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It's a Whole new way of seeing Green
August 8, 2005, Sydney Morning Herald - Although an Australian story,
it highlights many of the symptoms experienced here in New Zealand.
The land needs more people and animals, not less, to avoid
environmental disaster, writes Paul Sheehan.
The Void Express leaves Central railway station at 7.10 each morning.
Platform one. Officially, it is the XPT CountryLink express to the
western plains. I caught this train on a recent Tuesday. At 10.42am,
exactly on time, the train arrived at Bathurst, where I disembarked. I
caught a taxi to the local airport. Waiting on the tarmac was the plane
that would take me deeper into the void.
It was a single-engined four-seater, a Cessna 182. The pilot, George
King, was ready to go. We shook hands, got into the plane, taxied out
onto the runway, and took off. Into the air by 10.55am. That's how it
happens at country airfields.
King treats his Cessna like a family car, popping often between his
family company's two properties and far afield to the Northern
Territory, to buy cattle. It means he has spent a lot of time reading a
lot of countryside. And the more he has seen, the more he has moved
across the gulf that exists between dominant perceptions and the
reality of what is happening to this country. The void. Terrorism is
not the biggest long-term threat to Australia.
In the process of studying the fundamental structure of the country, he
has become a radical, despite the cockie's uniform of broad-rimmed hat,
denim shirt and blue jeans. "Our politicians and bureaucrats are still
illiterate about this environment. They have no concept of the
foundation blocks of ecosystems. And Bob Brown is one of the worst."
(So he's not joining the Greens any day soon.) "We're still treating
the symptoms, not the underlying cause. Droughts and water shortages
are just symptoms."
Despite the recent rains, which have left the brown land carpeted in
khaki-coloured cover, the horizon is covered with brown haze. "We've
been in a haze for the last hour," King says. "It's just appalling. In
a healthy landscape we wouldn't be seeing a permanent dust haze. But
it's coming off exposed soils and scalded country."
He then proffers this mild criticism of our environment's protectors:
"The National Parks and Wildlife Service is, by far, the greatest
environmental vandal in the country."
King is not one of those hot-air machines who has never run a business,
never turned a profit, never revitalised a landscape. He's 32 and since
taking over management of the family property, Coombing Park, between
Bathurst and Cowra, carrying capacity has increased by 30 per cent,
costs have fallen by a third, and it had permanent ground cover through
the drought. The 4000 hectare property has been praised in the farmer's
bible, The Land.
On the day we flew around the state, newspapers carried reports from
the Australian Productivity Commission that there are 46,000 fewer
farms than there were 20 years ago. Agriculture employs just 4 per cent
of the nation's workforce. King believes this is exactly the opposite
to the direction in which the country should be headed. He is a member
of a growing worldwide movement that follows the Allan Savory method of
land management. Savory and his supporters don't like land simply being
locked up in order to save it. They want more people on the land and
more animals.
Savory has encapsulated his views in Holistic Management (only
available from the US). He grew up in Africa, observing the enormous
numbers of animals that moved across the grasslands without degrading
the landscape. He saw the water cycle, the mineral cycle, and the flow
of energy had been in harmony on these plains for millions of years. It
is not possible to sum up 500 pages of meticulous argument in a few
words, but King is good at distilling the message:
"Ecosystems function as a whole so we need to manage the whole. The
role of animals in an environment like ours is critical. The Earth's
surface is 70 per cent brittle-tending, and it used to support
infinitely more animals than it does now. Australia has lost 94 per
cent of its mega-fauna since humans have been introduced...
"In a naturally functioning ecosystem the herbivores are held in tight
mobs by predators. When they get onto an area of land they graze it
down heavily, trample a lot of grass, which forms a protective mulch on
the soil surface; they defecate and urinate. No animal will eat fouled
ground, so the plants get both fertiliser and a recovery period before
being grazed again. The herbivores move on, in a tight mob for safety
from predators. For millions of years, brittle environments have
evolved with this herbivore-predator relationship."
This pattern happens in microcosm at Coombing Park, where land is
fenced into subsections and stock rotated like a migrating herd. The
property now has significantly greater biodiversity, which is critical,
and is covered by a mixture of grasses and weeds. A threatened and
beautiful species, the superb parrot, has moved into Coombing Park from
other, degraded areas.
"The soil is a living organism, and like all living organisms it needs
a skin to survive," King says. "So the earth needs to be covered with
mulch and grass to sustain its health. Overstocking has little to do
with the number of stock on the land and everything to do with the
amount of time stock stay on the land. We need a big paradigm shift ...
"If you could have 100 per cent ground cover all year round, you'd have
the soil maintained, good water flow, lower cost of production, no
erosion, and much higher productivity. But that's not what the market
rewards. It rewards farmers who create a sterile monoculture of wheat
with high chemical input. We have a massive toxin load in our food.
That's why so many people are getting cancer."
The void between the King/Savory view and many conventional wisdoms is
stark. It is the void between seeing the land as a whole and treating
it as a patchwork quilt of businesses. When I visited Coombing Park
during the drought I became convinced something important has happened
there because I saw the void written on the landscape, in sharp relief.
I was on a straw-green island surrounded by a sea of brown.
Paul Sheehan SMH 8 August 05
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