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Aussie environment destruction
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote in message ... "George.com" wrote in message ... Interesting book I and 3/4 the way through, Collapse - How societies choose to fail or succeed, Jared Diamond (I can recomend it). There is a chapter on Aus that is good reading. The chapter is titled "Mining Australia" and says essentially that for decades ockers have mined not only minerals but also soil nutrients, timber resources, moisture/water and fishing stocks. It is exactly the same in any other western country which is rich in "natural resources". The only difference between Oz and other western countries is that Oz has a (generally) extremely fragile soil and being a very old continent, limited fertility except for thin coastal strips. indeed true, however I never realised the extent of the fragility of Aussie forests. I find it odd that the forests are still felled given that the resulting land is not much productive for anything else. Even worse, exporting wood chip to Japan to be made into paper. Were the export of woods sustainable I could at least understand. As it seems the export is not sustainable it is surprising. We learnt a few years back to stop felling native forests, including chipping our native beech trees for export to Japan. Moreover, our native forests have a much better ability to regenerate than Aus forests it seems given better soil we have. The bit about timber I found expecially interesting. I am aware that Aus exports timber, we get oz hardwood in NZ for decks and the like. I presumed that it was from a sustainable resource. According to Diamond this is not the case. The rate of timber growth is slow for you compared to say NZ. Once a forest is stripped of mature trees the conditions for regrowth is quite difficult and can lead to the drying out, even desertification, of the soil. Not sure I will buy any more Aus hardwood if that is the case. He reckoned that much of the nutrient value of your bush is held in the trees themselves. I have understood for a while that your soil is low in nutrients given its age. It seems the trees store much of the nutrients and recycle it through the growing cycle as they shed leaves or die and decay. Once the trees are gone so is much of the nutrient. The trees could curvive and grow as they existed in a closed cycle with the existing nutrients recycled many many times. Once the nutrients were stripped away by forestry there was nowt left in the soil for regrowth. If true, a really fascinating example of closed cycles in nature and the way ignorant human activity can destroy it. The importation of exportation of ANY products on or off the land on which it is raised or grown is mining. If you eat meat or vegetables that are not grown on your own land, or wear clothes that are not produced from your own land, you are involved in mining the fertility belonging to someone else. We all do it and have done since time immemorial. I don't know anyone who can only survive on the products of their own land or return all their wastes to their own land. If you have been reading this ng for some time, you may recall that at one stage Otterbot made the comment that there is no such thing as unproductive land. She was (generally) right because any land can be made productive but it at the cost or mining somewhere else for nutrients. Tree cropping is perhaps the most "sustainable" form of cropping but it is dependant upon the soil and I have no doubt that there are some areas of Oz that could be very much depleted after a single tree harvest. I can't think of any area off the top of my head but I don't know about all our timber growing areas. He also described in some length the salinisation of your soils. I knew about it however the author described in length how the salt pans came to exist, how irrigation can cause the salt level to rise and dryland salinisation results from leaving productive land bare for much of the year allowing rain to wash salts through waterways or raise it to the surface. The soluable salts then infest waterways. If he wrote that about dryland salinity, then he doesn't know what he's on about. Dryland salinity and salinity on irrigated land have differing causes, as is perhaps the salinity of WA (which I have read has largely been caused by millenia of onshore winds bringing in ocean salt which has then settled on the land). That latter explanation could be pure crud, but I've certainly read of that being an explanation for WA. I summarised in (very) brief. The explaination is much moe detailed. The explaination seemed plausible enough in the book. rob |
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