I would like to think that Australia's national broadcaster would take-to-task an American who writes a best selling book that is full of factual errors that denigrate Australia. But instead our ABC just keeps giving him more time on radio to tell his tall tales.
Professor Jared Diamond got a great run on ABC radio last June when he was over here promoting his new book 'Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive'. Then Robyn Williams ran him again on The Science Show a few months later and for a whole hour.
I complained and was given 15 minutes on Ockham's Razor last November.
I have reviewed his chapter on Australia and shown it to be full of factual errors, click here for the published paper and I list some of the errors at the end of this blog post.
Michael Duffy invited Professor Diamond to debate me on Duffy's ABC radio program Counterpoint a couple of weeks ago, but the professor declined.
So the ABC gave him a wad of time last Thursday night, again on a Robyn Williams program, In Conversation. Click here for the transcript.
While the program was billed as putting the professor on the spot - it was anything but a tough interview. Indeed Diamond was given more opportunity to tell more tall tales.
These included that unless we change our ways there won't be any tropical rainforests left in Australia in 30 years time. That's right - read the transcript!
He also thought it relevant to make the point that "Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest." I thought we were also the driest continent on earth after the Antarctic so how relevant is that statistic? Should we turn our coastal rivers inland so that we can grow forest were there is now desert?
He goes on to state that Japan has a much larger percentage of its land mass as old growth forest. I would guess - and perhaps a reader of this blog might do the relevant calculations - that we have a much larger total area of old growth forest than Japan?
And I can't believe the following claim but would like more information. He said in the interview last Thursday night that:
"Farmers are bringing pressure to bear on other farmers. Again on my last visit to Australia I had a very interesting time with a farmer in South Australia who was telling me that if a farmer who either leases land, or owns land outright is not taking good care of the land for example by over-stocking it, then local farmers put pressure on that farmer to change his or her practices. And in extreme cases my farmer-friend told me, if a farmer continues to abuse his or her land then even if you own it outright your land may be confiscated."
Can anybody tell me as a comment below, or by separate email, whether there could be any truth in this claim that freehold land can be confiscated in South Australia?
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Just a few of the errors:
In the book the professor gets the price of wood chip wrong suggesting we sell it to Japan for US$7 per ton when official statistics show it sells for A$151 per tonne.
He indicates Australian farmers produce less food on a tonnes per hectare basis than most of the rest of the world, but doesn't specify which crops. If we consider some of our major crops including cotton and rice - well Australian farmers harvest much more than the world average on a tonnes per hectare basis.
We produce on average 7 tonnes of rice per hectare in Australia while the world average is 4 tonnes/ha and Australian rice growers use 50 percent less water for every kilo of rice produced than the world average. In Australia the average yield for cotton is 1,672 tonnes/ha, while the world average is just 638 tonnes/ha - a lot less.
One of the reasons we manage to produce so more cotton per hectare is because our cotton is all irrigated. This is a reason why we don't produce so much wheat per hectare. We grow a lot of wheat in Australia, but it is not irrigated, so our yields are low relative to much of the rest of the world.
In the book published by Penguin, Professor Diamond claims that, "it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees." Yet official statistics show Australia exports almost three times the quantity of citrus it imports. During the 2003/04 financial year Australian producers exported navel and valencia oranges worth A$107 million.
Indeed, contrary to the impression give by the professor, Australia exports most of the food it produces with crop exports valued at A$13,269 million in 2003/04.
In 'Collapse' Diamond states that Australians are cutting down too many trees and as a consequence Australia's forests will disappear long before our coal and iron reserves. Some forests have been clearfelled, some have been selectively logged, most have regrown. The area of forest is increasing, not reducing. The area of old growth forest protected nationally has increased from 1.2 million hectares to 3.8 millionh hectares since 1996. Tasmania has 43 percent of its total land are protected in reserves, including 82 percent of its rainforest.
Thinksy
Comment at a previous blog post from Christine Jones about small mammals:
"The open, park-like appearance of many areas at the time of European settlement has often been attributed to indigenous burning regimes. More recent evidence suggests that the healthy grasslands and friable soils described by the first settlers were more likely to have reflected the high abundance of small native mammals, such as bettongs and potoroos most of which are now locally extinct .. with the loss of the regenerative effects of small native mammals in Australia since European settlement, managed grazing is now arguably the only natural means by which grasslands can be 'improved' in a holitistic way."
see https://climatelab.com.au/blog/archives/000828.html
Good points, Boxer. The issue of sustainability certification is also not a simple one, especially in the third world. For in those cases the only people who are likely to get the certification are the cronies and the generals who have been given "concessions" over the forests of local communities.
These "concessions" are frequently mistaken by foreign observers to be "legal logging" while the local communities who try to continue with their traditional use of the forest are regarded as "poachers" and "illegal loggers".
In legal terms, the local communities should have a right to maintain their 'existing use rights' as an express provision of the Montreal Protocol, without need for any sort of development approval or permit process. But when these rights are assumed to be non-existent then the so-called permit held by the General is seen as the primary instrument in law.
And clearly, all the damage is being inflicted by the large scale 'legal logging' while the small scale, repairable impact, harvesting is done by the 'poachers'.
And all the international certification schemes succeed in doing is impose a whole new layer of opportunity to extract baksheesh from the disadvantaged communities.
And it is quite interesting to note that the European greens have fully supported the certification of wood from their own native forests and their consumers actually prefer their wood to come from native forest instead of plantations.
Indeed, the distinction between plantation and native forest is not very clear because one of the most effective ways to establish a forest on cleared land is to plant a small number of trees of different species and then wait for them to bear seed and regenerate a regrowth forest. This way nature makes the choice of which species goes best in which spot. It has worked very well on my place.
But here in Australia, the greens have fought tooth and nail to try and deny certification to all forest types that are not plantation.
To those of us who have always taken the view that 'how you get there is what the journey is all about' it is pure lunacy.
Thinksy, I don't think we have to consume only our own wood, so trade can be both ways across borders. It would be desirable to balance the trade at first, and then perhaps help take some of the global pressure off the developing nations. It's complex: the rainforest wood is cheaper than anyone else's and we have to achieve a balance where the developing nations can utilise their forest resource sustainably to generate income for their countries perpetually. It's the "rip 'em off" mentallity that we have at the moment that offends me most. We aren't personally and conciously trying to do this, but most people are trying hard to look the other way.
I have this scenario in my imagination when, in AD 2063, the last SE Asian rainforest is lost, and orang utans are only found in zoos. The world will look around to see where all that wood went. Australia will be standing quietly in the background, with vast areas of forest locked up in the 1990s and 2000s, much of it approaching its period of senescence, and a long history of living off other people's wood. We'll point to China of course, but our per capita consumption will possibly be high by world standards. Yes, we're accused of greed on many counts, but if forests are still an iconic green issue in 2063, we will deserve whatever we get when the reckoning is made.
I don't mind what the mechanisms are, but they have to operate within a real market. Before you get to mechanisms, you have to develop a national ethos that allows a realistic mechanism to be developed, and that mechanism means we will have to compromise on our desire to save every tall smooth-barked tree we can (but only in Aus). The RFAs were meant to do this, but the greens refused to be involved in this process and then worked furiously to destroy the Agreements once they were drawn up. In WA, this was very successful for the greens and the RFA lasted only a few months before the industry was decimated due to public anxiety whipped up by a campaign run with the full support of the local daily newspaper (which, as many people have observed, is printed on paper).
It's sad that some LDC forests are cleared (for agriculture) and the wood wasted. eg giant Amazonian trees smoldering for ages.
Boxer if we pursue a strategy of only consuming the amount of wood that we produce nationally (or regionally), then it's an argument for national self-sufficiency that goes against the whole premise of free markets and international trade according to comparitive advantage. We already wear accusations of being a greedy nation and I don't doubt that we will attract further criticism for this.
Meanwhile, international trade continues (and objections to further logging in Aust continue). Would the best strategy be ethically based trade in certified sustainable wood only? ie widespread (international) adoption of FSC, not just voluntary fringe action by some NGO's, some businesses and some individuals.
On fires and forests again:
Does anyone have experience with the role that small mammals and other small organisms play in minimising fuel loads (before their numbers generally declined)?
Thinksy
Undisturbed forest - I don't know. It's one of those statistics that can be turned to your advantage whatever your perspective. To me, it makes more sense to consider each forest type individually. Eg, if you clear a vast area of wheatbelt land to grow food (a million acres a year!), then the total area of native vegetation may be significantly reduced. Meantime, a tall forest type x that is not cleared (because it's not land desired for broadacre farming) may be largely undisturbed. It makes little sense to treat the tall forest type x according to the situation that has developed in the wheatbelt region.
Old growth forest is a poorly defined concept in my opinion. When a search was made for the oldest jarrah in SW of WA, the oldest tree was a bit over 300 years old. This is a relatively slow-growing forest where the strategy is survival of the individual. In forests like mountain ash, where the strategy is to produce millions of saplings, grow like mad and more than 95% of the trees die before they reach maturity, the chances of finding trees older than jarrah seems unlikely. People have used the diameter of trees to imply an age; big trees are older. This is comprehensively wrong in many, if not all, cases because the biggest trees are the biggest because they have grown several times faster than their neighbours. So 600+ years seems way too long for any forest that grows fast enough to be considered a commercial resource. Also worth noting that not one species has been recorded as being driven to extinction by logging in Australia.
For the purposes of a concise argument elsewhere I suggested that a whole forest could be logged if the rotation was long enough. This is an oversimplification. I think it would be much better to debate how much forest needs to be preserved to ensure no loss of biodiversity (and it should be possible to quantify this) than to have the current debate which is just both sides saying "we want more" and "youse guys are all wankers".
There are many many Aus forests that have been regenerated since the 19th century. I think any of the forests that are hotly debated today (these are all tall and usually smooth barked species) would have numerous examples of regen spread across the last 100 years.
Stopping Asian deforestation. There are more factors than our consumption, including other nations' imports and clearing for oil palms etc. But wood is a globally traded commodity. If you take more from the global resource than you are growing as a nation, then you must be depleting someone else's forest, even you import all your wood from NZ plantations (which are grown on land that used to support tall native forest). As a net wood importer, while we lock up more and more Australian resources for our sense of well being, we are making up the deficit directly from the global resourse. I heard a WWF guy on the ABC say today that we are the biggest individual market for PNG sawn wood. So if we grew all our own wood, other countries would continue to use the rainforests. But at the moment we are following the feeding frenzy strategy. Keep our resource under the bed and use as much as possible of others nations' forests before those forests are all gone. If we don't rip 'em off, someone else will. I would bet London to a brick that we will be condemned for this in the future as a greedy first world nation. Which, when you look at it, we are.
I also don't have much time for the argument that they're going to clear this forest anyway, so we may as well buy the wood. The sale of the wood probably pays for the clearing. Analogy - the sale of the hide from a cow pays for the act of slaughtering of the cow, so vegetarians should not use any leather, even if they don't eat the meat which is the principal product.
You must have a good memory Thinksy, the Australian bush has been "disturbed" for tens of thousands of years.
To rephrase the question: out of the forest cover that existed in Australia (pre-Europeans if that's a convenient yardstick), how much is left largely undisturbed?
From memory, I read (in a international article) that it's 3% - 5% depending on choice of parameters. Re: regrowth, again from memory: an old-growth forest state can take 600-1000 years to reach.
***Is there no good reason at all to conserve/protect the remaining old-growth forests in Aust? Should we just log it all?***
As it's practised today, is Australian forestry sustainable - and how can we be sure if it takes 65-80 years for regrowth?
Re: Asia - If Australia logged 100% of its forest area, would that stop Asian deforestation, or are there additional factors at play in Asia (eg: palm plantations)?
I agree Schiller, the distinctions between old new and native in vegetation types are mostly a question of when European colonisation took place. Perhaps this is why Europeans are a bit more pragmatic about this topic; nothing in northern European goes back further than the last ice age and they weren't colonised by Europeans in the same way the new world was.
I actually admire the Guns Germs and Steel argument, but yes, Diamond seems to be getting a bit over-excited in recent times.
Regarding forestation,
Here in the US we suffer heaps of scorn over deforestation. It's an accomplished fact that we now have more forest than when the first Europeans arrived. (I'm not counting the Vikings, etc.) So some of that "new" forestation isn't entirely "natural" and some would say that makes them "new growth" and may insist they're "new growth" no matter how old they get.
Then there's another fact that's so politically incorrect that people fear repeating it: most of the Great Plains of the Central US would be forest, and "old growth" forest at that, except for the Native Americans (Immigrants themselves, originally.) These Native Americans instituted the practice of setting massive grass fires in the spring each year, to keep trees off the plains so that they could be used, essentially, as pasture for buffalo.
So--the notions of "old," "new," "native" and "natural" are not terribly clear in this context.
As to the notion of Jared Diamond telling farmers where they ought to go: well, if it was a good idea, the farmers would already be there.
I have to wonder if the success of "Guns, Germs and Steel" left Diamond so impressed with himself that he feels endowed with oracular powers and, hence, a responsibility to tell others their own business.
Schiller.