{"id":1956,"date":"2011-10-25T21:29:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T11:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=1956"},"modified":"2015-02-23T16:05:27","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T06:05:27","slug":"bush-heritage-australia-and-another-exercise-in-misguided-self-congratulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/bush-heritage-australia-and-another-exercise-in-misguided-self-congratulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush Heritage Australia – and another exercise in misguided self-congratulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the latest load of\u00a0hot air\u00a0on the urban academics saving threatened species by purchasing ‘flogged out Simpson desert cattle stations’; if you can concentrate on the words above the racket the chorus of angels is making:\u00a0 Old cattle stations now wildlife haven.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s yet another self-congratulatory article spouting on about how well the environment is going since ‘saved’ by environmentalists, and the rare species proliferating on the property.\u00a0I’ve asked it before but it bears repeating (until the message gets through).\u00a0 If Ethubuka and Cravens Peak were so ‘flogged out’, ‘over grazed’, ‘degraded’, ‘badly managed’ etc etc – a veritable scene of absolute pastoral desecration – then how did they come to be ‘home to the richest reptile fauna of any arid region in the world’ just a few years later?\u00a0 How did these rare species come to be there?\u00a0 Did they arrive in spaceships from Mars,\u00a0the instant Bush Heritage Australia took over the pastoral lease and those naughty cows were taken away?\u00a0 Or did Bush Heritage Australia re-introduce these ‘rare species’ back onto the property, themselves?<\/p>\n

Neither.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These ‘rare species’ have\u00a0inhabited the cattle station,\u00a0alongside the extensively grazed cattle,\u00a0ever since white settlement more than a century ago.\u00a0 It’s just that there hadn’t been anyone with a university degree, publicly funded equipment etc, and the free time, to travel around trapping and counting them.<\/p>\n

Purchasing a property in an area of just a 6″ exceedingly variable average rainfall, after years of debilitating drought, then parading around after the best season recorded since white settlement, and attempting to claim that the flourishing plant and animal life has anything to do with the change in ownership and management – is laughably dishonest.<\/p>\n

Would it be\u00a0objective to photograph a cattle station after the best wet season on record, sell it to conservationists, then photograph it at the end of a long and severe\u00a0drought period that will inevitably roll around, sooner or later, and claim that the dearth of vegetation and lowered native animal population was purely due to environmental mismanagement?\u00a0 Of course not!\u00a0 But hey it’s ok to do the reverse, because these people all have a university degree, so they know better than anyone else!<\/p>\n

A thorough assessment of\u00a0cattle stations in the same region as Ethabuka and Cravens Peak would undoubtedly reveal that a) the same ‘rare species’ are found in similar numbers on surrounding land, not managed by\u00a0university-degree conservationists, and b) the surrounding land is also covered in thriving vegetation at present\u00a0(at least, what hasn’t been burnt out by lightning strikes).\u00a0\u00a0The whole of\u00a0 central and eastern Australia has flourished over the last twelve months – regardless of who happens to be managing it.<\/p>\n

But Bush Heritage Australia will hardly want to point\u00a0 out that land managed by pastoralists is just as ecologically healthy as the land owned by Bush Heritage…their funding will vaporise, as will public donations!<\/p>\n

The same silly article quotes appalling extinction statistics for Australia…but fails to mention that the majority of these extinctions have occurred in the most closely settled parts of Australia.\u00a0 Not in central and northern remote areas, where no tree felling\/land clearing or\u00a0soil tillage has ever been undertaken;\u00a0where there are few roads, buildings, fences and other man-made structures; and where domestic livestock are run at very low levels per square kilometre; and native plants and animals co-exist in harmony with extensively grazed livestock; and organic production was usual, long before it became fashionable.<\/p>\n

If Bush Heritage Australia was serious about doing the utmost to conserve Australia’s most endangered flora and fauna, they’d leave remote areas\u00a0alone – and the extremely knowledgeable and capable managers and owners, already in place, at no cost to taxpayers.\u00a0\u00a0 Extensively grazed cattle country still has ‘rare species’\u00a0in residence and will\u00a0continue to do so into the future.\u00a0 The smartest thing is to leave the experienced owners and managers of large, remote cattle stations\u00a0to get on with the job they do best – efficiently managing the environment for future generations – more or less as they have always done.\u00a0 Instead of sinking money into remote areas, Bush Heritage Australia should be making better use of their limited funds by buying up slabs of land in and around our most closely settled areas, because\u00a0this is where urban sprawl and increasing population density is causing the most environmental decimation.\u00a0 Sydney springs to mind, as does far north Queensland – from the Atherton Tablelands to Cairns, Port Douglas and Mission Beach.<\/p>\n

The latter is one of the worst environmental disasters in recent times, that I’ve seen.\u00a0\u00a0 Do Bush Heritage Australia own any land at Mission Beach?\u00a0 The very thing that attracted the new residents to the Mission Beach area is the first thing to go when they’re building their flash new house – rainforest is replaced with cement, lawns and other introduced species of plants.\u00a0 A large Woolworths supermarket sits out on the flat, surrounded by cleared paddocks – fringed in the distance by native bush.\u00a0 It’s a planning horror, as is Keith William’s memorial to environmental vandalism, Hinchinbrook ‘resort’ and marina, which appear to have fallen into disrepair, since cyclone Yasi.<\/p>\n

I can just see all those people who have made donations to Bush Heritage Australia, sitting\u00a0 in their suburban backyards, feeling a warm glow of smug self satisfaction for having contributed to ‘such a worthy cause’.\u00a0\u00a0All the while completely oblivious to the fact that they are surrounded in their garden by\u00a0introduced species of trees and plants, populated not by native birds, but\u00a0feral species (such as blackbirds, starlings and sparrows).\u00a0 Plus wild and roaming domestic cats, European mice and rats, and perhaps foxes as well.\u00a0 But few if any native reptiles or marsupials.\u00a0 Oh but they’re helping to save the outback from those terrible pastoralists!<\/p>\n

Conservation is the best example of the NIMBY syndrome in existence.\u00a0 Stuff fixing up our own backyard in Paddington, Redfern and Fitzroy – let’s interfere with central Australia instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the latest load of\u00a0hot air\u00a0on the urban academics saving threatened species by purchasing ‘flogged out Simpson desert cattle stations’; if you can concentrate on the words above the racket the chorus of angels is making:\u00a0 Old cattle stations now wildlife haven. It’s yet another self-congratulatory article spouting on about how well the environment is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,7,11],"tags":[176,179],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1956"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4464,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions\/4464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}