by Kate Holden
There was actual political effect, too. In 1989, Bob Hawke had launched the One Billion Trees program and another, Saving the Bush, to enhance native vegetation cover, though neither ever fully achieved its aim. Landcare was established that same year by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers’ Federation. It seemed the central authorities and popular enthusiasm were converging.
Focus finally expanded from deforestation of public forests to the less-glamorous clearing of bush. The NSW Farmers Association asked a committee to look into historian-farmer Eric Rolls’ 1981 account, A Million Wild Acres, of scrub infestation in the interior, and of how the removal of Aboriginal managers and overgrazing had provoked the overgrowth that now seemed to require such drastic clearing. Rolls fractured the idea, taken up by remorseful conservationists, that European colonisation had ruined a pristine Eden; but he also chronicled 200 years of devastating misjudgement by settlers. The Association was impatient with Rolls’ careful distinctions. Its chairman, Ian McClintock, grumbled that ‘the green movement wants to take the Australian landscape back to some point in the past that may never have existed’.
At the same time that conservationists were using cultural history to reify their campaigns, agricultural and mining companies began to use the conservationists’ own strategies to build social support. While their lobbyists in Canberra pressed causes, their advertising aimed to instil community support for continued resource exploitation, such as BHP’s famous campaign featuring true-blue actor Bill Hunter extolling, in a broad accent and hard hat or Akubra in turn, how the kindly, patriotic company was advancing Australia’s wellbeing.
Both sides, increasingly agile in using state authority and moral argument to promote their respective causes, were supported by public feeling. Both now had a history of achievement to draw upon. Both had the ear of government. The thing now was to put it all into forms that couldn’t be undone: to have it drawn into law.
CONSERVATION ACTIVISM OFTEN OCCURS at a local level. People respond to threats to their neighbourhood. Campaigns are mounted to protect waterways or groves or vulnerable animal populations, funds are raised from local sources, parochial pride is engaged. This form of conservation plays to the privilege of place, in the sense of a location that holds meaning, is visible, personal.
The risk with the local conservation paradigm is that it is anatomical. A frail indigenous flower might be protected from the starving native mammal that needs to eat it. One species soaks up attention, but this may lead to neglect of another, or come at a cost to an ecological community further down the creek, outside the council boundary or at the other end of the migration range. Place is precious, but when it is too lovingly fenced, a garden becomes a jail.
The contrasting approach is conservation at the landscape scale. Broad overviews of a situation, recognising whole scenarios, whole bodies of ecology, give a sense of perspective. Patterns are perceived. Systems are sensed. An ecology is made from relationships. The shrinkage and fragmentation due to broadacre cropping are dramatic in the comparison of historical maps. The mass migration of plants and habitats with the shifts of climate change will happen on a landscape scale.
Yet the landscape view can make for hazardous complacency, especially politically. A decline in habitat in one place is dismissed because there is ‘still’ so much of it on the other side of the state. The fine detail of change is invisible: a species of fish in the coastal waters failing to breed as normal seems unrelated to inland landclearing that is loosening soil and allowing silt to flow to the sea. Conservation management at landscape scale is subject to dispute: just as overfocused locals might jeopardise the wellbeing of ecologies outside their remit, those with irritable interests can protest the personal cost and make assurances that, when considered on a large scale, their actions are granular, insignificant, affordable.
From landscape-scale thinking comes the crucial and contentious concepts of ‘offsetting’, ‘set-asides’ and ‘land sparing’. Offsetting, the better-known strategy, equalises loss through allowing the clearing of ecological communities and re-establishing them elsewhere on ‘extra’ vacant or degraded land. The companion strategy, set-asides, occurs where a landholder, desirous of clearing one area, agrees to not clear, and maintain, another. This seems reasonable – except that where there were two areas of biodiversity, there is now only one. Often implied is the idea of land sparing, by which the most productive parts of a landscape are devoted to agriculture so as to free ‘spare’ land for other uses, but it works on a separating principle, devoting the very land probably preferred by wildlife to farming instead, and can distort a landscape by allowing the removal of paddock trees or waterways, whether they’re required by the wildlife or not. ‘Alley farming’ – alternating strips of cultivated crops and native vegetation – can go partway to addressing these issues, but still inhabits this confidence that separated elements can remain distinct.
Offsetting, popular with conservative administrations, places a value on native vegetation and considers that value transferrable. Vegetation is evaluated as an asset, accounting is performed and, as with the transfer of money for goods or services, an equivalent value is imposed elsewhere. The values are blunt: the amount of vegetation is assessed, but not its function in the original location, the relationship it has with other elements of an ecology, the lifeforms that live in or depend on it in that location. Native vegetation on this model has two qualities: it is vegetation and it is native. All else is occluded, emptied of texture and history.
In the landscape view – or the mechanistic model of our Enlightenment ancestors – this might make sense. One could grandly shift ecologies from here to there, maintaining tree density or carbon sequestration, numbers and distribution of wildlife. The proportion of brigalow remaining in New South Wales could, theoretically, stay the same, only sited in different places. Or even increase: if the management of an offset is put out to tender and ecologists are employed to oversee the regeneration, the result may be more copious and higher-quality vegetation than there is today. But the reality is that the ecological benefits in an offsetting scheme often vaporise across a landscape.
Conservationists like to attend to the particular even as they direct attention to broader relationships and literal landscapes. And farmers appreciate the perquisites of local knowledge and personal property, while promoting landscape-scale mechanisms to displace local responsibilities. Modern law, caught between conservationists and landholders, has it both ways: it allows general destruction of wildlife habitat while offering funding for specific salvations. The Native Vegetation Conservation Act 1997, which preceded the current Act in New South Wales, established a provision for BioBanking, a market in conservation credits that could be sold or transferred. It is now under a different name and expanded into a larger system. Particular animal species are singled out for preservation even as the plant species in their habitats are reduced. But government regulation must be broadscale, even while effects are felt at the local level. A more particulate system would be incoherent and ineffectual, whether applied to governance, conservation or compensation.
Does it matter if one community group loses a campaign to protect remnant vegetation if two groups elsewhere wins theirs? If a patch of endangered ecological community is bulldozed, but the owners increase their wealth and so pay more tax, and the government ultimately has more money to spend on restoring native vegetation?
Does it matter if habitat is fragmented and separated by baking, shadeless fields many kilometres wide, covered in tough stubble or grains soaked in herbicide; if one side of fenceline scrub is deafened with highway traffic, and the other is full of tractors sowing seed; if spray drift is careening and the soil beneath the scrub is weakened by nearby fracking activity; if the rain is infrequent because of clearing-associated rainfall reduction; if the eucalypt leaves are not as nutritious as they used to be; if the summer is hotter and drier for longer than ever before – but there is still a p
roportion of native vegetation, a certain number of koalas to be seen, giving a percentage likelihood that others have survived so far?
Landscape models are a Ponzi scheme of transferred risks and penalties, the damage hidden by shifting baseline syndrome, their philosophy appealing to fans of permeation metrics and ecosystem epistemology, but hazardous to the real lifeforms and geographies.
Offsetting is included in the current New South Wales legislation as a provision under ‘equity’, a partner to the idea that public interests in ‘taking’ from private property should result in reimbursement for the owner. Here equity means that the community should be reimbursed by the owner for ‘taking’ away from a common wealth. But while this seems just, even refreshing, it comes at a cost for the particularity of what is offset. It vacates its meaning, leaves only an outline, a value dispersing across a landscape to condense in some meaningless elsewhere.
The Turnbulls were ordered to regenerate scrub and, if that failed, to plant trees. But a sapling is not a mature tree. It will not house a koala or hollow-nesting birds for many years, if it survives. The distances of range between one habitat and another will not be precisely recreated. The lizards and insects, microbes and small mammals killed in the clearing will not be magically reanimated.
Under the current law, a property with a thousand hectares of native woodland can clear up to a hundred hectares in one three-year period, and another hundred the three years after that. The set-aside areas must be at least double those cleared. There will be, however, a gross diminution of vegetation. Habitat will be weakened. The networks will be partially cut.
If a restoration project might cost $95,000 to regenerate 30 hectares of scrub, down the road farmers might be smashing down 600 hectares for broadacre crops. ‘You can destroy what you’ve got,’ Phil Spark explains, ‘if you go and plant somewhere else. So the whole time lag and loss of habitat’s just massive. The idea is that you’re going to recreate the same community, but …’ He scoffs.
Years of effort to disprove offsetting have failed, and it now forms the structural rationale of two-thirds of approvals across the country even when they’re not properly acquitted or monitored. The impervious accountancy of it persists, the convenience of its equations. In a 2016 report, the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales examined eight case studies involving offsetting. Environmental outcomes ranged from ‘adequate’ (two), ‘poor’ (five) to ‘disastrous’ (one). Spark says wearily, ‘It’s like it has some kind of credibility that it just doesn’t have.’
A WEEK AFTER THE murder trial began in May 2016, Grant Turnbull had another appearance to make, this time in the New South Wales Land and Environment Court. It was to hear the decision on the third lot of clearing on ‘Colorado’: the clearing his father had been doing on the day he shot Glen Turner.
Grant must have felt he was perpetually being pulled back in time. That July week, the week of the winter road, was here again.
It was the familiar cut-and-paste information from previous decisions. The clearing from early January 2014 to 31 July 2014 was deemed unlawful. The OEH demanded that Grant remediate the areas unlawfully cleared. He hadn’t done the remediation from previous convictions for unlawful clearing; instead, his father had cleared the bits supposed to be regenerated. He hadn’t, Grant said, realised he was supposed to tell the OEH about that.
The OEH wanted a restraining order on Grant, to stop him clearing any more land. Grant protested. He’d contravened the Act but gave an undertaking that he wouldn’t again. That statement of present intent, noted Justice Craig drily, ‘must be understood in the context of the events’, which is that the OEH had been telling Grant his clearing was wrong since 2012, that he’d had no sign any approval would be given for the clearing and that he’d already been prosecuted for clearing on the same property. ‘The circumstances I have identified do not satisfy me that, without a restraining order in place, Mr Turnbull will adhere to the provisions of the NV Act in conducting his farming activities on “Colorado”,’ said Justice Craig. He slapped Grant with the order.
Grant had to pay the OEH’s costs. He had to do the original remediation, and the new. Grant again protested: it would cost him $4.5 million, including fencing.
Outside his father’s murder trial a few weeks later, when Grant spoke to the media, he attempted to explain his father’s reasons for feeling provoked by the OEH. ‘I’ve never been to any meeting,’ said Grant, ‘where anybody’s said, “Let’s go back to the old ways of doing things.” It is simply, “Let’s get something that is workable. It has to be workable.”’
Ian Turnbull had also commented on the situation to his family. ‘How are we going with the bloody thing as far as fighting these bastards and paying the bloody fines and whatnot?’ he’d said in one of his phone calls recorded from jail. He had apparently been advised not to pay any of the fines – the penalty for not paying them was that Turnbull would go to jail, where of course he already had. His listener murmured in understanding. ‘The main thing,’ continued Turnbull, ‘is to get the bloody [OEH] off our bloody back so the boys can go ahead and farm.’
THE 1991 CHAELUNDI CASE, in which the New South Wales government’s own forestry commission appeared to have harmed native wildlife in the Chaelundi forest, established that even inadvertent killing or taking of native fauna was a crime. This included the disturbing of habitat and breeding, feeding or nesting; anything, indeed, that jeopardised habitat and led to even a gradual reduction in numbers of an endangered species was a crime.
More laws emerged in the following decade, addressing fisheries, threatened species, land contamination and water, and finally produced the Native Vegetation Conservation Act.
Australia, like many nations, had adopted the protocol of ecologically sustainable development in 1992, following the Rio Earth Summit. Its ethos is in ‘using, conserving and enhancing the community’s resources so that ecological processes, on which life depends, are maintained, and the total quality of life, now and in the future, can be increased’. Embodied in both the current federal and the state environmental legislation, it has four main planks: the precautionary principle, advising caution in activity that may pose a threat to the landscape; intergenerational equity; conservation of biological diversity and ecological integrity; and improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms. Its principles are to be applied, in theory, to all legislation on any kind of development, at any level of governance, for all time.
The Native Vegetation Conservation Act was the work of Bob Carr, premier of the state from 1995 until 2005 and architect of some of the most robust environmental protections in New South Wales. Carr introduced the world’s first carbon trading scheme, created 350 new national parks, ensured continuous water access along the state coast and enacted laws to control the clearing of native vegetation as part of a program to curb carbon emissions. He also suffered mightily at the hands of infuriated landholder advocacy groups. A variety of interests, including the Ecological Society of Australia and Indigenous representatives, were included in stakeholder consultations for the Act. Its gestation was typically fraught, as committee consensus was vetoed by government, or farmers’ advocacy delegates, having agreed to proposals, were opposed when they returned to their communities. Rural communities felt disenfranchised and truculent, and conservation organisations were clenched in frustration.
When the law was passed, rural lobbies protested. The premier was jostled at Walgett Airport and farmers mounted roadblocks to stop compliance officers coming to inspect properties. There was some cause for their unhappiness: farm values plummeted up to a third, and the administration of approvals became agonisingly slow. Yet the law, though inflammatory and difficult, held.
Phil Spark was out at Walgett at the time, working on a regional vegetation plan, one of the Carr government’s ideas to allow communities input on regulation. ‘It was,’ Spark gives an amused puff, ‘a bloodbath.’ Exasperation colours his face. ‘We thought, after four y
ears, that we were just about to get somewhere, and the NSW Farmers completely pulled all their representatives out, out of all the committees that were operating right across the state, and there we were.’ He shakes his head. ‘We’d just wasted four years.’
Chris Nadolny, too, had been involved in consultations leading to the Act. He’d been assisting the Native Vegetation Advisory Council, established in 1998, to help direct and liaise consultations with community groups, government agencies and landholders. He co-authored a paper explaining the ecological importance of native vegetation; he had had decades of experience in both practical ecology and fractious relations with authority by the time he walked beside Turner across the stubble of ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ to see what the Turnbulls had done.
That advisory council published a report in 2000, outlining the crucial benefits of keeping indigenous flora in landscapes. In 2002, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists offered Carr documents that suggested only an immediate end to broadscale clearing would suffice to restore environmental balance. Yet the Native Vegetation Conservation Act had come at huge political cost to the Carr government and antagonised landholders and farmers’ groups into obduracy. After various interpretations and refinements in the courts, judicial reviews and merits proceedings, the 1997 Act would be revised.
