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.

In praise of walking - Annie Proulx

I am reading — and very much enjoying Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud. I came across this quote this morning that resonated: "Walking induces a trancelike stat that allows the mind freedom and ease and encourages exploration of odd possibilities and improbable connections." The "odd possibilities" and the "improbable connections" in particular; that is one reason I love walking that I had yet to let surface in my mind until Annie Proulx fished it up.

The Cobberas - a wilderness area?

I am back from 4 days walking in the Cobberas, in north-east Victoria, on the other side of the Great Divide. It snowed and it was exquisitely beautiful, but I was saddened by the impact that Europeans had had on the Australian landscape. The Cobberas is designated as a Wilderness Area but driving in to the Cowombat Flat Track the presence of feral dogs was obvious as farmers had shot them and left there corpses hanging from trees. On the first night I heard the mewling of a feral cat in the dark hours of the morning. The first night on Cowombat Flat we heard the eerie and beautiful yowling of a feral dog. Everywhere was evidence of feral horses: horse shit, brumby pads, and wetlands and streams turned to quagmires. And occasionally we had a sighting of the horses themselves - beautiful. Most obviously was the damage done by the fire of 2003. Without Aboriginal mosaic burning we have intense whirlwinds of fires that leave the debris of a holocaust, and a simplified ecosystem. The Cobberas burnt in 2003. Now, since the 2009 fires, almost all of the Victorian Alps are covered by dead trees. No where can I stand on a mountain and see a sweep of green unburnt forest to the horizon. That is lost to me and to coming generations. The countryside has the look of the stubble on an unshaven face.

So what is now a wilderness area?

I took the book Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx with me and read with sadness of the same situation in North American pine forests destroyed by the "triple catastrophes of prolonged drought, warming climate and an unprecedented invasion of mountain pine beetle" She goes on to say "I am deeply sorry for all who never … looked out from a fire tower across miles of green mountain wilderness." The pleasure in that awe has been lost there, as it has been here in Australia.