Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Weeds & Ferals

Under Threat in Australia, Grassland Birds?

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While groups like the Wilderness Society run advertisements suggesting that in western Queensland and New South Wales broadscale tree clearing is a major environmental threat, many local landholders argue the problem is quite different. They claim that trees are replacing once open grassland over vast areas and that these ‘invasive woody weeds’ are the real environmental issue.

Yesterday, On Line Opinion published an article by Gillian Hogendyk* entitled ‘An Alternative Perspective on Tree Clearing’ providing some support for the landholder’s position.

Gillian writes:

“Early settlement caused massive changes to the ecology of the region. Grasslands were overgrazed, fires were put out, native shrubs and trees began to invade grasslands as early as 1870, rabbits invaded, drought struck, and wool prices collapsed.

By 1901 the Western Division of NSW was in an economic and ecological crisis, and a Royal Commission was called to try and formulate some solutions. Today landholders claim they are still battling the invading scrub, and that recently introduced native vegetation regulations are making their job almost impossible…

“So how is all this affecting the bird life of the region? In 2000 intensive biodiversity surveys were carried out by “West 2000” at a number of sites in the Cobar, Wanaaring, and Ivanhoe localities…

“Two examples of threatened species that were found to prefer less woody shrub cover were the Pink Cockatoo and Hooded Robin…

“Landholders of the Cobar Peneplain claim that 80 per cent of the threatened species of the region are dependent on grasslands and open woodland habitat. They claim that while many fauna species use the dense shrublands and trees for roosting and nesting, they are almost always seen feeding in the grasslands and croplands nearby. Their claims are supported by the known habitat requirements of the threatened birds recorded from the Cobar region. The majority of species listed rely on open woodlands and different types of grasslands as feeding habitat.

Of interest in this debate are the nationwide findings on woodland bird populations reported in The State of Australia’s Birds 2005: Woodlands and Birds, a Birds Australia publication. This document compared the reporting rates of the two nationwide atlases carried out by Birds Australia in 1977-81 and 1998-2002…

“Surprisingly, despite the “doom and gloom” text, the reporting rate of the majority of woodland-grassland birds had actually remained unchanged or increased over the 20- year period (for all woodland-grassland species: 48 per cent increased, 38 per cent did not change, and 13 per cent decreased). However the results were very different for grassland-dependent and ground-feeding woodland-grassland birds. These species showed much higher rates of decline over the 20-year period than the species that feed in the canopy layer.”

Read the full article here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5265

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* Gillian is a Director and founding members of the Australian Environment Foundation and so am I.

Burke’s Backyard Infested with Native Invasive Scrub: Media Release from Community Group

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The following media release was distributed by a group called the NSW Regional Community Survival
Group* after TV personality Don Burke was interviewed by radio personality Alan Jones in Sydney yesterday:

“Australia’s pioneer lifestyle presenter and Chair of the Australian Environment Foundation, Don Burke, has called upon the Iemma Government to make further changes to native vegetation laws so that farmers in western NSW can control infestations of invasive scrub.

“Premier Iemma must act fast to stop the destructive invasion of native scrub before it is too late for the environment
and farmland of western NSW,” said Don.

“Recent changes to native vegetation regulations announced by the NSW Government are a step in the right direction, but they still don’t provide farmers with enough flexibility to rehabilitate land degraded by invasive scrub.
“Hundreds of farming families will be forced off their land if this problem is not fixed: who then will be left to care for the environment of western NSW?” Don said.

Invasive scrub (also called woody weeds) are native shrubs that have increased greatly in density over the last 130 years, invading the formerly open grassy woodlands of western NSW from the Queensland border to the Riverina in southern NSW.

Scrub infestations now cover up to 12 million hectares of western NSW – an area twice the size of Tasmania – with another 6 million hectares vulnerable to invasion when the drought breaks. It is estimated that up to 1,000 farms are fighting the problem.

“I was invited by farmers from Nyngan and Cobar to view first-hand the destructive impacts of invasive scrub on the landscape of western NSW. What I saw was not a natural feature of the environment.

“I was shocked to see how near ‘monocultures’ of scrub had out-competed native grasses for moisture and nutrients, leaving the soil prone to severe wind and water erosion.

“Vast tracts of land are now an ecological desert, exacerbating current drought conditions,” said Don.

Don said that for thousands of years, Aboriginals used fire to suppress outbreaks of scrub.

“Original infestations of scrub can be traced to a lack of bushfires after the land was first settled and coincided with periods of above average rainfall in the 1860s and 1870s. High rainfall seasons in the 1950s, 70s, 80s and 1990s resulted in further outbreaks. Overgrazing in the distant past – including by rabbits – also contributed to the invasion of scrub,” explained Don.

“With the introduction of tighter land clearing laws in 1996, farmers in western NSW have been ‘straight jacketed’ ever since in their efforts to stop the insidious spread of native scrub. With native grasses virtually obliterated in the last ten years, the country will no longer carry a fire, so it can’t naturally thin dense areas of scrub.

“Clearing and short term cropping are now the only effective tools to remove scrub and suppress regrowth, giving
native grasses a chance to rejuvenate,” said Don.

“Farmers want to restore the landscape to its natural state of open woodlands and grasslands, but political pressure from radical greens has put a bureaucratic handbrake on land restoration.

“In return, farmers are prepared to set aside a minimum of 15 per cent of their land for the preservation of native
woodlands. Combined with rehabilitated native grasslands, this will lead to an average cover of 50 to 60 per cent of
native vegetation on farms in western NSW.

“After making statements about the vital role that farmers play in protecting the environment, I’m calling on moderate
green groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation to support farming families in their efforts to rehabilitate the degraded landscape of western NSW,” ended Don.

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* The NSW Regional Community Survival Group was established about a year ago to draw attention to the problem of invasive woody weeds in western NSW. Some of the groups members were interview by the Sunday Program as part of its feature on ‘The Great Land Clearing Myth’.

Publish or Perish: A Note from Anthony Gibson

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Nyngan farmer Anthony Gibson, spokesperson for the NSW Regional Community Survival Group, has warned government officials and the public to be aware of Dr Barry Traill’s limited scientific credentials on the ecology of woody weeds.

Following is the rest of the media release from the NSW Regional Community Survival Group:

“An exhaustive search of the world’s premier online scientific publication database, CAB Abstracts, has failed to unearth any examples of refereed published work by the Wilderness Society’s key spokesperson on woody weeds,” Mr Gibson said.

The Community Survival Group is made up of farmers from western NSW who are fed up with ‘green-inspired laws’ that prevent farmers from controlling woody weed infestations that are destroying up to 20 million hectares (an area three times the size of Tasmania) of western NSW.

Mr Gibson said that a comprehensive search of the CAB Abstracts database failed to uncover any trace of published work in refereed (peer-reviewed) international journals by Traill.

CAB Abstracts is the most comprehensive bibliographic, abstracting and indexing database in its field, covering references to journal articles, monographs, conferences, books and annual reports from more than 100 countries.

It covers environmental science and ecology, including soil science, water resources, organic farming, forestry and integrated crop management, environmental pollution and remediation. Issues relating to the conservation of land, forest, soil, biological and genetic resources, and nature conservation are also covered.

Ecological publications within CAB Abstracts searched for articles written by Traill included:

Conservation Biology; Ecological Applications; Ecological Monographs; Ecology; Evolution; Global Ecology and Biogeography; International Journal of Plant Sciences; Journal of Applied Ecology; Journal of Biogeography; Journal of Ecology; Journal of Tropical Ecology; Journal of Vegetation Science; Proceedings: Biological Sciences; Quarterly Review of Biology; and Science.

Mr Gibson said that a PhD alone does not make a scientist an expert – a scientist has to publish his/her work extensively in refereed international journals before they can be considered an authority on an issue; hence the maxim in the academic community of ‘publish or perish’.

“The only published material by Traill unearthed was a 2001 review titled ‘The Nature Conservation Review’, a publication produced by the green group The Victorian National Parks Association, and a couple of unrefereed conference papers.”

“Barry Traill is entitled to an opinion on how woody weed infestations should be managed in western NSW but government officials and the public should be warned not to consider him an authority on the issue.

“The NSW Government must start to listen to the local knowledge and experience of Aboriginal Elders, community leaders and farmers on how best to control the destructive affects of woody weeds – people who deal with the problem every day – not political activists like Traill,” ended Mr Gibson.“

Rats Destroyed the Forests on Easter Island: Terry Hunt

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Easter Island has been described by Jared Diamond as the “clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources”.

Prof Diamond has told and retold the story and drawn a parallel between the ecological disaster he says befell Easter Island and our likely fate because we are cutting down too many trees and consuming too much energy.

In the September-October issue of American Scientist Online Terry Hunt details findings from his work on Easter Island.

It is an interesting read in which Hunt concludes that rats introduced by the Polynesians negatively impacted on recruitment in Jubaea palms resulting in forest decline. In contrast, Jared Diamond says the Polynesians simply cut down all the trees.

Furthermore Hunt suggests that the downfall of the original Polynesian civilization resulted not from internal strife associated with ecological disaster following destruction of the forest, but rather from contact with Europeans.

I read a lot of James Michener books when I was a bit younger. Civilizations destroyed by new arrivals is a consistent theme in Michener’s stories.

Note On Herbicide Resistance: Chris Preston

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Thirty-three different species of weeds are now reported to have developed resistance to herbicides commonly used in Australian farming systems, says Dr Chris Preston, programme leader for the Weeds CRC.

The worst offenders are annual ryegrass, wild radish and wild oats.

And of the thirteen ‘families’ of chemicals used to control weeds, resistance to ten has now been found in various agricultural weeds, Dr Preston says.

“Those ten groups of herbicides, as you’d expect, are the ones that are most commonly used in our cropping systems,” he adds.

In a few areas of Australia the herbicide resistance problem has become so acute that there are no longer any herbicides available to control particular weeds – such as annual ryegrass – in some crops.

You can read more here.

Journalist Ross Coulthart Legitimises Farmer Woody Weed Concerns

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Not so many years ago Australian farmers where forced to clear their land of trees, it was a condition of many leases. Some areas were over-cleared particularly in Western Australia.

Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung in completely the other direction, with legislation now essentially outlawing tree clearing on both leasehold and freehold land.

In Queensland and NSW the new legislation has been driven, at least in part, by relentless campaigning from the Wilderness Society. As their name suggests, this environment group believes in ‘wilderness’ and is against the active management of landscapes. Yet, to quote, Deborah Bird Rose :

“A definition of wilderness which excludes the active presence of humanity may suit contemporary people’s longing for places of peace, natural beauty, and spiritual presence, uncontaminated by their own culture. But definitions which claim that these landscapes are ‘natural’ miss the whole point. Here on this continent, there is no place where the feet of Aboriginal humanity have not preceded those of the settler. Nor is there any place where the country was not once fashioned and kept productive by Aboriginal people’s land management practices.”

The reality is that before white pastoralists moved into western NSW and Queensland the country was “kept productive” by aboriginals and their firesticks. They burnt the land which favoured some grasses and limited the establishment of what many pastoralists now refer to as “woody weeds” including species of native cypress pine and acacia.

Current land management practices compounded by government regulations, policies and expectations, have resulted in large areas of western Queensland and NSW being over run by invasive native scrub, also known as ‘woody weeds’, and this is having a negative economic and environmental impact in many areas.

While the rural press has run hard on the issue it has been ignored by the mainstream media. It has perhaps been assumed that farmers have exaggerated the ‘woody weed’ issue because they want to keep clearing trees until there are none left? Interestingly when I tried to get a piece published by the Courier Mail some years ago, I was told that my suggestion that there were more trees regrowing than being cleared in Queensland was offensive.

But, at last a respectable metropolitan journalist has discovered the issue. This morning Channel Nine’s Sunday Program ran ‘The Great Land-Clearing Myth’ as their cover story. Ross Coulthart made the comment:

ROSS COULTHART: Another reason to be skeptical about the Wilderness Society’s alarming land clearing figures — they don’t include regrowth in their estimate of 100,000 hectares of clearing because no-one is measuring it.

WILDERNESS SOCIETY CAMPAIGNER: That figure doesn’t include regrowth.

ROSS COULTHART: You say a lot of people say to us if you took the regrowth of native vegetation into account the amount of regrowth would far exceed the clearing.

WILDERNESS SOCIETY CAMPAINGER: Sure but the native bush can’t regenerate at the moment as fast as it’s being cleared.

In fact last time I looked native bush was regenerating faster than it was being cleared. That’s not to say that there is not a need for some restrictions on broad scale tree clearing or that woody weed regrowth is equivalent to high value remnant scrub. But until this morning it seemed not a single respectable journalist would explore the issue – there was not honest discussion in the mainstream metropolitan media.

Earlier this year Ross Coulthart went further than anyone has ever gone in exposing the politics of salinity in Australia. This morning he legitimised many landholder’s concerns about woody weed regrowth and perhaps opened the door to a discussion that needs to be had.

You can read the full transcript here: http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/article_2039.asp .