Jim Hoggett milks goats at his farm west of Gloucester in northern eastern NSW, he is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and he had the feature letter in last week's The Land (16th February). It read:
Last weekend we had the routine "alleged illegal land clearing" scare in the Sydney Morning Herald, fostered by the Wilderness Society. It was alleged that the equivalent of 6 Sydney Cricket Ground pitches were being illegally cleared in NSW every hour of every day.
The greatest threat to nature in NSW is not scrub clearing in the central West. It is fire, especially fire in the National Parks.
In the few weeks prior to the SMH report an area perhaps 10 times the area of alleged illegal clearing went up in wildfires across the eastern States. And the season is not over yet. To use the much loved
Green cricket pitch analogy, that is the equivalent of 60 Sydney Cricket Grounds every hour of every day. The difference is that the fires consume the pristine, national heritage, wilderness rather than Central-Western scrub.And this is as nothing to the 2003 fires (900 cricket grounds per hour for NSW and the ACT alone) where the jewels in the crown were burned to the ground - if that is not too mixed a metaphor.
I have not heard a peep out of the Wilderness Society about all this. Nor has anyone to my knowledge ever attempted to measure this truly massive, recurring ecological damage. Not to mention the annual risk
to the lives of firefighters. No doubt there is a lot of silent hand wringing but I hear no solutions.And we will no doubt find that much of the alleged illegal clearing was of regrowth. The interval between the two photos in the SMH report was only 3 years. So much of the area may well have been previously cleared. Perhaps we could direct the satellite to take a survey of reafforestation in NSW. We might well find that the total area and density of NSW native vegetation has actually increased with regrowth and forest thickening. Let's look at the stock as well as the flow.
What is the net gain/loss?
Even better, instead of spending millions of dollars on satellites to spy on its own citizens, government could divert the money to programs which would prevent the mass destruction of our fauna and flora. Then we could possible simplify the absurdly restrictive Native Vegetation Act and work on a program of serious fire mitigation in our Parks.
Incidentally, the alleged illegal clearing amounted to less than one hundredth of one per cent of the area of NSW.
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Republished with permission from Jim Hoggett.
Steve Munn appears to have a one word vocabulary for fire. He fails to distinguish between hot and cold burns, claiming it is all beneficial on the basis of his oven treatment of banksia seed.
Experienced land managers have a very large fire vocabulary based on humidity, fuel load, aspect, slope, landform, access, wind speed, natural constraints, man made constraints, time of day, crew fatigue and, above all SCALE.
And his suggestion that, "There is a massive difference between permanently removing remnant patches of vegetation from private land and the affects of a bushfire", reflects that ignorance.
He is trying to suggest that the clearing is worse than the fire but it is highly unlikely that any forest clearing in our history has notched up a contiguous 2 million hectares of habitat destruction in a single year the way the recent wildfires have done. At that scale there is no-where for any dependent species to escape, let alone provide connective corridors for migration.
Even when the Big Scrub was cleared on the NSW North Coast, the 50,000ha involved was divided into 400 properties of about 125ha each. And it took 70 years from 1880 to 1950 to complete so average annual clearing was about 714ha spread over 400 properties. This averaged 1.78ha on each property each year. In fact it was probably closer to 3ha/pa because the properties that started first also finished first.
This rate of habitat decline, coupled with the extent of the dispersal of impacts, meant that dependent animals rarely actually died as a result of the clearing. The normal range of variation in animal populations in untouched forests in this area has been shown to exhibit 80% declines due to drought and corresponding five fold increases in good seasons. So the animals died in the same proportions as in any other drought but when the good seasons came the rate of population increase was modified by the slightly smaller habitat due to clearing during that cycle.
And this is nothing like the broadscale, contiguous population decimation caused by wildfire. And if Munn knew anything about farms he would know that the landuses that replaced the forest often provided equal, if not superior habitat value to the removed forest. Only the most specialised species were seriously disadvantaged.
But instead, Munn resorts to blatant defamatory statements like "woefully ignorant or dishonest", and, "I can only wonder about the integrity and motives of this man Hoggett", because the facts Jim has presented are at variance with Munn's perspective from the klingon home world.