally misrepresents what is happening: The growth is 'projected' ... as if it happened all by itself. Europe has cut back on its growth since the first oil shock. Rudd is setting out purposefully to grow Australia's population enormously. It would not grow much at all by itself and, without his interference (despite the interference of Howard), would stabilise and hopefully decline within a couple of generations. People should understand that Rudd is forcing a population growth policy on Australians and is selling it to them by pretending he has no control over it; allowing them to infer that this is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is a conscious, coercive political policy carried out by the Federal government with the complicity of the States.

Comment on Rudd's speech from a disgusted correspondent on [email protected]: "This means that the Labor Party is fully aware that population growth makes it more difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but have decided to grow anyway. Australians will be faced with making larger cuts in living standards than people in Europe in order to feed the growth monster. We will be sacrificed on the altar of the housing industry by a government that represents business before the people."

.

In 2001 I made predictions about Australia's current predicament, at the end of a statistical appendix on population and energy for Australia and France (pdf 2.8M). Throughout my thesis I discussed these looming problems and their drivers. It seems appropriate to cite the short predictions from the appendix here, because Australian governments constantly pretend that no-one could see what was coming. The people who formed government from the 80s to now should be held formally responsible.

[Written in 2001]
"Australia's recent history is a strong indicator that population growth is likely to remain rapid or accelerate in the next half century. Between 1946 and 2001, Australia's population grew by 11,849,099 persons, or by 157.58%. From 1946 to 1974 it grew by 85.76%. From 1974 to 2001 it grew by 38.65%. Between the year of the French base projections, 1990 and 2001 Australia's population has grown by approximately 12.8% from 17,169,800 to 19,368,345 or an average of 1.6% per annum. Australia's growth, up to 1966 was affected by baby boom high fertility and high net migration. Although fertility declined rapidly after this, the high immigration continued. With increasing longevity this means that the population has continued to expand rapidly. We can assume that most of the Australian baby boomers will die between 2027 and 2051. If high immigration continues, however, the population will have continued to expand and will require more intense land-use, more infrastructure, and more technology to maintain its economy, even with similar per capita footprints. With exponentially expanding drylands salinity and other forms of desertification, plus massively degraded waterways, together with micro-climate changes brought about by local vegetation removal (without considering the possibility of macro-global climate changes) it is difficult to see how such a large population will survive without severe declines in quality of life, standard of living, health and longevity. As well as other bio-diversity die-off, the chances seem high for considerable human die-off due to the effect of desertification on the economy and environment. Petroleum based energy shortages are likely both to increase poverty and misery as cheap fuel becomes much less accessible to ordinary citizens. Pollution is likely to increase as coal and other lower grade fuels are substituted, since Australia has not invested in alternative energy sources. Poor design of built and transport infrastructure will add to the difficulty in reducing and satisfying energy demand for both personal and economic use."

On the other hand, under a different system:

"France's recent history is a strong indicator that population growth is unlikely to accelerate in the next half century. Between 1946 and 2001, France's population grew by 18,914,482 persons, or by 47.13 %. From 1946 to 1974 (28 years) it grew by 25.4%. From 1974 to 2001 (27 years) it grew by 17.32%. Between the year of the base population for these projections, 1990, and 2001 France's population has grown by 2,462,713 people or approximately 4.35%, or and average of 0.39% per annum from 56,577,000 in 1990 to 59,039,713. France's growth up to 1974 was affected by both the high fertility of the baby boom and high immigration. After 1974 the contribution of both these factors declined sharply. Increased longevity means that the population remains large, although its base is reducing. If we consider that the Baby Boom went from 1947 to about 1966, and assume longevity of between 80 and 85 years, then between 2027 and 2051 the baby boomer generation will die off. With no other changes this will leave the French population several millions smaller. Since France, like most Western European countries is under considerable environmental stress due to the intensity of land use required by its economy, a smaller population even with similar per capita footprints would lessen this stress and the long-term need for greater infrastructure and technology for the maintenance of the population and its economy. If, as seems likely, petroleum based fuels become rarer and more expensive, France is ahead of a lot of other countries, including Australia, in the spatial organisation, planning and technology for transport and other built infrastructure mediating economic and personal fuel needs. It currently has access to alternative fuel sources and technologies and potentially to others."