Humankind has altered the Australian landscape more in the past 230 years than in the 230 centuries before that.
Our European forebears tried to make Australia like ‘home’, with familiar animals, birds and plants, including crops. Australia has always had dry periods – we now call them droughts – and the indigenous biota has had eons of time to successfully adapt.
The temperate-climate European populations of animals, plants and people have generally not adapted very well to these conditions.
There are two distinct but interactive components to the rain-water cycle of our continent.
Rain can come from offshore, ocean-weather patterns which are highly variable in timing and intensity but are important, continent-wide, for filling up and flushing out water-ways and replenishing the aquifers.
The second component consists of the deep-rooted trees and shrubs which draw up and respire this subsurface, store water and release it to the atmosphere, where it can precipitate as fog or more local rain. Our widespread clearance of deep-rooted, native vegetation and replacing it with shallow-rooted, introduced species, has seriously restricted or denied access to this stored water source, which has exacerbated our present water shortages and denied the forests on the eastern side of the continent the moisture they needed and caused them to dry to such a dangerous extent.
We should recognise the present situation has evolved over at least the past hundred years, but has accelerated more recently.
There is an urgent need to re-vegetate with locally adapted plants, on a grand scale. It is beyond dispute that at least 10 percent of farm land can be set aside for such work without affecting the level of productivity of the remainder.
There really is no excuse for ongoing inaction.
Cor Lenghaus
Armstrong
The entire January 29, 2020 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!
The entire January 29,, 2019 edition of AgLife is available online. READ IT HERE!
