Australia's Rampant & Shameful Bush Clearance
11/24/00
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY
by Forests.org
Australia is rivaled only by the United States and Canada in hypocrisy concerning forest conservation and atmospheric protection. To its great and everlasting ecological shame, "Australia is clearing its native forests at a faster rate than any other developed country in the world." As the article below highlights, Australia is "using resources unsustainably and not earning enough from them to pay for the cost of the degradation". This clearance is ecologically indefensible; land is becoming unproductive as soil is becoming saline, huge amounts of greenhouse gases are being released as Australia suffers remarkable floods, and this biodiversity hotspot is facing imminent extinctions and ecosystem collapse on a massive scale.
Forests.org calls on Australia to take immediate action to halt ALL clearance of native rainforests. No amount of kowtowing to individual or states rights will do - this land clearance threatens Australia's future development and very survival; and federal responsibility for crafting and implementing policy responses can no longer be disavowed. Failure to stop the native forest clearance will mean intensified international campaigns to highlight Australia's abysmal conservation record, and possible efforts to boycott Australian products and travel until such time as their eco- rhetoric matches their eco-actions.
Please take the time to let the Australian government know that you share in these sentiments-that you demand a halt to native forest land clearance and that failure to do so could have consequences for Australian interests. You can email the Australian Prime Minister from his web site feedback page at: http://www.pm.gov.au/your_feedback/feedback.htm . Alternatively you can send mail to: The Hon. John Howard MP, Prime Minister, Parliament House, Canberra ACT, 2600. You can also fax the Prime Minister on 02 6273 4100.
More information for your letters/emails can be found at our earlier report at:
http://forests.org/recent/2000/lcinaust.htm .
g.b.
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Rampant bush clearance may cost Australia the earth
Copyright 2000, The Guardian (London)
November 24, 2000
Patrick Barkham in Sydney
Links
http://www.acfonline.org.au/index.htm Australian Conservation Foundation
http://www.qccqld.org.au/
Queensland Conservation Council
Inez Rosser looks out from her veranda. There's our rainforest, surrounded by potato paddocks," she says. The small dark patch of trees on the hillside, besieged by the brown scars of recently cleared land.
She and her husband David bought the 790-hectare (320-acre) plot of rainforest near Killarney, south Queensland, in 1968. With the surrounding forest now slashed away, they fear for the future of the rare Albert's lyrebird confined within their forest. With no corridors of land left connecting with larger forests it will be hard to sustain the colony.
Australia is clearing its native forests at a faster rate than any other developed country in the world, hot on the heels of Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and Bolivia. Landowners bulldozed some 2,000 square miles last year - three times the size of London - for grazing, wheat plains and urban development.
Australia also has the highest rate of mammal extinction, and many of its unique marsupial species are threatened with extinction. Charlie Sherwin of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) fears the country will lose 50% of its bird species in the next century. The biggest problem is land clearing," he says.
According to the Wilderness Society's Barry Traill: You can go to these patches of woodland and still have the birds in them, but the populations are so small they are biologically dead. They'll only last another one or two decades."
Mammals and birds at most risk include the northern hairy-nosed wombat, the rat kangaroo, the golden blackbird, the regent honeyeater and the grey-crowned babbler.
The rotting and burning of vegetation on cleared land accounts for 13% of Australia's greenhouse pollution but land clearing is also behind the growth of the country's devastating salinity problem, which threatens the livelihood of the very farmers clearing the land.
Ripping out deep-rooted forest vegetation and planting shallow-rooted crops is causing groundwater to rise to the surface. The salt it brings poisons farmland, pollutes streams and damages roads and buildings. The National Dryland Salinity Programme predicts that by 2050 the area ruined by salt could treble to 22,000 square miles - an area almost as large as Tasmania.
Queensland is the clearing capital of Australia. The world's largest landholder, Stanbroke Pastoral Company, owns 50,000 square miles in Australia and 500,000 cattle. It holds permits to clear 400 square miles of bush in Queensland alone.
The state is also frontier" country, colonised by small farmers battling against the bush. There is a very strong culture of independent rights, of individuals being able to do what they want with their own land," says Felicity Wishart of the Queensland Conservation Council.
It's easy to pigeonhole the archetypal Queensland farmer as a redneck, concerned with land rights, God, and guns. They are a significant minority, but there are also some of the most sophisticated land-managers I've ever seen, trying to keep the trees and birds, as well as the cows. Unfortunately, they tend to live where the clearing has finished."
Jo Wearing is one such farmer. She and her husband raise cattle in central Queensland's Brigalow Belt. While large tracts of rainforest in its tropical north are in pristine condition, protected by World Heritage listing, only 2.2% of the Brigalow Belt, a 220-mile swath of temperate woodlands, is protected.
The land is tired. It has been over-used with little understanding of the impact of our use on it," says Ms Wearing. She thinks it can recover but not to fertility levels achieved after clearing.
She has allowed the regrowth of forest on her land and uses a system of cell grazing, rotating cattle around more than 80 small paddocks to prevent exhausting the land.
Ms Wearing agrees with farmers' demands for compensation" not to clear land. But no such scheme exists. Indeed, until recently, crown land was leased to farmers on condition that they cleared a certain amount each year.
The Queensland Conservation Council accepts that grants are needed to encourage sustainable land management. Leaving uncleared corridors of deep-rooted woodland can prevent salinity. In the longer term, it says funds should encourage sustainable land use, such as the production of sandalwood, nuts or wild flowers and the farming of kangaroos and ostriches, which have a lower impact on the environment than cattle.
But the states and the federal government clash over who should fund such compensation". Constitutionally, land management is a state issue, but its consequences - damaging biodiversity, causing salinity and greenhouse gases - are federal.
The ACF wants tough new laws brought in. Clearing has never stopped anywhere in the world without sternly enforced regulations," says the Mr Sherwin.
Despite opposition, Queensland introduced legislation to control land clearing. But the state's Labor government refused to ratify the new law for nine months. The attempt to force funding from the rightwing federal government triggered panic clearing", as farmers raced to rip up trees before the curbs became law.
The new law, preventing the clearing of endangered ecosystems on freehold land, could protect 3.5% of Queensland's vegetation, says the ACF.
Inez Rosser is pessimistic about her rainforest. But Ms Wearing hopes for a revolution in land management. We're using resources unsustainably and not earning enough from them to pay for the cost of the degradation we are causing,' she says. But I do believe it is being increasingly recognized. One has to be optimistic. The alternative is too awful to imagine."