Assoc. Professor Martine Maron at the University of Queensland and Professor Carla Catterall at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, are very concerned about large-scale land clearing Down Under.
Australia’s culture of killing native animals
Tag Archives: land clearing
Australia’s culture of killing native animals
Baird government to axe Native Vegetation Act
Koalas and other iconic wildlife are vanishing from our bushland as the trees they call home continue to be cleared for farmland. They’re plastered across our tourism brochures, yet government policies are putting them at risk.
The NSW Baird government is scrapping the Native Vegetation Act – one of the most important protections for koalas in our state. While the focus remains on native vegetation, a real and important issue is the wildlife, and ecological systems, that inherently belong to these habitats. It’s assumed they will just “move on” and re-home themselves conveniently elsewhere! The “elsewhere” is getting harder and harder to find.
The Native Vegetation Act 2003 (the Act) frames the way landholders manage native vegetation in NSW by preventing broadscale clearing unless it improves or maintains environmental outcomes.
Data collated by the Productivity Commission for their review of native vegetation regulation found that a decline in overall clearance did take place from the early 1980s to the early 2000s in all Australian states and territories (Productivity Commission 2004) However, of the 74,000 hectares of land cleared in New South Wales in 2005, 40 percent (ie 30,000ha) was cleared illegally (ie without prior approval; NSW AOG 2006).
In 2003, the NSW Government pledged $3.5m to establish a satellite monitoring system in the state (although some parties have claimed the receiving department did not end up using the money for this purpose; The Wilderness Society 2008).
A biodiversity report released last December contained 43 recommendations for significant change, including repealing the Native Vegetation Act and other legislation that had been plaguing farmer productivity for decades. It also recommended streamlining of development assessment where land use change can occur, which places farming development on an even playing field with other types of development. It’s commercial interests, of profit-increasing, over conservation and protection of biodiversity. Instead of a triple bottom-line, the bottom line will be profits, developments and economic progress!
Key to the proposal is the removal of the requirement that land clearing only be allowed if it improves or maintains environmental outcome, and shifting approval for vegetation clearing to the planning system. North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) spokesperson Dailan Pugh said most rural councils had yet to identify or map high-conservation value vegetation for protection and, where they had ,the National Party had intervened to stop it.
A host of environmental groups, including World Wildlife Fund and the National Parks Association, condemned the review of the state’s biodiversity legislation for neutering the office of environment and say it will lead to wide-scale land clearing and loss of species.
The review panel report that recommended this backward legislation also recommended conserving habitat at a regional or even state scale. Farmers, it said, had been left to carry an unfair share of responsibility for preserving nature in the state. “Regional or State” level is a way of leaving it up to individuals, who will probably be loaded with conflicts of interests! It’s political abandonment, to make way for housing and urban growth.
Of course the National Party and the farmers will welcome this news, and gives them more license for land clearing and short-term profits.
Mr Evans, chief executive of NSW National Parks Association, said the rate of land-clearing from agriculture had fallen 68 per cent since the Native Vegetation Act was passed in 2003. So, the Act was working!
The Wilderness Society NSW Campaign Manager Belinda Fairbrother said: “Weakening wildlife protection laws will place our threatened species in peril at a time when bold action is required to reverse the ongoing decline in our state’s rich biological diversity… We are resolutely opposed to any weakening of our state’s wildlife protection and land clearing laws”. Backward Australia will be more cleared at a time of multiple environmental and climate change threats, and will be a the cost of long term sustainability, and ultimately more food security threats.
“The Native Vegetation Act is among the most important nature conservation laws in NSW because it protects so much of the state’s wildlife like koalas and gliders from indiscriminate destruction. “If new laws weaken protections for land and wildlife, Mike Baird will be remembered as the Premier who took us back to the dark days of broadscale land clearing” said Nature Conservation Council CEO Kate Smolski.
(image: paddock containing remnant native vegetation:CSIRO )
Labor leader Luke Foley said native animals, birds and native bushland would be the losers after the Government said it would implement all 43 recommendations of a review of the state’s biodiversity legislation, completed last year.
Sydney’s urban sprawl had wiped out market gardens on peripheral land since first settlement. The problem now is Sydney’s expansion has reached the last phase, where in 20 to 50 years the sprawl will eradicate unprotected farms. So, instead of containing the limits of population growth, more land clearing will “fix” the problem, and mow down the constraints of trees, grasslands and bush in the path of “progress”.
Australia continues to have a net loss of biodiversity and the United Nations reports that we are entering an extinction crisis. What does this government and some farmers have against a healthy environment?
Contradictorily, at the same time as the government is establishing a $100 million survival fund to stop a ‘race to extinction’! The commitment was made after Opposition Leader Luke Foley promised $150 million to create new national parks including a Great Koala National Park on the north coast — as a nod to the NSW Labor Party’s preference allies the Greens. It’s easy to make political promises, throw out spin, and money to environmental problems, but actually have tight laws and policies protecting native vegetation and wildlife is far to holistic and intrinsic for slippery politicians who pander to lobby groups.
Drought, land clearing in Queensland
(featured image: Queensland_State_Archives – land clearing Beerburrum_December 1916)
When we think about global deforestation, certain hotspots spring to mind. The Amazon. The Congo. Borneo and Sumatra. And… eastern Australia?
Yes, eastern Australia is one of 11 regions highlighted in a new chapter of the WWF Living Forests report, “Saving forests at risk”, which identifies the world’s greatest deforestation fronts – where forests are most at risk – between now and 2030.
The WWF Living Forests report, “Saving forests at risk”, identifies the world’s greatest deforestation fronts – where forests are most at risk – between now and 2030. It estimates forest losses for eastern Australia range from 3 million to 6 million hectares, including over a million hectares of Queensland’s native vegetation. Report co-author Martin Taylor says a relaxation in land clearing regulations in NSW and Queensland could trigger a resurgence in large-scale forest clearing, mainly for livestock.
Australia is an internationally renowned biological treasure, one of 17 ‘megadiverse’ countries. Our national responsibility for maintaining the planet’s biological diversity is even greater by virtue of the uniqueness of many of our species.
Queensland needs to reinstate strong controls on broadscale land clearing, including regrowing native vegetation. The weakening of broadscale land clearing regulations has already allowed instances of substantial clearing, and this will increase in scale and frequency over time.
“Queensland has been the site of more than three quarters of Australia’s land clearing in recent decades. … From 1988 to 2009, an average of 410,000 ha was cleared per year in Queensland. Less than 2% of trees cut in this period were used for timber and 93% of the clearing was to establish pasture for livestock grazing.“ “Feedlots in the southern Queensland grain growing region are the greatest single consumer of feed, followed by Victorian dairy farms and NSW feedlots.” (BZE Zero Carbon Australia Land Use report p30)
Dryland salinity has affected large areas cleared of native vegetation, and the salinity impacts of recent large-scale clearing in central Queensland have yet to be realised. Less than 10% of the original vegetation remains in some parts of southern Australia and south-east Queensland. The greatest conservation success in recent times has been the slowing of land clearing, particularly of broad-scale clearing in Queensland.
The drought in central west Queensland has left “skin and bone” kangaroos starving to death and too weak to move, residents say. The commercial kangaroo meat industry figures and Queensland senator Barry O’Sullivan both claim kangaroo numbers are out of control, despite population estimates that may suggest otherwise. The data suggests the kangaroo population in regional Queensland dropped from 26.3 million in 2013 to 22.5 million in 2014, a decrease of close to 15 per cent. There are new markets to China and Peru. No doubt this cruel industry won’t stop until they are threatened!
Despite the recent rains and coastal flooding, more than 80 per cent of Queensland remains officially drought declared. Queensland agricultural lobby groups have criticised the Labor Party over its plan to reinstate its former land clearing laws. Producers prefer to accept the inevitability of drought than to draw the dots between heavy land clearing and drought! Record numbers of Queensland cattle are going to slaughter as the drought continues to bite hard in the Sunshine State, so it’s growing- business as usual!
The Queensland Government is under pressure to stop the bulldozing of tens of thousands of hectares of bushland on Cape York, a move approved in the dying days of the previous Liberal National Party government.
(image: Recent increases in land clearing threaten Queensland’s biodiversity http://theconversation.com/land-clearing-in-queensland-triples-after-policy-ping-pong-38279)
The rate of large scale land clearing in Queensland is about to go off the scale unless the Palaszczuk government delivers on its pre-election promise to reinstate strong controls on large scale clearing. The warning from The Wilderness Society follows media reports in May 2015 revealing that clearing has just commenced on 32,000 hectares of World Heritage quality woodland at Olive Vale on Cape York Peninsula.
“The Olive Vale clearing is … the largest single permit that we’re aware of being granted for high value agriculture,” said Tim Seeling of the Wilderness Society. Conservationists argue that Olive Vale, which is on the Laura River 90 kilometres west of Cooktown, is home to 17 listed threatened species and a nationally important wetland, including the Gouldian Finch!
Land clearing is the main cause of biodiversity loss. It also exacerbates erosion and salinity, reduces water quality, worsens the impacts of drought, and contributes significantly to carbon emissions. Indeed, vegetation protection laws enabled Australia to meet its Kyoto Protocol target for emissions reductions.
For yellow-bellied gliders and other species dependent on large tree hollows, it doesn’t matter how much money is spent if hollows continue to vanish from the landscape as a result of land clearing.
(image: yellow-bellied glider from web page http://www.endangered-animals.com.au/yellow-bellied-glider.htm)
The most pronounced declines in koalas are in southeast Queensland, where urban development has destroyed and fragmented large areas of high quality Koala habitat, with resulting increases in mortality from vehicle collisions, dog attacks and disease. In the past 20 years, there have been substantial population declines in southwest Queensland and central Queensland due to drought, heatwaves, urbanization and land clearing.
It’s 25 years since prime minister Bob Hawke promised to plant a billion trees across Australia, the first of many ambitious schemes to reverse the destructive toll of broad-scale clearing by farmers. In 1995, Queensland premier Wayne Goss announced a plan to preserve 90 per cent of his state’s remnant native vegetation. Hawke’s billion trees were never planted and Keating and Goss were thrown out of office before they could fulfil their promises.
The re-acceleration of land clearing in Queensland puts the state on the world stage – and not in a good way. We are still in a Colonial mind-frame of desperate clearing of “messy” native vegetation, and environmental destruction, all for the economic model of production, profits and feeding an expanding number of mouths!
It’s time to stop the razing of our landscape for short-term profits, at the expense of the long-term impacts of destruction.
Petitions:
https://www.communityrun.org/petitions/feed-our-native-wildlife-not-more-cattle
Koala extinction? Protection is being watered down!
According to the Australian Koala Foundation, there is currently no legislation, anywhere in the country, that can protect Koalas and Koala habitat in Australia. The listing of the koala as “vulnerable” under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in 2012 changed nothing. This is supposed to be the premier law for protecting Australia’s environment, yet it is powerless.
The Australian Koala Foundation’s (AKF) research indicates that the Koala is in trouble and that extinctions of local populations have already occurred. In contrast to the millions of Koalas which were thought to be present at the time of European settlement, the AKF believes that there could be less than 80,000 remaining today, possibly as few as 43,000. If this rate of decline continues then yes, the Koala is at risk of extinction.
In 1902 in the state of New South Wales alone 600,000 koala skins were publicly sold. The historian Ellis Troughton has claimed that nearly 2 million koala skins were exported from Australia as recently as 1924. By the late 1920’s the Koala was almost extinct. The situation was so dire that they became extinct in the state of South Australia. There were only a few hundred left in New South Wales and a few thousand in Victoria and Queensland.
The major threats to koalas are listed as
- Habitat loss
- Motor vehicle and dog attacks
- Bush Fires
- Disease
“We need a national recovery plan that would mean developers have to change their behavior. And yet there’s no sign of it. They’ve got rid of so many people in the department I’m not even sure there’s anyone left who can do it” says Deborah Tabart, chief executive of the Australian Koala Foundation. Unless there’s a plan for a sustainable human population size, and a more diverse economy, then there are few options left for these iconic and world-renown animals!
Habitat loss, motor vehicles and dog attacks, bush fires will all increase with housing and human population growth.
The National Koala Alliance (NKA), which was launched recently, and aims to ensure the national icon survives and thrives for future generations. It is a non-profit network of koala conservation, welfare, advocacy and research groups working in habitat conservation, political lobbying and the protection of individual koalas. Biodiversity legislation is being watered down and koala habitat is being destroyed by coastal peri-urban development and other harmful activities such as industrial-scale logging in the state’s forests, poorly regulated private native forestry and mining, the article says. Corporate power and demands for resources and land, means continually loosening environmental controls, and releasing land for housing developments.
Queensland Koala Crusaders secretary Vanda Grabowski said State Government law dictates all koalas that are not considered reproductively viable are euthanised.
Property developers said back in 2011 that the push to list koalas as endangered will threaten an industry which employs 11 per cent of the state’s workforce. The Property Council of Australia said koalas were adequately protected! Anything in their path gets bulldozed, and with the heavy support of governments, housing always is prioritized over native animals that can go “elsewhere”!.
“At the moment if a koala isn’t considered reproductively viable it is killed, that’s the law,” Ms Grabowski said. In the past 30 years, koala populations on the Sunshine Coast have dramatically declined.
Unfortunately a lot of wildlife corridors are not linked, so koalas can’t move from one to another. This effectively restricts them to one area. The placement of wildlife corridors should be planned so that one links to another to allow free movement of our native wildlife.
The Pacific Highway threatens to bisect koala populations in the north of NSW. Habitat loss for urban development continues on the coastal lowlands. The future looks bleak for koalas. If current declines continue, koalas will be extinct in NSW by 2055.
Property developers have had a boom time, and now it’s time for a sustainable and innovative economic model. The destruction of habitats for the housing boom must end. We need to stop the addiction to “growth”, and it’s destructive bulldozing of koala habitat. We need a sustainable population plan for Australia, not just bulldozer economics!
Stop Driving Koalas towards extinction
Koalas in Australia suffer from a severe chlamydia epidemic. Take action!
Please Save our koalas from extinction – Call in and refuse the ‘Shoreline’ Development Application to Redland City Council – Redland Bay MCU013287
Please write to him and tell him to “lay the maps on the floor, make a coffee and ingest what you are seeing in this graphic display of science at its best”.
Email: Malcolm.Turnbull.MP@aph.gov.au
Tweet: @TurnbullMalcolm
We demand that the genocide of wildlife in Queensland, by land clearing, ends
TO:
The Honourable Annastacia Palaszczuk MP Premier of Queensland
Hon Dr Steven Miles, Minister for Environment and Heritage Protection and Minister for National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef
The Australian Wildlife Protection Council (AWPC) is a non-profit charity founded in 1969 by Arthur Queripel and incorporated in 1981. Registered Charity A0012224D/ ABN 85240279616
The committee and members are appalled at the wanton vandalism and carnage that’s happening in Queensland, the State under your custodianship, at this present time.
The statistics from 2014-15 — the most recent figures we have — show that 2960 square kilometres of forest was cleared in Queensland alone. This has led to a “massive escalation in the rate of deforestation”, which has resulted in the deaths of “countless native animals” and has impacted the Great Barrier Reef significantly; much of the current land-clearing is occurring in Great Barrier Reef catchment areas.
Nationally, the Australian Koala Foundation believes the koala population — which is concentrated across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, is less than 80,000. In addition to koalas, tree-clearing victims include mammals like the feathertail glider, a range of native birds and countless reptiles and frogs.
A new report by RSPCA and WWF-Australia, released Sept 7, significantly on Threatened Species day, highlights the worsening impact of tree-clearing across the east coast of the country — and koalas are on the frontline of clinging onto their existence! “The enormous extent of suffering and death caused makes tree-clearing the single greatest animal welfare crisis,” the report found.
The report exposes that tree-clearing rates due to urban sprawl, (engineered high population growth!) logging and “development” have more than tripled in recent years and Australia’s east coast now is one of 11 global deforestation hot spots.
We call this “development” as synonymous to government-sanctioned environmental vandalism!
Tens of millions of wild animals suffer injuries, displacement and death every year due to the bulldozing of their forest and woodland habitats, the report revealed. So our precious and unique native birds and animals are just collateral damage, in the name of economic progress, “economic growth”?
In Queensland alone, WWF-Australia estimates tree-clearing kills about 34 million native mammals, birds and reptiles annually.
This is genocide, and is shaming us as a supposed first world, developed nation.
Queensland has been rated as a “contemporary hot spot” for land clearing and is on par with places like Brazil, a new study has found. “Land clearing in Queensland is the highest that it has been in the last 10 years,” Dr Reside said.
“We have 95 threatened species of animal, 12 threatened species of plant that are impacted by land clearing.”
Why bother with the facade of having an Environment Department, Minister, if there’s a carte blanche for industries and property developers have an open book to do what they want, and destroy vegetation with impunity? Why have the pretence of any laws, policies or regulations to protect wildlife, our endemic species, or the environment?
According to the above WWF, (above) bulldozing of forests in Queensland has killed tens of millions of the wild Australian animals living there in recent years.
Scientists estimate tree-clearing in Queensland now kills 34 million animals each year: 900,000 mammals like koalas, possums and gliders, 2.6 million birds like cockatoos and 30.6 million reptiles including goannas, dragons, skinks and geckos. Just how are native animals meant to survive the onslaught of chain saws, bulldozers and the sure-killer of habitat being stolen?
Habitat destruction is a major driver of extinction of wildlife. Over 120 Australian vertebrate species have ended up on the
national threatened species list due in large part to bulldozing of their bushland habitats. (Tree Clearing: The hidden crisis of animal welfare in Queensland. Joint RSPCA and WWF report as below).
But this underestimates true numbers of animals affected. In particular, the legacy impacts of clearing due to fragmentation and degradation of the remaining habitat are likely to be even more severe because they are ongoing and affect subsequent generations. This is exemplified by koalas, of which more than 10,000 were admitted to the four wildlife hospitals in southeast Queensland from 2009 to 2014, mainly due to dog attacks and vehicle collisions, more than 10 times the numbers directly affected by clearing.
We would like to know where the leadership is, and how industrialists and property developers have grabbed so much power and influence? What happened to our ethics, wildlife conservation policies, standards of stewardship, and responsibilities to future generations?
This neo-Colonialism can’t be defended by 19th century ignorance, as in the past. So the policy of Terra Nullius is alive and well today, with no State, national or international safeguards against rampant destruction, the further of threatening and killing processes and the sterilization of Queensland to vast, de-nuded landscapes void of native vegetation and indigenous species? What about your responsibilities to our climate change mitigation policies?
Our members are outraged, as is the AWPC committee members. We need some answers, and we demand that NO MORE land be cleared in Queensland, that the Queensland population is stabilised, and there is funding for landscape restoration and re-vegetation of damaged ecosystems – along with protected zones, extra national parks, and breeding programs and release strategies for endangered/threatened species.
Thank you, We wait for a detailed response.
Sincerely, the Committee
Featured image: FEARS ABOUT CONTINUED LARGE-SCALE LAND CLEARING IN QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
LINKS:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/09/04/australias-hidden-environmental-crisis/
http://www.publish.csiro.au/pc/PC17001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-19/land-clearing-rates-qld-need-to-be-lowered-new-study/8628524
The culture or vilification of kangaroos, as “pests” and their killing has become engrained into our history as a macabre type of environmental “management”. It’s rationalized as a human responsibility to control their numbers, as we have changed the environment so much, due to infrastructure and agriculture, to such as way as to encourage their overpopulation and breeding! They thus are condemned for over-populating and causing mayhem, including environmental damage and threats to other species!
The great Canberra “cull” of kangaroos is being considered again, in our so-called “Bush Capital”. It’s an oxymoron, and it’s using kangaroos as a scapegoat for mismanagement and human-caused environmental destruction.
In July 2015 Canberra activist Chris Klootwijk, 70, was arrested for blowing a whistle during the ACT Government sanctioned kangaroo cull which hindered the annual shooting operation. Klootwijk is accused of hindering the cull workers by making loud noises, which included blowing a whistle.
It is alleged that his actions were designed to scare off kangaroos, making it difficult for them to be shot, and halted the cull for about 45 minutes.
Chris faces fines of up to $30,000 and up to two years in jail if found guilty because the ACT government is positioning the blowing of a whistle as a crime. Whistles are not weapons, like firearms!
Borobi the blue koala has been announced as the official mascot for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Koala numbers have plummeted by more than two thirds in less than 20 years in south-east Queensland.
One of Australia’s leading koala experts has labelled this week’s unveiling of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games mascot an embarrassment. The sad irony is that koala numbers have plummeted. They like the symbolism of our native animals, but not the actual animals!
Tweed Heads ecologist Steve Phillips said the use of a koala as the Gold Coast’s mascot was frustrating. “What we’ve seen is that progressive development, and the end result is that decline [of koalas] is proceeding at pace,” he said. High human population growth on the Coast has seen koala numbers plummet, due to urban sprawl. Some critics hit out at what they believed was state government hypocrisy in using a “vulnerable” species as the Games’ emblem but conservationists said it could actually work in favour of helping the threatened animals.
Federal threatened species commissioner Gregory Andrews denied the outlook for koalas was as dire as conservationists believed.
“I would disagree that the future is so bleak. The future is much rosier than it has been for a long time,” he said. Human population on the Gold Coast.
Over the past five years, the population of the Greater Port Macquarie region has been growing at an average rate of 1.62% per annum – driven largely by Australia’s massive immigration rates.
By the mid-nineteenth century as the European settlements grew significantly, a lucrative trade in Koala skins sprung up. Koala hunters shot, poisoned or snared these animals off their tree perches and bludgeoned them to death and sold their skins for export. The main export markets were the US, Canada and Europe where the Koala’s soft waterproof fur was used to make hats, gloves and fur linings for coats. (http://panique.com.au/trishansoz/animals/koala.html)
Due to huge public outcry, Koala hunting was banned throughout Australia by 1927. The importation of Koala skins into the US was also banned in 1927 by President Herbert Hoover while he was Secretary of Commerce.
Today’s threats to koalas are more pedestrian, of deliberate land clearing for urban sprawl. They are seen as an inevitable victim of our housing-based economy.
Our “environment” department in Victoria, DELWP, plans to “cull” 25,000 kangaroos on public land this year, under permits issued by the Victorian Government. They plans to kill 8560 red kangaroos and 5170 western grey kangaroos by Parks Victoria in the Murray Sunset National Park, 3000 eastern grey kangaroos by the Commonwealth Department of Defence at Puckapunyal, and 200 eastern grey kangaroos by Gippsland Water at Dustson Downs. DELWP said kangaroo populations were managed to “prevent crashing — or dying in large numbers from starvation during droughts — to prevent damage to vulnerable native vegetation and habitat from overgrazing, to allow heavily grazed areas to regenerate or to protect water catchments”. Rather than magnanimously prevent kangaroos from over-populating and “starving”, its really a thinly mask commercial kill, to keep up the supply of pet food, being trialed in Victoria! (Weekly Times, April 15th, 2016)
The Colonial culture of ignorance, human domination, land clearing, and killing is deeply embedded in Australia’s culture.