There are rafts of administrators, reports, computer models, guidelines and plans, but the only restoration and conservation of any value is being done by volunteers and farmers. The vast sums currently being squandered could actually achieve worthwhile results were they redirected to practical solutions.
I have worked as a hydrologist and environmental scientist for 30 years. Over that time hope for environmental conservation has given way to fatalism. Governments of all ilk have failed to reverse environmental and biodiversity decline. There has been some progress but it has been partial at best and misguided at worst. Impacts from industry, residential development, farming and mining have declined. Land clearing laws have seen savannah – maintained by indigenous peoples over millennia – give way to woody weeds, feral species and declining biodiversity over vast swathes of the Australian landscape.
The 2007 Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment found that riparian zones are declining over 73% of Australia. There has been a massive decline in the ranges of indigenous mammals over more than 100 years. In the past 200 years, 22 Australian mammals have become extinct – a third of the world’s recent extinctions. Further decline in ranges is still occurring and is likely to result in more extinctions. Mammals are declining in 174 of 384 subregions in Australia and rapidly declining in 20. The threats to vascular plants are increasing over much of Australia. Threatened birds are declining across 45% of the country, with extinctions in arid parts of Western Australia. Reptiles are declining across 30% of the country. Threatened amphibians are in decline in south-eastern Australia and are rapidly declining in the South East Queensland, Brigalow Belt South and Wet Tropics bioregions.
Our rivers are still carrying huge excesses of sand and mud. The mud washes out onto coastlines destroying seagrass and corals. The sand chokes up pools and riffles and fills billabongs putting intense pressure on inland, aquatic ecologies. In 1992, the Mary River in south east Queensland flooded carrying millions of tonnes of mud into Hervey Bay. A thousand square kilometres of seagrass died off decimating dugongs, turtles and fisheries. The seagrass has grown back but the problems of the Mary River have not been fixed. The banks have not been stabilised and the seagrass could be lost again at any time. A huge excess of sand working its way down the river is driving to extinction the Mary River cod and the Mary River turtle. The situation in the Mary River is mirrored in catchments right across the country. Nationally, 50% of our seagrasses have been lost and it has been this way for at least thirty years.
It is well known what the problems are. The causes of the declines in biodiversity are land clearing, land salinisation, land degradation, habitat fragmentation, overgrazing, exotic weeds, feral animals, rivers that have been pushed past their points of equilibrium and changed fire regimes. The individual solutions are often fairly simple and only in aggregate do they become daunting. One of the problems is that the issues are reviewed at a distance. Looking at issues from a National or State perspective is too complex. Even if problems are identified broadly, it is difficult to establish local priorities. Looking at issues from a distance means that a focus on the immediate and fundamental causes of problems is lost. There are rafts of administrators, reports, computer models, guidelines and plans, but the only on-ground restoration and conservation is done by volunteers and farmers. Volunteers are valiantly struggling but it is too little too late. Farmers tend to look at their own properties, understandably, and not at integrated landscape function. Governments apply greenwash with very little understanding of, and support for, the necessary regional approaches of farmers groups, volunteers or indeed their own staff.
