The following letter was published in one of Australia's broadsheet newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald on June 17, 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald could claim to have a more educated and influential readership than any other newspaper in Australia.
"Fellers not fellows
During my long and interesting life, and my travels around the world, I have observed that there are only two kinds of people: civilised people who plant and look after trees, and uncivilised humans who chop them down.
Moray MacDonald
Franz, Lane Cove"
The letter is perhaps indicative of the extent to which our elite is being swept along by environmental fundamentalism.
And I can't help but wonder whether Moray MacDonald knows where his toilet paper comes from:
"Here's to a logger
Who fills a need
From houses to paper
From one little seedFor those of you who
Wish to disagreeTry wiping your arse
without felling a tree."
The poem was on my stubbie holder at the TCA Conference last year.
Mary (just above) has misrepresented my book, The New Nature. I won't bother explaining why because I am not convinced that blogs like these serve a useful purpose.
Seems like the habitats frequented by "Homo sapiens greenus horribilus are also the home to Homo sapiens richus BMW-ensis var lawyer and var banker. Indeed quantitative surveys (unlike above) put their numbers at high densities than greenus horribilus.
My observation that the increasing urbanisation surrounding our cities seems to be a sure fire way of getting rid of native birds, wallabies, echidnas and native fish - and replacing them with possums, Asian Mynahs and silt.
According to Tim Low, in "the new nature - winners and losers in wild Australia" transects taken from CBDs to forested national parks etc show the greatest number of species, the greatest density and the largest populations of those species will be found on the variegated forest and farmland landscapes on the edge of cities. The lowest values were recorded at each end of the transect, the CBDs and the national parks.
It seems that the true experts in "biodiversity", the wildlife themselves, have a preference for sharing their habitat with humans. Their partial clearing and their crops, provided they are in a mosaic of native forest regrowth and paddock trees, are where the biodiversity experts prefer to live. They have voted with their feet.
Interestingly, the places where green voters are most prevalent, the inner city electorates, are shunned by the very wildlife that greenies claim to be representing. And the same applies to the national parks where the urban greens have full control of management. The wildlife have also made their views on "green wisdom" (now there's an oxymoron) very clear there as well.
Lets face it, if a Goanna would rather spend a day feasting on the rotting carcass of a dead cow than hang out with a greenie, then why should anyone else hang out with them?
Luke, this is exactly what I'm talking about -
"I think if you value species for intrinsic value or consider ecological services (pollinators, ability of wetlands to absorb wastes etc)biodiversity may count. But if you don't care about such things blaze and chop away I guess"
Language of the argument. Just because I am a little suss about a term like biodiversity because I think it is too general, too emotive and possibly not truly measurable doesn't mean I don't value the natural world and want instead "to blaze and chop away." Believe it or not I do value biodiversity in the real I'm just not happy about the use (or should that be abuse?) of the word.
Luke,
Oddly enough, some decades ago the Forests Department of WA (then responsible for forest recreation) did a survey to find out where people liked best to picnic. The answer, by a clear margin, was not in native forest (too prickly, bull ants etc.) but in pine plantations, with gas barbeques. Nice and open, can kick a footy etc.
Also, I don't know much about pasture, but remember reading once that it can be very diverse, in the sense of a rich small scale mixture of species, even if not in number of species.
That's one of the problems I have with 'diversity' (with or without 'bio' on the front). Thinking about tile mosaics reveals that 'diversity' is a very diverse concept. How many colours, how many different tile sizes and shapes, how rapid a cycling of colours along a transect, how much clumping of colours, shapes, or sizes, etc? When you start looking at living things interacting it blows your mind away (well, mine anyway). By the way, I think it is the sum of the (n-1)th row of Pascal's Triangle, not the nth as I said before. Makes no real difference - 2 raised to the (n-1)th power is just as potent. Shouldn't ecologists just lie back and enjoy it, without succumbing to physics envy? Anyway, I think the physicists long ago gave up on being able to explain everything. Mystery rules, okay? And that means endless employment for ecologists, heh! heh!
Mary - greater biodiversity (now called micro and macro distribution of biota in the landscape or MMDBL) may or may not be a good thing. Reefs, rainforests and some heaths are very diverse. But simple rangeland and desert systems that are not as diverse may be very natural and stable too.
On sand mining - my observation is that in many cases the Wallum associations and diversity of heath plants do not return in some situation. You can have a replanted Tristania thicket - no birds, few ants and nothing much else grows. So the biodiversity is very low compared to the original - looks green and won't blow away but nothing like natural. Much coal mine spoil is too chemically nasty to revegetate properley.
Similarly you can clear bushland and seed wonderful pasture. Very stable - even sustainable - but very little biodiversity as such.
I think if you value species for intrinsic value or consider ecological services (pollinators, ability of wetlands to absorb wastes etc)biodiversity may count. But if you don't care about such things blaze and chop away I guess.
Many of us would like to think we could have it both ways - clear some, utilise some and leave some. That we would have native wildlife and native plants in our agricultural areas. And that we could make such a system "sustainable" - at least for 100 years to start.
But what if you don't want to leave any and clear wall to wall ?
When people recreate outdoors - do they want to sit or walk in a cropped paddock or a tree laden national park. Haven't seen too may sitting in cleared paddocks myself.
Thanks Davey, thanks Luke.
I still have a problem with biodiversity Luke mainly because it seems that implicit in the definition is a value judgement. It would seem that higher biodiversity equals greater value - so that some tropical islands with high biodiversity are somehow better than say a farm or a desert or dare I say it a suburb because there is more life forms present. I think when you talk about it being measurable you are really talking about Davey's biota.
As for biodiversity after rehabilitation following mining - are you talking immediately after, 5 yrs later, 10 yrs later? Surely it isn't static?