Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2006

International Whaling Commission Meeting Starts Friday in The West Indies

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The 58th Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is being held from 16 to 20 June 2006 at the St. Kitts Marriott Resort and the Royal Beach Casino in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, West Indies. The website “Kujira Portal” will broadcast the IWC meeting’s highlights and press conferences starting from this Friday, 16 June 2006.

So if you live somewhere like Australia you have a choice, you can stay up all night watching the soccer (World Cup in Germany) or the ‘wailing’ at the IWC.

The scientific papers underpinning the discussion are available at the Scientific Committee home page of the IWC website under the section titled ‘In-depth Assessments’ (http://www.iwcoffice.org/_documents/sci_com/SC58docs/sc58docs.htm).

David@Tokyo will no doubt be blogging on the event from Tokyo.

Sally Warriner in Southern Sudan: I Salute You

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“I would rip off someone’s arms at the moment to get to a clean, crisp, delicious, fresh salad and grilled fish which was not going to reappear again within 30 minutes in mutant form. Tonight is my cooking night, so I have to go to the store and choose which can of bland vegetable will be to added to spongy potatoes and fried onions. None of which I can eat at the moment, but everyone else will.

Probably what I will have will be a Tusker (the very excellent Kenyan beer) and a couple of cigarettes. Sadly I have succumbed to the aid organisation affliction – but I just had to give myself a break on something, and it is only three at night, never during the day.”

That’s a quote from my friend Sally Warriner who’s just been published by Online Opinion, click here for the article titled ‘Everything is not gwar in Sudan’. Sally is a medical worker right now in war torn southern Sudan.

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I was working as an entomologist in the northern Sudan in May 1990:

Sudan May 1990.jpg .

I’m the one in blue jeans and blue shirt. There was no beer or cigarette for me then. Alcohol was, and I think still is, banned in northern Sudan. I survived on the meal a day I got, if we got, to the next Forestry Research Station by about 11am.

I was travelling along the Blue Nile with a couple of Sudanese foresters. We survived on chai tea in the evening. Since that trip to the Sudan in 1990 I’ve been grateful for a meal in the evening. I remember going to bed feeling so hungry!

Double the Number, Half the Price: Toyoto’s Vision for Hybrid Cars

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Toyota is reported at CNN to be going to double the number of hybrid cars in its vehicle line-up soon after 2010 meaning it has targetted sales of 1 million hybrid cars annually.

I wonder what percentage of total sales this will make hybrids?

Toyota has also indicated it wants to halve the cost of hybrids.

Competitors including DaimlerChrysler are claiming diesel is the way to go with a 20-30 percent better fuel economy than gasoline cars and they are more affordable. I guess you can also run the diesel cars on biodiesel and in this way move from oil dependence.

And its the move from “oil dependence” and also “reducing pollution” that Toyota claim is driving their “endorsement” of the hybrid tecnology.

… and I wonder how much of the Prius marketing is about positioning the brand ‘Toyota’ as environmentally responsible?

Honda Civic Australia is trying to go one better. The company will guarantee the planting of 18 trees through Greenfleet when you buy your next Civic Hybrid. That’s apparently enough trees to absorb all the vehicle’s greenhouse gas emissions for three years.

I wonder how many trees you would need to plant to cover the emmissions from the manufacture of the car itself?

… and I wonder where they are planting the trees?

Doublethink on Groundwater (Part 2)

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Water is meant to be a really precious commodity in Australia, particularly in the Murray Darling Basin. Yet the Murray Darling Basin Commission recently announced, and with some pride, that the ‘National Salinity Prize’ had been awarded to Pyramid Creek Salt Interception and Harvesting Scheme, a scheme that evaporates precious water to sell subsidizes salt using old technology.

The project was explained on Television, on Channel Nine’s Sunday Program:

“ROSS COULTHART: Courtesy of this month’s Budget, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has another half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to spend. Much of it will be going on expensive schemes to stop salt reaching the rivers similar to this one in northern Victoria near Pyramid Hill. This is Pyramid Salt a private company funded with $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money. Here they pump saline water from underground and harvest the salt it contains, for sale.

Does it make you laugh that people in Sydney are paying six bucks for a 250g box of salt that you blokes are desperate to throw away in this part of the world?

GAVIN PRIVETT, project manager, Pyramid Salt: No it doesn’t make me laugh. Actually, it makes me cry because the in-between guy is getting all the money.

ROSS COULTHART: But it’s only here at all because of an environmental blunder years ago, when attempts to lower the watertable under here ended up poisoning the Murray River.

GAVIN PRIVETT: Initially, what they looked at, they started putting drainage systems and then the problem was they realised they were transferring the problem from one place to another. They put in drainage systems. The next thing it was going into the Murray.

WENDY CRAIK: That’s true and I think that’s a fact of life, that science moves on, that people learn more about systems, learn more about what they should and shouldn’t do.

ROSS COULTHART: So it’s a multi-million dollar patch-up for a past mistake and it’s not a long-term solution for salinity.

GAVIN PRIVETT: You can’t put projects like this all over the place. One, people don’t eat enough salt. It’s a low value commodity. It’s not the answer to the problem. What we’re doing is we’re just intervening and I believe it’s probably as a short-term fix which we’re probably looking to buy some time.”

Its not only a “multi-million dollar patch-up”, the salt interception scheme is using groundwater, extracting groundwater, to evaporate the salt.

I explained in my last blog post with reference to a recent report titled ‘Risks to the shared water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ written by the CSIRO and published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, in particular the section titled ‘Groundwater Extraction’, that groundwater stores are declining at alarming rates and that there is a high level of groundwater extraction in the Shepparton-Katunga region from the salt interception schemes.

The Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme is in this region.

But this is the spin that the Murray Darling Basin Commission put on it in the media release announcing the prize:

“National Prize highlights continuing fight against salinity

A joint public-private salt harvesting scheme that each year diverts 22,000 tonnes of salt from the Murray River today won the prestigious Engineers’ Australia National Salinity Prize.

The prize for new technology and other practical outcomes tackling salinity was awarded to Pyramid Creek Salt Interception and Harvesting Scheme by the Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery, AC, CVO, MC at Parliament House Canberra.

The first stage of the $13 million Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme near Kerang, Victoria, was opened in April this year and is funded by the Victorian, South Australian, New South Wales and Australian Governments through the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC).

Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) has overseen construction and now manages the scheme on behalf of the MDBC’s partner governments, while Pyramid Salt run the commercial salt harvesting facility.

MDBC Chief Executive Dr Wendy Craik said MDBC co-sponsor the award as it serves to highlight the ongoing battle against salinity across Australia.

Dr Craik said the consensus of scientific knowledge underpinned the commitment Basin governments have consistently shown by investing in such schemes. “This prize will further encourage the important ongoing debate about the salinity challenges faced by the nation”.

“This prize also acknowledges the positive effects such projects have on communities, the environment and the local economy.

“One of a network of engineering works, schemes like Pyramid Creek make immediate gains against salinity Basin-wide and form part of the $60 million Basin Salinity Management Strategy supported by all Basin governments,” Dr Craik said.

“More than 1,000 tonnes of salt would enter the Murray River system every day were it not for the operation of these schemes at strategic points along the river”.

Pyramid Creek, like several other salt interception schemes, is a large-scale groundwater pumping and drainage project that intercepts water flows and disposes of them, generally by evaporation. The salt is then harvested for commercial purposes.”

What’s the relative value of the water to the salt?

What about a prize for a technology that gets rid of the salt without evaporating the water?

Doublethink on Groundwater (Part 1)

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Doublethink is when we hold two contradictory beliefs in our minds simultaneously and accept both of them. Doublethink has been described as a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions.

I reckon it afflicts a good percent of academics, activists, politicians and bureaucrats who comment on the management of water, particularly, groundwater in the Murray Darling Basin.

They are on the one hand concerned that there is not enough water and will be even less as a consequence of global warming, but at the same time they worry about rising groundwater now and into the future.

Consider a recent report titled ‘Risks to the shared water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ written by the CSIRO and published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, in particular the section titled ‘Groundwater Extraction’.

It begins by stating that “groundwater stores are declining at alarming rates and this may jeopardise its future use locally”. It goes on to explain different ways that groundwater extraction can lead to reduced stream flows including:

1. When the area of pumping is close enough to a river that the hydraulic gradient between the area of pumping and the stream can be increased or even reversed, such that water flows from the stream to the aquifer, and

2. Extraction of groundwater that would otherwise flow into the river at a downstream point.

Read on and there is reference to high levels of groundwater extraction in the Shepparton-Katunga region contributing to salinity mitigation. This is code for salt interception schemes are a form of groundwater extraction.

There have been quite a few salt interceptions schemes built along the Murray River since 1982 to reduce river salinity levels and they appear to have been very successful at reducing river salinity levels. For example, levels at the key site of Morgan — which is just upstream from the offshoots for Adelaide’s water supply– have halved over the last 20 years.

The recent special federal government budget allocation of $500 million is for more salt interception schemes.

But hang-on, how much lower do we want to push Murray River salt levels and what is the tradeoff in terms of lost groundwater?

The section of the CSIRO report on ‘Groundwater Extraction’ then concludes with the comment that, “Clearing of native vegetation and irrigation has lead to raised water levels in many parts of the Basin, forcing saline groundwater out into the streams”.

No.

Where this was an issue we have constructed salt interception schemes and, across most of the Basin the problem is now falling, not rising groundwater levels.

Indeed groundwater levels in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas — the regions considered most at risk of rising groundwater in eastern Australia — have generally fallen in the past decade.

They were rising in the 1970s but started falling by the late 1990s.

In 2004, the CSIRO provided me with the following reasons for the general fall in groundwater levels: improved land and water management practices; relatively dry climate over the past ten years and increased deeper groundwater pumping and higher induced leakage from shallow to deeper aquifers.

At what point will there be a realization that river salinity and rising groundwater are no longer key issues, the real issue is disappearing groundwater and it is likely to be exacerbated by the next salt interception scheme?

More Grass for Less Salt

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About 75 percent of the landmass of Australia could be classified as ‘rangeland’ and about 60 percent of this area is under pastoral lease. Many pastoral leases are not well managed and campaigning by the Wilderness Society and others tends to miss the point.

Contrary to popular perception created by misleading environmental campaigns there is no general shortage of trees across Australia’s rangelands, but there are soil health issues that need to be addressed.

I’ve previously quoted from Christine Jones and her important document titled ‘Recognise, Relate and Innovate” and I’m going to quote from it again.

This might be the first of a series of blog posts on soil health, as I’ve received a few emails on this issue since Channel Nine’s Sunday Program titled ‘Australia’s Salinity Crisis, What Crisis?’.

On page 8 of ‘Recoginse, Relate and Innovate’, Jones writes:

“Areas currently experiencing salinisation in south-eastern, southern and south-western Australia were mostly grasslands and grassy woodlands at the time of European settlement, as recorded in explorers journals, settlers diaries and original survey reports from the early to mid 1800s. It is intriguing therefore, that tree clearing in the early 1900s, or later, continues to be cited as the ‘cause’ of dryland salinity.

There is no doubt that the removal of any kind of perennial vegetation will have an effect on water balance. However, to insist that dryland salinity is the result of tree clearing is a misrepresentation of the facts, particularly when twisted in the current form “if we put the trees back, we can solve the problem.” Some parts of Australia did not have any trees at the time of settlement. In some regions trees and shrubs have become woody weeds, in
others the environment would be healthier today with more trees. However, these issues have very little to do with dryland salinity.

We need to address the lack or perenniality across the entire landscape, not just in parts of it, and not just with one type of vegetation. Woody vegetation, or crops such as lucerne, can pump accumulated groundwater. This represents a biological form of an engineering solution and treats symptoms not causes. In order to move forward and find some real solutions to the salinity crisis, it is important to view the ‘transient tree phase’ in perspective. It is the overlooked understorey, or more particularly, the groundcover and soils, which have undergone the most dramatic changes since settlement.”

Graham Finlayson recently emailed me with the comment that:

“You are too quick to dismiss native perennial [grasses]* and miss two vital points. They don’t have to be expensively “planted” as they just need to be allowed to grow, and the amount of land needed is not an issue.

Most of the worlds rangelands are performing far below their capacity, and the vast majority of agricultural land is taken up by growing crops that are used to fatten cattle in feedlots.

This is expensive, unnecessary and with huge detrimental health costs to us all.

…Typically, we in Australia are just jumping onto the feedlotting bandwagon while in the US there is a big premium for cattle that are bred smaller with finishing ability on grass!

Anyway, my point would be that if we get our land systems “healthy” then there is no limit to the amount of way we can profit from it.”

Graham recommended the following two websites for information on soil health, grasslands and grazing:

http://managingwholes.com/–environmental-restoration.htm

http://www.stockmangrassfarmer.com .
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* Not sure that I’ve been too dismissive of native perennial grasses, but there hasn’t been much at this blog about rangeland management and soil health perhaps because I’ve been distracted with other issues.