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Aussie environment destruction
0tterbot wrote:
"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. 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. 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. This isn't a criticism mind, kiwis have done a good job of habitat degredation as well. I guess our environment is not so fragile in many ways. I did not realise just how fragile the Aus environment was (aside from your droughts). Comments welcome. rob my only real comment would be: "don't get me started". :-) on a positive note, many people are waking up to better ways to do things here, and it's a learning process that i believe is almost at critical mass, but essentially are hindered by a few things (see jonno's post) but mainly our godforsaken dickhead gobshite ****knuckle federal govt, who have now decided it's a top idea to drain wetlands so that people who already waste water can waste even more of it. i could just scream (in fact, sometimes i do!) kylie Aboslutely That came out wrong. Am I getting into fruedian slips? Better than womens underwear I suppose. I hope I made sense on that last post. |
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