Life Source is a new organisation which was launched at Beef 2009 at Rockhampton, aimed at countering increasingly negative agricultural stereotypes. Peter Mahoney, of Theodore, is the primary contact. While the Queensland Country Life has indicated that fighting the tree-clearing ban is a primary objective, Life Source appears to have broader objectives than that. Life Source core values are listed as being:
– Enhance the effectiveness of stakeholder organisations.
– Strengthen the connection between people who desire fresh and healthy food with the innovative environmentalists who produce it with passion.
– Promote the adaption of land management which continues to deliver positive environmental outcomes.
– Actively counter the misrepresentation of industry’s land management credentials.
– Deliver on all objectives through a co-ordinated and strategic communications campaign.
The Life Source Founders Message is well worth reading. I’d also like to see Life Source encouraging rural landholders to actively work towards weeding out landholders who do not look after the land they are in charge of, and/or who are not looking after the agricultural businesses they have bought from others. This should be done to protect the condition of the land that our children & grandchildren will inherit, and it should be done to protect the reputation of all landholders who do operate in an environmentally responsible and sustainable manner.
Thankfully, damaging operators are just a tiny percentage of farmers & graziers. However most people involved in the northern cattle industry know of at least one person who is not leaving the land in a better condition than they found it. I’m not talking about someone who has had to survive extreme drought conditions – I’m referring to those who were in a position to make better decisions, but chose not to. This handful of environmental vandals are not publicly commented on and are allowed to continue on, unchecked – often buying up more and more land, by running down assets that has taken generations of careful management to build up. Inevitably, such owners sell the skeleton of the business they bought within about 5 years, (often the whole show is highly geared, and prone to come unstuck when there is a run of high interest rates, poor seasons and/or low commodity prices), however I often wonder what the various state & territory Lands Departments are doing (are they all asleep, in their Brisbane, Darwin and Perth offices?)
Theoretically, leasehold land is leasehold land (not freehold) so that governments can keep an eye on these large acreages to ensure they are being managed in a manner that is both environmentally sustainable and economically sustainable. Yet there are owners (some very high profile) that everyone knows perpetually overstock land and run down valuable capital improvements such as buildings, waters and fencing. Not only do these people damage land and suck dry healthy businesses, that take years to recover, they give the rest of the agribusiness sector a very bad reputation. Akin to a handful of corrupt policemen tainting the whole police force, or a few extremist Muslims giving the entire Muslim community a reputation for violent fanaticism. When people don’t know someone in a particular line of work, personally, then they’ll form their opinions from what they see from a distance and read in newspapers – and apply that opinion across the board, to everyone that they meet, in that line of work. So if the public reads about Cubbie station’s massive water storages, they think all farmers are greedy water squanderers sucking historic inland rivers dry; if they read about farmers selling properties worth millions of dollars (without mention of net annual incomes, hours worked, or how many generations it took to build the business up) then the public tends to presume all are well-off landed gentry who should never be asking for public assistance; and if the public reads about someone clear felling an area of protected swamp, then they start to think all farmers are environmental vandals.
The rural community must be seen to be weeding out unscrupulous operators, rather than pretending that every single land manager is a model of perfect sustainable land management. Such honesty and effort put into ‘self policing’ is the best way to ensure the rural community is viewed as one of integrity. (It’s also the best way for the police force and Muslim community to gain the trust of the general public – to be seen to be routing out the bad sorts themselves – but that’s another story.)
I also look forward to the time when the extensive grazing industry distances itself from intensive agricultural enterprises. Increasing numbers of people are becoming vegetarians or semi-vegetarian, because they object to battery hens and feedlots; when more sensibly, they’d be shifting to buying free-range eggs and grassfed beef and lamb, instead of avoiding meat products altogether (regardless of how it was produced). If people have absolutely no first hand knowledge or experience of agriculture then they’ll lump every shape & form of agricultural enterprise all in together, from Italian horticulturalists in the Werribee region of Victoria, to South African cattle station managers in Western Australia’s Kimberley region.
From southern Victoria to far north Queensland I’ve seen land clear-felled with little or no shelterbelts or wildlife corridors; severe droughts and extreme weed infestations delineated by boundary fences; heavy-rainfall areas of steep slopes that have been cultivated vertically and without contour banks, slap happy chemical and fertiliser use, and worst of all, some cases of animal cruelty. Some of this has been on rural land, but most these horrors are to be found in the suburbs of our largest cities!
Irresponsible rural land clearing is a rarity now, but all these things can and do still happen in the bush, so the smartest thing for everyone involved in agriculture to do, is to do whatever it takes to weed out those who damage the reputation of us all. And, to point out how much more frequent the above is in urban areas. Huge numbers of homeowners think nothing of their excessive use of very poisonous chemicals around their home and garden (professional pest control agents are often heard saying that the chemicals they are allowed to apply are not as strong as what is available to the public on supermarket shelves), chopping down perfectly safe and healthy mature trees, with just the flimsiest of excuses, and growing ‘pretty’ plants that are declared weeds (especially succulents and vines), despite their proximity to native bush. And these urban environmental vandals don’t have the excuse of ‘at least we’re producing food for someone else to eat’.
We used to live next door to an old bloke who couldn’t mow the back of his quarter acre block. So whenever something green had the temerity to poke its head above the bare soil, he’d tip some diesel onto it. In all my years living in and roaming around the bush, I’ve never seen anyone in the bush treat the environment as badly as I have seen urban residents treat it, and it’s difficult to understand why urban activity isn’t scrutinised and effort put into improving the situation, on a daily basis. I guess its because the vast majority of Australians now live in large towns and cities, and they want to criticise others and get them to change their ways, rather than do it themselves. Few people are prepared to scrutinise their own behaviour objectively, and fewer still actually want to change their own behaviour to improve the environment. It’s the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) syndrome. Very few real or meaningful changes have occurred in urban areas, despite the widespread media-generated terror of global warming. There has only been a few token changes that make stuff-all difference (eg taking green bags to the supermarket [the fact that they’re still sending half a tonne of landfill, including a lot of plastic, to the rubbish tip each week – in extraneous packing, wasted food, and broken goods that are not repaired but replaced by new items, seems to escape most people] and installing fancy new light globes [though they still use their dryers to dry clothes because they don’t want to be bothered pegging their clothes out for nature to dry, and/or they like their towels extra fluffy].)
Perhaps Life Source should gather funds to run an independent and comprehensive study comparison of how the average rural resident lives and how the average suburban resident lives. It would make an excellent reality show for prime time television, the sort of thing that the ABC, or maybe even SBS, would pick up and run with. It could be a complete study of what is spent by the household on food and consumer goods, how much energy is consumed and how it is consumed (eg. recording separately certain costs, such as keeping separate the cost of travelling for a remote resident to the nearest supermarket or hospital – i.e. an unchangeable cost, given that public transport or walking is not an option), how much water is used and recording any that is recycled (eg grey water/septic outflow that is used to water trees), how much rubbish is created each week (and what it consists of – eg how biodegradable or poisonous it is), how much and what is recycled (eg vege scraps to egg-laying chooks and meat scraps to working dogs), what pollution or detrimental emissions the household produces, and what valuable items the household creates (eg food grown, or service hours produced). To create a worthwhile picture it would be necessary to include urban families from different socio-economic backgrounds, in northern and southern Australia, and rural residents in different parts of Australia and different rural industries.