I have an affection for weeds, gritty little survivors who set up life anywhere. Discriminated against but tough. The heroic underdogs. I like finding life in the most unexpected places and that is often a weed. After all our magnificent eucalypts were once weeds living on the edge of a Gondwanan forest. (It took me time to digest that when I first read it. But this affection can be pushed too far and Emma Marris does that in her Rambunctious Garden. Let’s re-evaluate them but it is bizarre to elevate them to the top of the ecological pyramid of good guys.

While reading Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in the Post-Wild World by Emma Marris, a little over 50% through (by this point there is lots of questions, lots of sledging but no answers, which I am looking forward to).

Marris's Rambunctious Garden too rambunctious?

I am annoyed by Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden, but maybe in a good way. It has certainly given me a new interest in invasive weeds, and a readiness to think differently. But and there is a big but, she seems to be simply saying bad stuff happens. Species ranges grow and shrink and species do go extinct – the world is really just one big garden for people to do as they like in it. And if we lose a whole bunch of interesting endemic species with short-lived, quick growing, rapidly seeding species who put little effort into their offspring. 

It is the economist’s view of ecology – a licence for greed and carelessness. Yes change happens but the rate of change in the past 200 years and especially the last 50 years is unprecedented. Ecosystems that have existed for 100s of years, 1000s of years (and that’s a lot of time in a world that marks itself as some 2000 years old), 100,000 of years, even millions of years, ecosystems that have co-evolved over many lifetimes are being destroyed in less than one. Yet she takes time out of the equation. Her position as an ecologist seems perverse. Yes climate change is changing the paradigm and we need to do some rethinking about what we consider "nature" and "wilderness'. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Is it important that the number of species on some islands are increasing though that is as the expense of the biodiversity of the world? Is that not obvious? Yes it is good to challenge prevailing wisdom, but what is she offering in its place? She seems to be picking around the margins, finding the exceptions, not the principles. The quality of the writing is disappointing for such a bold thesis. She is using language frequently to deliberately stretching the argument. She has eradicated time and the rate of change from her argument. Wow. Yes things have always changed chronologically and spatially but it is the rate of change that is a concern, a rate of change generated by the expansion of technology.

Maybe I have yet to read far enough. I am only 48% into the book (according the bar at the bottom of my kindle screen.) I look forward to writing again when I have finished the book.             

Davis has Oz wrong

In response to Marris citing it, I am now reading Mark A Davis “Researching Invasive Species 50 Years After Elton”. Davis is saying specifically in the case of Australia that: In Australia, non-native species have been reported to have contributed to the extinctions of some native mammals (see Finlayson 1961; Kinnear et al. 1998). However, the fact that declines in native species typically began decades before the introductions of species such as cats and foxes (often reputed to be the causes of extinctions), and the fact that species introductions are usually associated with other types of anthropogenic change that are believed to have contribute to the declines (for example land use change), it is difficult to ascribe extinctions of Australian mammals exclusively to no-native species (Abbott 2002; McKenzie et al. 2007.

Well that doesn’t accord with my understanding. Cats arrived with the First Fleet – the first settlement of Australia, as did cattle, which also soon ran wild. So I am not sure how “declines in native species typically began decades before the introductions” could work. In Australia’s case the introduction of species came early and non-native species spread quickly. We have seen waves of extinction in mammals since the arrival of Europeans – the latest of which is going on in the north at the moment with the disappearance of the bilby and other like sized animals.

A lot hangs on the word exclusively. Define it narrowly and  anything can be justified. Little if anything has a singular cause. The smaller mammals were not just killed by cats but had their habitats destroyed as farmers cleared bush litter, and the ground hardened by the hooves of introduced cattle. (Are cattle a land-use change or an invasive species?)

The MIS ponzis - who loves a monoculture?

I am just back from the Green Triangle, from canoeing the Glenelg, four days actually, and driving via Warrnambool and then back by Byaduk and Penshurst you cannot miss the plantations, rolling like dark water over the hills and valleys mainly pine, some gum (blue gum). The soil up this way is poor for farming but fine for pine. I am guessing the pines like the acidity of limestone soils.

            Much of the planting was the result of the failed managed investments schemes Great Southern and Timbercorp. A managed investment scheme (MIS) allows investors to pool their investment and pay a manager to manage on their behalf. As I understand it investors were encouraged to take the maintenance costs out as an upfront tax deduction and that was the attraction of a managed investment scheme. Timber has the advantage as do a number of agricultural products where there are high maintenance expenses over a long period of time, in tax terms that generated a good deduction that was brought forward to the time of the investment. It seems an artefact to me, just too clever: short term thinking harnessed to a long term product. There was something of the ponzi to the way the schemes managed the funds they attracted, buying production to keep the price up. And then the tax department I have been told disallowed bringing so much of the expenses to the time of the investment and ruled that the expenses had to be deducted closer to the time they were incurred. Owww. That’s a convenient explanation but not accurate. There was tax doubt but governments and the ATO worked to reassure investors. Maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t.

            In the meantime a lot of land had been bought and a lot of trees had been planted, and not just in the south-west of Victoria but as far away as the Tiwi island, which was controversial.

            The idea of the plantations is to grow trees fast and to industrialize the farming of timber. Plantations are monocultures – one tree species spread over a landscape like a disease. The industrialization of forestry means that many forestry values, say those espoused by Aldo Leopold are destroyed. It is all about the money and systems to reduce costs. It is about shortening the forester’s traditional long vision to something as short as a tree’s life can be squeezed into. It is about industrializing forestry, which is about simplifying everything to cut costs – and also to push costs especially unknown costs into the future on to other people and future generations. A forest is not a monoculture but a living diverse ecosystem, a series of habitats, a structured mosaic of ecotopes. These plantations are sucking up water and dropping the water table. One local told me that the level of the Blue Lake at Mt Gambier had a dropped a metre. The local ecology is locked up for a long time.

            The land is only productive for two rotations of timber so some 60 to 100 years, and after that the land is depleted of nutrients and clotted with roots. Will it be useable? What are we leaving future generations? Plenty of what economists like to call “externalities”, as if these are not part of their dream of a perfect economic system.

            The MIS are a touchstone for how economics and government treats the environment, seeking short-term profit blindly. 

Hope yet for James Price Point

Economics is looking like it will stop the James Price Point hub where environmental protest have yet to succeed. $30 billion is looking like a lot in the current environment and the strong inflationary pressures in WA are pushing the likely cost up. Woodside has asked the WA government to extend the commitment deadline from mid 2012 into 2013. That increases the chances that the project just will not go ahead. Woodside's joint-venture partners - BHP, Shell, BP and Chevron - prefer the cheaper alternative of processing the gas at the existing facility at Karratha, and Goldman Sachs said that option "increases in attractiveness as time goes on". Who wants to take a big risk in today's economic climate? Woodside may just have been saved from itself by the doggedness of environmental and indigenous groups. Oh, sweet irony. Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman has tempered several of the ambitious plans of his American predecesso,Don Voelte, since ascending to the chair in May this year. The Wilderness Society says this setback is a "testament to misguided egos" of the ambitious. How does Martin Ferguson feel about that? Maybe a few people should be reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test.

Links:
SMH
West Australian
Oz

CSG concerns - handy summary

Here's a handy summary about the concerns with coal seam gas extraction. The fundamental is that as the industry is new there is not much known about the medium to long-term effects of lowering the pressure of coal seams but pumping out the gas (and the water with it). Specific concerns are:

• Just how impermeable are the layers of clay separating the coal seams from the aquifers?

• Are coal seams and aquifers always separated? (And, how do you know when you start drilling?)

• Will fracking lead to coal seams connecting to aquifers?

• Will the wells leak? Will the casing seal the wells adequately (think Deepwater Horizon)? Will the wells be plugged properly (think Rum Jungle? What is the industry's record of cleaning up after itself?)

Queensland Gas Company says the majority of view of hydrologists is that over time water will always flow from high pressure to low pressure areas regardless of permeability Now here's the kicker QGC says it won't be a problem in our lifetimes. So what they are saying is lets take the profits now and lets shift the problems to the future. A case of not paying for what economists call externalities. In the ninenteenth century factories used to pump toxic waste into rivers and let those who live downstream take the consequences. Now we the downstream is the future, our children and their children and so down to the nth generation.

The concerns from farmers is the damage that CSG does to their land, to the surface of the land. The web of roads and other facilities that go with CSG extraction. It is different from other sorts of mining. And there is the problem of what happens to everything that comes out of the ground apart from the methane that is pumped away - salty toxic water.

Abuse of language

Language is used and abused to pursue particular interests. An appreciation that was reinforced for me recently when I read of plans to use 'waste' to make resin pellets to fire power plants in South Australia. The 'waste' is the pulp that will no longer go to the Tantanoola Pulp Mill (Tantanoola is being closed because it is too 'small' in a global context. Small is beautiful is not something that industry embraces.) Woodchipping started with a plan to utilize the 'waste' from logging, now forests are clearfelled and only a small proportion of the timber is actually cut into timber, most is chipped and pulped. Woodchipping spearheaded the industrializaton of logging based on 'waste', and resin pellet will continue this trend, all in the name of being green, all in the name of utilizing 'waste'. Words just slide around.

The other recent notable abuse that I came across was the statements made by Queensland State Mining Minister Stirling Hinchcliffe that fracking is a 'very small' part of coal seam gas extraction. He's right. Here's what he actually said: "The scientific advice I have is that fracking is at the moment a very small part of what's required as part of oil and gas operations here in Queensland." The scientific is a nice touch. Fracking does not have much to do with science; it is a mining operation. Using 'scientific' lends support, though. But the key is what Stirling has not said. It is what he left out. Fracking is a small part 'at the moment'. It's about 5% but that's for now; in the future fracking proportions will grow. The industry is being coy about it, and reading between the lines about 30% of mines will eventually be fracked. And my guess is that it will be much higher. It is early days in CSG extraction so not much fracking is required to extact the gas. A point the minister conveniently did not mention.