Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2005

How Much More Water?

By

It has been very wet in Brisbane over the last couple of days. But not as wet as on the Gold Coast where over 400mm has fallen over the last 24 hours. The Hinze Dam, that supplies the Gold Coast, is predicted to fill completely some time this evening. But there has not been much runoff into the three dams that supply Brisbane the Wivenhoe, Somerset and North Pines dams.

Nevertheless there is a feeling that the recent drought has finally broken.

But, I would argue, now is not the time to stop thinking about new water infrastructure. It is unlikely to keep raining, while the population in the SE of Queensland is predicted to keep growing.

It was only two months ago, on the 27th April that Queensland’s Premier Beattie and Treasurer Mackenroth announced water projects worth more than $2.3 billion including a new dam and possible desalination plant as part of a grand SE Queensland Infrastructure Plan.

After perusing the plan and wondering how much extra water the projects listed in Table 6 of the glossy were likely to deliver, I phoned my local state member Ronan Lee MP and asked him a few questions including how much extra water the projects listed in the Infrastructure Plan (including the dam and desal plant) were likely to deliver.

Ronan Lee couldn’t answer my questions. He said if I sent him an email he would have a go at finding out, or forward the information to the Premier.

I sent an email off on 5th May.

On 30th May I received an email from the Premier’s Chief of Staff letting me know that the issues I raised had been noted and fall within the responsibilities of both the Deputy Premier and the Minister for Natural Resources and Mines and they would all have a go at answering them.

Then just today, 30th June, I received an email from the Treasurer telling me that my email “seeks information on the amount of water that the projects identified in the Infrastructure Plan and Program will deliver”. That was one of my questions.

The email then went on to tell me that this question would be answered by the Minister for Natural Resources and Mines.

You wouldn’t want to be in a hurry!

While I can understand that my local member, the Premier’s Chief of Staff and the Queensland Treasurer, may not know the answer, you would think they could easily find it out/give me the name and number of someone who does?

Indicative information about storage capacity etcetera should have been in the glossy document launched on 27th April.

Fire, Folly & Dead Canaries

By

In National Parks, Reserves, and on private property in south-western Australia, grasstrees are under termite attack, rotting, breaking off, and toppling over, due to vast accumulation of thatch. The grasstree in this photograph, with heavy thatch removed by hand to show the decay underneath, is typical of thousands.

View image of grasstree rotting under long fire exclusion in Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia (38kbs).

Had grasstrees been covered by heavy thatch when Europeans first arrived, there would have been no reason to call them ‘blackboys’, since the black stems would have been largely hidden. Only rarely would they have produced a flower stalk, usually weak and twisted, quite unlike a spear. More likely popular names with British settlers would have been ‘greybeards’, or ‘haystack trees’. Early sketches and paintings consistently show them, quite clearly, as recently burnt, with black stems, little thatch, and a prominent flower stalk, like a spear.

As a rule of thumb, a grasstree thatch fire lasts as long in minutes as it has been unburnt in years. A three year old thatch will flare for only a few minutes, doing little damage to the green crown. A thirty year old thatch will burn for half an hour or more, reaching an incandescent thousand degrees Celsius.

Such fierce thatch fires often kill the grasstree immediately, because the protective mantle of old leaf bases is rotted away. Where dead eucalypt leaves, or casuarina needles have formed a ‘birds nest’ in the green top, the rot is exacerbated, the green top is reduced in size and vigour, and the eventual fire may completely burn the green top. If the grasstree survives the immediate fire effect, it is forced to live on starch reserves until a new top can grow. Complete replacement of the top can take a year, and the plant may die in the meantime, if its starch is exhausted.

If grasstrees are burnt more often, when the thatch is small, they flower and seed profusely, the protective mantle remains intact, the green top remains largely unburnt, nutrients in the thatch are recycled, and soil pH around the base is raised. The needles become obviously greener, longer, and thicker. Fire scars on some grasstrees along the old railway track in John Forrest National Park show annual burning by railway gangs when the railway was operating from the 1890s to the early 1960s. These grasstrees obviously survived. Now, under long fire exclusion, they are beginning to die.

There is a serious conservation problem with these old icons of the bush. Although still plentiful, the possibility of mass collapses and local extinctions cannot be ruled out. Grasstrees are like the Miner’s Canary – they are warning us that something is amiss in our bushland. The West Australian Government’s”Threatened Species Unit’ has been informed, but, apart from asking me to fill in a form, I am unaware of any action on their part. Perhaps the concept of ‘common and endangered’is too intellectually audacious for those accustomed to the familiar mantra of ‘rare and endangered’. But would a miner be wise to ignore his canary falling off the perch, because canaries are still plentiful?

By David Ward, Retired Senior Research Scientist with the Department of Conservation & Land Management, Western Australia, and formerly Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University School of Environmental Biology.

Copyright David Ward, 30th June 2005

Stop Global Warming, Stop Burning-Off in the NT

By

Maybe I have been a bit harsh with my title for this post? Then again, I am, after all, at heart, a global warming skeptic.

And now the NT government is proposing aboriginals stop burning-off to reduce C02 emmissions.

“Government figures show the Territory has Australia’s highest rate of emissions per person. The service’s hazard reduction officer, Patrick Skewes, says Indigenous land owners and communities need to change the way they use fire.

“They need to understand the damage that they’re doing too and that’s an educational program,” he said. “Just because you’ve had a bad habit for 100 years doesn’t mean to say that it’s a good thing … bad habits become cultural as well.”

Would this be a good outcome for the NT environment? Is there too much burning-off in the NT?

At this blog David Ward from WA has suggested:

“By insisting, through our political representatives, that CALM burn the bush more often, and more patchily, we will make it safer, see more wildflowers, avoid most animal deaths, and avoid dense, choking smoke from fierce wildfires. We will have to live with occasional light smoke from prescribed burns. If most litter were less than five years old, smoke would be minimal, and arson would be futile. All it could cause would be a mild, creeping fire, which would benefit the bush.

Think of the savings and benefits by working with nature, instead of fighting it. No more squadrons of aircraft, anxious home owners, and choking smoke for a week or more. The police could get on with catching burglars. More young Noongar people should be employed by CALM to help manage the bush with fire, restoring their culture and healing their self esteem.”

Read Ward’s entire post at https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000672.html

Cane Toads Threaten WA?

By

I received the following email from someone looking for advice:

“I rarely get involved in environmental causes but I think this one is worth it because the opportunity seems to be now or never. The consequences of cane toads don’t seem to be life or death but I’d certainly rather live without them and also save my tax payer dollars from trying to manage the problem later on. Same as international quarantine.

To me it’s a no brainer – but happy for any sceptics to tell me why I might be misguided… ”

Subject: Fw: help STOP THE TOAD

Hi everyone, please read this and log onto the online petition (takes
2mins of your time) to lobby the West Australian govt to support this
initiative to stop the cane toadentering WA. If they manage to cross
into the Kimberley, this will havedevastating consequences on our state’s biodiversity, and they will eventually make their way into the South-West. Please help by filling in the petition and forwarding this message on. Kath

if you have problems reading this email please go to
http://www.stopthetoad.com/sttemail.htm

URGENT – ALERT – JUNE 2005
We have just 4 months to STOP THE TOAD from entering WA!
Scientists and community groups in Western Australia and the Northern
Territory are combining forces to implement a trapping program to
stop cane toads reaching the Ord River as rains open the way for them in the next wet season (Nov 2005-March 2006).

The trapping program aims to Stop The Toad at a natural barrier
inside the NT.

Your help is sought to encourage state and federal governments to
support this initiative.

Sign the online petition at www.stopthetoad.com to inform the WA
Premier,the Northern Territory Chief Minister and the Federal Minister
for the Environment of our grave concern.

We take the fight to the toad and stop its advance across the top
NOW. Or we suffer the consequences for ever more.

Failure will mean the loss of much of the Kimberley’s amazing
biodiversity, with serious implications for WA’s tourism, economy and
Aboriginal communities.

Most people in the north of Australia believe it’s worth a try. We are
supporting them.
Please, support us, and let your friends know about this critical
issue too.

GO to www.stopthetoad.com

I am not sure that I would empty my piggy bank on the cause (see the plea for donations at the link) and I probably wouldn’t sign the petition because it seems over-the-top as in the following text,

“The cane toad’s rampage through Qld and the NT has already caused the local extinction of animals like quolls and some goanna species and the impacts on fresh water crocodiles, snakes and birds are bound to be just as devastating. This toxic feral pest eats any native animal that will fit into its mouth. It poisons anything that bites it or picks it up. It is toxic even at egg and tadpole stage. It is extinction in motion.

But I think it is great that WWF and the other conservation groups are focusing on ferals and weeds and stopping their spread – probably the best thing these groups can do for the environment is to raise awareness of these issues and prod governments into action.

Taralga’s Potential Windmills

By

Some residents of Taralga don’t like windmills and have sent me the following poster picture Download file (180 kb).

It came with the following text:

“Place on notice boards, dart boards, toilet doors……the mind boggles. Let’s just get the message out. No prizes for the most original use…………….”

I am not sure that windmills are the most efficient generators of electricity, and the people of Taralga (NE of Canberra) have a right to protest, but I actually think the windmills in the picture look rather beautiful.

On Pious Hope & Queensland’s Rangelands

By

The following note on rangeland management is from a reader of this blog who lives in western Queensland. The note was followed by the the comment that, “a major problem of rangeland management is that politicians and bureaucrats have undying faith in the efficacy of pious hope and regulation to rectify problems now largely caused by previous doses of pious hope and regulation”.

He writes,

“Among the myths of rangeland management are:-

1. that rangelands are fragile

Wrong on either meaning of “fragile”. In the sense of Wedgewood china, wrong because the organisms involved have had some millions of years of the vaguries of semi-arid and arid regions and are basically as tough as old boots.

In the ecological sense of “fragile” (having frequent changes in species composition), wrong because “resilience” is the ticket in these regions, not “stability”

2. that things happen slowly in the rangelands

Wrong – more that nothing much happens, then things can happen very rapidly and then nothing much happens – (but you don’t get to see this if your rangelands watching is by intermittent visits). Contrast “state and transition” vs “Clementsian succession”.

3. that one size fits all (the shifting spanner of management)

Lower George Street (in Brisbane) has a bad case of this at the moment.

So fire or not depends on what we have to manage. Pretty well documented that lack of fire got us to the current woody vegetation increase problem. And New England and Southern Africa experience says fire for managing some pasture species. Unusual to need fire every year for such management.

And (for rangeland) one of the Charleville Pastoral Laboratory results is that out here we are looking at about 90 percent of the dry matter by about the end of March, and we shouldn’t be aiming to use more than about 30 percent of that via grazing animals over the next 12 months – so there is the rest for roos etc and insects and mulch. And on the economics side, at least 90 percent of the net income will come from around 70-75 percent of the stocking rate.

I’m afraid we didn’t doo too well on this score for the last 4-5 years. But there is hope – a warm winter so far and 119mm in May and 72mm so far in June, and the pasture species are finally responding (even buffel seedlings in June), so we may be able to get back to the above.

This note follows the posting by Graham of 28th June which was Part 2 of ‘Managing our Rangelands’.