Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 2007

Give the Sheep a Drink Now

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There has been heavy rain and even flooding in northern South Australia and parts of western Victoria. But irrigators upstream in the New South Wales Murray Valley are running out of water and what little remains is stagnant and becoming contaminated.

Right now about 1,000 farmers in this region are out of water and sheep are dying as farm dams empty.

NSW Riverina stranded sheep Jan2007 blog1.JPG
This is the first year since the late 1930s, when the irrigation channels were first dug, that there has been no water for stock. Photograph taken by John Lolicato, Wakool, Murray Valley, January 2007.

These farmers began the season with a zero water allocation. This means they knew they would get no water from the licenses they held; from the entitlements they owned.

Many were hoping to get through the season with water saved from the year before, while others purchased water at considerable expense as a temporary trade to keep their stock alive.

Then just before Christmas they had 52 percent of this carry-over or newly purchased water taken off them by the New South Wales government.

Most farms within the Murray Irrigation boundaries are now facing the prospect of no ‘stock and domestic’ water for the first time since the beginning of irrigation in the region in the late 1930s.

Many irrigators in the Murray Valley claim the decision to take their water was unjustified as there is still water in the dams at the top of the catchment, in the Snowy scheme, but governments have been saving this for electricity generation and for Adelaide.

Instead of providing the farmers with stock and dometic water, the New South Wales government has in effect offered them $20 million dollars in compensation with any single farmer eligible for up to $50,000. Government has said that the water it has taken will be re-credited as soon as there is sufficient rainfall and that the $20 million is not compensation, but rather “extraordinary assistance”.

Why didn’t government buy the water, rather than just taking it, in the first place?

Perhaps because State governments are used to just taking water. Indeed across Australia a majority of irrigators often pay for water they never receive as they are locked into a system whereby 60 percent of their water entitlement is as a fixed charge, payable whether or not the water is provided.

Governments justify this arrangement on the basis they have to manage the water infrastructure whether or not there is a drought. In effect, state run water monopolies are saying, farmers should plan for drought, while we, government, are incapable of the same.

The $20 million payment smacks to me of a bribe in advance of the upcoming New South Wales state election.

ABC Online has suggested the $20 million was promised to avert the possibility of legal action by irrigators.

Normally state governments decide at the beginning of the season how much water they have in dams, likely inflows, and how much they can allocate for irrigation and other uses.

The decision by the New South Wales government to take water from irrigators during the season is unprecedented.

The $20 million Extraordinary Assistance Program for Murray and Murrumbidgee irrigators has been welcomed by the NSW Irrigators Council while the Council has noted that irrigators actually lost $57million in water late last year.

Many farmers would just like some water and all the New South Wales government needs to do is let it out of the Snowy Scheme. This would reduce the amount of water in reserve, but why deny farmers access to stock and domestic water now? There is an immediate need, and now is the time to act.

NSW Riverina sheep stranded close up Jan2007 blog 2.JPG
Photograph taken by John Lolicato, Wakool, Murray Valley, January 2007.

NSW Riverina dead sheep Jan2007 blog3.JPG
Where is Peta on this one? Photograph taken by John Lolicato, Wakool, Murray Valley, January 2007.

Bindi Irwin Gets It Wrong on Koalas

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Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late Crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, may be the youngest person to ever address the National Press Club in Washington DC. According to ABC Online she follows in the footsteps of Winston Churchill, Indira Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

But the new face of nature conservation got it wrong when she suggested koalas could go extinct in “my lifetime”:

“It is very sad that in my lifetime, a lot of wildlife could disappear,” she said, wearing her trademark khaki and pigtails. “We could lose tigers and gorillas and even my favourite koalas.” “We need to help my daddy’s work and make this world a perfect place for animals.”

In fact there is no evidence to suggest that the Australian koala is threatened with extinction, and some evidence to suggest some populations, including on Kangaroo Island, may benefit from culling.

How could Bindi get it so wrong?

Perhaps the economics of conservation favours ignorance and failure?

Indeed the Australian Koala Foundation has generated and maintained its support base on the false belief that the Australian koala is a species in decline and furthermore the organisation has not supported measures, in particular control burning, that may significantly benefit koala populations.

Has the Drought Across Southern Australia Finally Broken?

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Has the drought across southern Australia finally broken?

According to ABC Rural Weather: “cloud is crossing western Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania with a trough, generating widespread rain. Low cloud is driven across southern South Australia by cool southwesterly winds, bringing showers. Thick cloud is forming over the north near a monsoon trough, triggering heavy showers and storms.”

News Limited is reporting: “A one in 50 year monsoonal downpour dumping record rain across much of South Australia has cut off towns, stranded motorists, flooded businesses and brought smiles of joy to drought-stricken pastoralists.”

ABC Online is also reporting flooding in South Australia and heavy rain in western Victoria.

While last week national parks across central Australia received flooding rains with even the normally dry Trephina Creek to the east of Alice Springs running.

Western New South Wales may even get some good rain?

So has the drought finally broken?

Counting Trees in Australia for Greenhouse Accounting

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The National Greenhouse Accounts and Land Clearing: Do the numbers stack up?
by Andrew Macintosh, at The Australia Institute,
published January 2007.

Australia’s capacity to meet its Kyoto target is contingent on a reduction in emissions from land clearing. Government projections indicate that if land use change emissions are at their 1990 levels in 2010, Australia’s total emissions will be 27 per cent above 1990 levels, meaning Australia will exceed its Kyoto target by 19 per cent.

The National Greenhouse Accounts suggest that between 1990 and 2004 there was a 59 per cent reduction in emissions from land use change, which has ensured that Australia’s total emissions have increased by only 2.3 per cent. Approximately 70 per cent of the decline in land use change emissions is attributed to a fall in the rate of
land clearing in Queensland. The Federal Government has relied on the decrease in land clearing to justify its claim that Australia ‘remains on track’ to meet its Kyoto target.

Data published by the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) in Queensland raise doubts about the accuracy of the estimates of land clearing in the National Greenhouse Accounts. For example, the total amount of land clearing in Queensland identified under SLATS between 1989/90 and 2000/01 is approximately 50 per cent
higher than the amount estimated by the Federal Government’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) between 1990 and 2001. There are also significant differences in the land clearing trends identified by SLATS and NCAS, with peaks in clearing shown in the SLATS data in the late 1990s and early 2000s not evident in
NCAS results…

Read the complete report here: http://www.tai.org.au/documents/downloads/WP93.pdf

The Rise of Environmentalism and Decline of Religion?

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Green lobby must be treated as a religion
By John Kay, In the Financial Times on 09 January 2007.

Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.

Anthropologists have established how different cultures independently evolve similar myths – familiar stories, such as the myth of the Fall and the myth of the Apocalypse, which meet deep-seated human needs. The Christian tradition describes the temptation of Adam and Eve and warns of the Last Judgment…

Read the complete article here: http://www.johnkay.com/political/479

New Conservation Program Unlikely to Save Already Extinct Dolphin

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On Tuesday the Zoological Society of London launched a new conservation called Edge. It’s an acronym for ‘ecologically distinct and globally endangered’ and was described in The Guardian newspaper as an ambitious project by British scientists to save the planet’s rarest and most unusual animals.

There is a real need for an established, knowledgeable and committed group of scientists to focus in on the planet’s rarest animal species many of which are currently receiving very little conservation attention. Indeed, too many environmental groups focus on species which are charismatic rather than threatened. For example, Greenpeace sends ships to the Antarctic each year to save Minke whales — whales which have been referred to as the rabbits of the sea.

But I’m not convinced that Edge is really going to make a difference.

A spokesman for the program, Dr Jonathan Baillie, told The Guardian: “The almost-blind Yanghtze river dolphin is at the top of the list. It’s extremely threatened, a team was recently out there looking for it and could not find one – they truly are on the verge of extinction.”

In fact despite two extensive surveys in the last two years, not a single Yangtze River Dolphin, Lipotes vexillifera, has been seen since September 2004 and the species was declared functionally extinct late last year.

Dr Randall Reeves, Chair of the Cetacean Specialist Group at the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) has said that the loss of the dolphin, also known as the Baiji, would be equivalent to the ‘snapping off a complete branch from the tree of mammalian radiation’.

Illegal fishing practices are thought to have contributed to the species decline. Illegal fishing is an ongoing issue in China where set net, poisoning, dynamite, rolling hook (lines of iron hooks set across the flow of the river) and electro-fishing are officially banned along the entire length of the Yangtze River, but reportedly still widely practiced.

So what does the Royal Society propose to save this probably already extinct species of freshwater dolphin?

According to their website: interview Chinese fisherman including to promote awareness amongst local people along the river about the importance of conserving the fragile Yangtze ecosystem and its many threatened species.

But why should subsistence Chinese fishermen, probably struggling to feed their own families, care about “threatened species” and is it the job of a British-based Zoological society to “educate them”?

The Swiss-based Baiji.org Foundation has a perhaps more realistic approach including employing guards to enforcing fishing legislation where there is a viable population of the Yangtze Finless Porpoise, Neophocaena phocaenoides. Indeed the Baiji.org Foundation, recognising the Yangtze River Dolphin is now extinct, is refocusing its efforts on practical measures for the conservation of another freshwater mammal.

There are perhaps 2,000 finless porpoises in the Yangtze and a breeding population of 26 porpoises has been successfully established in the Tian-e-Zhou reserve.

As well as working towards the establishment of populations in this freshwater reserve, the Baiji.org Foundation has supported a captive breeding program and in 2005 the Baiji Conservation Aquarium at the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan witnessed the birth of the first-ever freshwater cetacean in captivity, a healthy Yangtze Finless Porpoise.

In conclusion, it is encouraging that the Zoological Society of London, a well respected and well resourced environment group, has just committed to the conservation of ecologically distinct and globally endangered species.

But avoiding the extinction of more ecologically distinct and globally endangered species such as the Yangtze River Dolphin will require much more than “promoting awareness amongst local people” and asking for donations at a website. Yet this appears to be the extent of the strategy for the animal species at the top of the list for Edge, furthermore, it’s a species already considered by the world’s cetacean experts to be extinct!