Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for July 2006

Let Me Drink Recycled Water

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Was it former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett or Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?

Who convinced Queensland’s Premier Beattie to change his mind on recycling sewage as a source of drinking water?

They have each visited my home town of Brisbane over the last week and each publicly announced their support for the concept.

Now the Premier says he’s going to put the idea to the people of Brisbane.

That is quite a back flip.

Until recently Peter Beattie had been promising new dams, desalination plants and even piping water over 1,000 kms from the Burdekin to fix Brisbane’s water shortage, but had ruled out waste water recycling. Now he says recycling is a possibility – that he will make it an election issue.

You can read about Andrew Bartlett’s petition in favor of recycling at his website and Mikhail Gorbachev and Malcolm Turnbull’s comments in The Australian here, here and here.

I attended the Brisbane Institute last night to hear Malcolm Turnbull speak and he really was eloquent. On the subject of recycled water he suggested that:

“We must learn to judge water by its quality, not its history”.

He also commented that permanent water restrictions in Brisbane make no more sense than would permanent electricity restrictions. He indicated that the current water restrictions reflected a lack of investment in infrastructure by state governments and spoke about the referendum on waste water recycling in Toowoomba this Saturday.

I wrote in support of sipping sewage in last week’s The Land and blogged on the issue last August.

An ‘Advertisement’ for ‘Dipetane’

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I’ve been sent links to www.dipetane.net.. According to the website you add dipetane to your petrol or diesel and you get a 10-17percent efficiency increase and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Wikipedia* it’s a fuel enhancer that improves the quality of combustion of any liquid fuel and it reduces emissions of CO2 up to 25%, CO up to 9.5%, NOx from 28.8% and SOx from 19.9%.

So why aren’t we all using it?

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update 9am, next day
* Apparently this link was to a Wiki user page rather than the Wiki proper and the information was ‘commercial content’ and so John Quiggin has had the information removed, so the link no longer works, see comments from John below. And I’m wondering whether the ‘commercial content’, as repeated in this blog post, is factually correct or not?

Guilty Until Proven Innocent Says Auditor-General

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“Last week the Auditor-General stated that farmers have escaped land clearing prosecutions because the State Government had ‘problems with meeting the evidence requirements’ under NSW native vegetation laws,” said a spokesperson for the NSW Regional Community Survival Group, Doug Menzies.

A media release from the group issued earlier today began:

“Farming families are demanding an official apology from the NSW Auditor-General who last week implied that farmers should have been prosecuted for clearing 30,000 hectares of land in 2005.

… The Regional Community Survival Group is made up of farmers from western NSW who are fed up with bureaucratic and nonsensical laws that are preventing farmers from controlling infestations of woody weeds that have invaded up to 20 million hectares (an area three times the size of Tasmania) in western NSW.

“The Auditor-General implies that farming families have carried out illegal land clearing yet in his own report he clearly states that no prosecutions in relation to land clearing were successful when contested in court between 1998 and 2005.

“I was led to believe that a foundation stone of the Australian legal system was the benefit of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty by evidence presented in a court of law?

“By implying that farmers have escaped prosecution the Auditor-General has effectively branded farming families as having engaged in illegal land clearing activities – an outrageous suggestion,” said Mr Menzies.

The Regional Community Survival Group is concerned that the comments of the Auditor-General could prejudice land clearing cases currently before the NSW Land and Environment Court.

“We demand an apology from the Auditor-General and seek clarification from the NSW Attorney-General on how the comments of the Auditor-General could potentially prejudice land clearing cases currently before the courts.

“We also have serious concerns on how diligently the Auditor-General investigated the issue of land clearing in NSW.

“The Auditor-General obtained the vast majority of his information from government agencies that are pandering to Sydney-based green groups,” said Mr Menzies.

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Read the full report — which does seem to ignore the concept of ‘presumption of innocence’ — published by the NSW Auditor-General and titled ‘Regulating the Clearing of Native Vegetation: Follow-up of 2002 Performance Audit’ by clicking here.

How to Save the Baiji?

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The Yangtze River Dolphin, also known as the baiji, is perhaps the most endangered of the world’s large mammals. The last confirmed sighting was of a single adult in September 2004.

The journal Conservation Biology recently published three short papers [1] on the current state of baiji conservation and plans to save the species.

There is no single agreed plan, rather several disputed and contentious plans which can perhaps be summarized as four options:
1. Leave the baiji where they are.
2. Move individuals to the Institute of Hydrobiology dolphinarium in Wuhan, Hubei Province.
3. Move individuals to a 21-km oxbow lake originally part of the Yantze River at Tian-e-Zhou, Hubei Province.
4. Move individuals somewhere else.

The first option has been advocated by Professor Guang Yang and colleagues [1] on the basis that the chances of successfully finding, capturing and establishing a genetically viable ex situ population of baiji is unlikely. They argue that the baiji is essentially a lost cause, that available resources should be prioritized, and would be better spent on saving the finless porpoise population of the Yangtze river.

Drs Randall Rheeves and Nick Gales [1] reject the notion of leaving the baiji in situ. They claim that the baiji will surely go extinct if left in the Yangtze because of harmful fishing practices as well as increasingly river traffic, water pollution and habitat loss. They claim that it is more important to save the baiji than the finless porpoise. They explain that finless porpoises can be found from Japan to Iran in a narrow band of coastal continental shelf water while the baiji are only found in the Yangtze and “their disappearance would be like snapping off a complete branch from the tree of mammalian radiation.” They claim it should not come down to a choice between finless porpoises and baiji, that both can be saved.

There seems general agreement that moving baiji to the dolphinarium at Wuhan (Option 2) is not a good idea because previous attempts to establish a breeding colony there have failed.

Guang Yang et al. argue that moving baiji to the Tian-e-Zhou seminatural reserve (Option 3) is not a good idea because it “potentially compromises not only the future of the currently increasing finless porpoise population but would represent a major risk to the baiji due to potential for agonistic interactions, disease transmission, and competition for limited resources.”

A single baiji female released there in 1995 died of entanglement (presumably in fishing nets) but was already emaciated.

In contrast Drs Reeves and Gales argue that moving baiji to the Tian-e-Zhou reserve is the best option because finless porpoises have similar requirements to the baiji and the reserve has proven success for breeding the porpoises.

Drs Reeves and Gales propose that the population of finless porpoises now in the reserve be moved elsewhere, so there is no potential for competition with the baiji.

But, what about moving the baiji elsewhere – finding another seminatural reserve (Option 4)?

I’m inclined to think that if the finless porpoise population is doing well in the Tian-e-Zhou reserve, leave it alone. Find somewhere else for the baiji and begin preparing this new environment in anticipation of finding enough individuals to capture for translocation.

If enough baiji are never found for translocation, if the species does go extinct, then the new reserve could be used for the hopefully expanding finless porpoise population.

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[1] Thanks to Libby for sending me the papers:

* Guang Yang et al. 2006 ‘Conservation Options for the Baiji: Time for Realism?’ Conservation Biology Volume 20, Number 3, pgs 620-622

* Randall Reeves & Nicholas Gales. 2006 ‘Realities of Baiji Conservation’ Conservation Biology Volume 20, Number 3, pgs 626-628

* Ding Wang et al. 2006 ‘Conservation of the Baiji: No Simple Solution’ Conservation Biology Volume 20, Numbers 3, pgs 623-625

I’ve previously posted ‘Worrying About the Baiji’ .

Fewer Trees Means More Water for Macquarie Marshes: Ian Mott

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In discussions about water allocation in the Murray Darling Basin it is generally assumed that runoff now is equivalent to what it was at the time of European settlement. Consider, for example, the following table from a Murray Darling Basin Commission Facts Sheet.

runoff mdb tble blog.JPG

At the same time there is a perception that there are a lot fewer trees now than there were at the time of European settlement. As Ian Mott points out in the following comment, first posted at ‘Banking in the Macquarie Marshes’, if there are fewer trees now, then there is more water now:

“If you really want to correct the misconceptions that threaten you water allocations then you should correct the fallacy that the pre-irrigation runoff into the marshes was 460,000 megalitres which has since been reduced to 395,000ml by irrigation.

The pre-settlement runoff into the marshes would have been much less than 460,000ml and most likely less than 395,000ml because much of the upper catchment has been cleared for pasture. And this has substantially increased the catchment yield.

But don’t expect the MDB Mafia or the Land and Water audit people to concede this willingly. The work of Robert Vertessy and the CRC for Catchment Hydrology makes it very clear that the switch from forest to pasture increases water yield.

So your group has to determine the exact amount of clearing that has taken place in your catchment and overlay the rainfall data so you can find out the real historical water footprint for the marshes.

There is not the slightest room for doubt that the volume of water taken out of the system by irrigators, given that extractions are only 14% of current runoff, is less than the improvement in yield produced by clearing.

My understanding is that the upper Macquarie is not subject to widespread thickenning like the mulga and brigalow country so cleared land has been more likely to stay cleared.“

Humane Society To Sue Japanese Whalers

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The Australian Federal Court ruled last friday that environment group the Humane Society International (HSI) could sue Japanese whaling company Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd to get an injunction forcing the Australian government to stop whaling within the Australian Whale Sanctuary in Antarctica.

According to Channel Nine News:

“In May last year, Federal Court Justice James Allsop refused the group permission to proceed with the case, after federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock raised concerns it could spark a diplomatic incident between Australia and Japan.

But the court’s full bench found Justice Allsop made an error in deciding HSI’s case should not have gone ahead because it might have been ignored by the company, as Japan did not recognise the sanctuary.

Chief Justice Michael Black and Justice Ray Finkelstein also said in their judgment that too much consideration was given to Mr Ruddock’s concerns.

HSI wildlife and habitat program manager Nicola Beynon said it was an important decision that allowed the group to “take the fight” directly to the company.“

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Thanks Ann for sending me the link.