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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
ACTION
ITEM: Australia's Rampant & Shameful Bush Clearance
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org
http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation
Portal
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest
Conservation
11/24/00
OVERVIEW
& COMMENTARY
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.
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TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Rampant bush clearance may cost Australia
the earth
Source: Copyright 2000, The Guardian (London)
Date: November 24, 2000
Byline: 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.
Mr
Traill said: 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."
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