by Heidi Norman
Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road-free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumours.
And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.
For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.
But we need roads
And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads, seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.
How do we balance these two competing realities, between road-lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road-fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?
This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I’ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.
A global roadmap
Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.
We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.
The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.
Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.
Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads. Such roads could give them ready access to fertilisers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.
In these regions, most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.
A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as magnets – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.
In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.
Conflict zones, but reasons to hope
By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.
In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.
Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’, where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash (light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming).
The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.
But there are also massive conflict zones: in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.
Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.
Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.
There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.
Playing God
Small mammals vanish in northern Australia
An uneasy alliance
Messages from Mungo
John Pickrell
It’s almost silent, but all around me shift the sands of time. I am sitting on a dune 50 metres above the saltbush plains at Mungo National Park, in south-western NSW. A cool breeze carries with it fine grains of silica, and the soft glow of first light is beginning to illuminate a series of emu tracks that trail past me and disappear over the crest of the dune. Just a little while earlier, the Milky Way had been a clear streak across the sky, and Venus, Mars and Saturn were all bright points of light. There was even the brief and exciting flare of a shooting star – a distant traveller met with a fiery demise.
Aboriginal people have camped here on this very dune and on others like it in the Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area (WHA) for more than 50 millennia, beginning long before modern humans had even arrived in Western Europe. On countless occasions, they have looked out at the rising sun and seen the same night sky awash with twinkling stars. Beneath me in the dune are their stone tools, the baked hearths of their cooking fires, and their carefully buried or cremated human remains.
Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Australia, you can feel a connection to the first people who arrived more than 60 000 years ago. They were at the front of a wave of migration that carried small bands of travellers on an almost implausible journey, by foot and over many generations, from Africa and along the coasts of Asia. Eventually – via an ocean crossing from Indonesia that was shorter than it would be today due to lower sea levels – they made their way to northern Australia.
The first occupation sites in Australia are below today’s sea level, so we’re unlikely to ever find traces of them. Perhaps the earliest evidence of these migrants is a rock shelter, known as Malakunanja II, located about 50 kilometres inland from the Arnhem Land coast. Here, alongside rock art, the remains of stone tools, grinding stones, ochre and charcoal have been found, the oldest of which are about 55 000 years old.
The next evidence we have of people living in Australia comes from Mungo National Park and the wider Willandra Lakes area – and here it is abundant. In geological layers dated as far back as 50 000 years, there are stone tools and hearths, shellfish middens and butchered animal bones.
Australia’s Aboriginal people have the oldest continuous culture on the planet and today we take its great antiquity for granted, but this wasn’t always so. When now-retired professor Jim Bowler stumbled upon the cremated remains that came to be known as Mungo Lady, in 1969, it suggested Aboriginal people had been here far longer than scientists suspected. But it was his 1974 discovery of Mungo Man that really startled the world.
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In 1974 Jim was working as a geologist with the Australian National University (ANU), in Canberra, looking at rocks in the south-western corner of NSW to find clues about ancient climate change; he wasn’t an archaeologist and he hadn’t set out to find human remains. ‘I wanted to unwrap the story of the climatic legacy written in the A
ustralian landscape,’ Jim tells me when I meet him at Mungo on a warm autumn day, the air thick with flies. ‘My agenda was to explore the … dry inland country, the dune systems and salt lakes. I was reconstructing the impact of Ice Age climatic change.’
Few people had explored the now-dry ancient lakebeds that spanned the sheep stations in this remote spot. Jim was mapping them for the first time. ‘I was able to identify the shorelines of the lakes, and in them, find stone tools and shells and evidence of human remains. That completely changed the importance of the system,’ says Jim, now in his eighties and living in Melbourne. Here, five years earlier, he had found Mungo Lady – hundreds of fragments of bone, now known to be the world’s earliest recorded cremation. Although the true age of this find was not realised until later, it was clear it was a globally significant discovery. At this time, scientists believed Aboriginal people had arrived in Australia some 15–20 000 years ago, but this figure was about to be corrected dramatically.
In 1974 prolonged rain confined Jim to the shearers’ quarters at Mungo station. On 26 February the conditions improved and he was excited as heavy rains expose new artefacts. Little did Jim realise that this would be a historic day. ‘I hunted along in the same area as Mungo Lady. In that part of the landscape, when you get your eye in, you can follow a particular geological horizon – it’s like a geological map, with layers that are 20, 30, 40 thousand years old,’ he says.
Less than half a kilometre from where Mungo Lady was found, he stopped dead in his tracks. ‘I spotted the tip of a white bone. I brushed away and it was clearly a skull … and I brushed away a bit further and the mandible was attached. And I thought, “Holy shit! This is the companion to Mungo Lady.” I raced to the nearest shearing station and got on the telephone to Canberra … I thought, “I’m not going to touch this; this is a specialist job.”’
It was another day before archaeological heavyweight Professor Alan Thorne arrived from ANU with a truckload of assistants and the excavation began. They had only to strip off 10–15 centimetres of topsoil. Rarely are excavations this simple. A deeper trench was dug to reveal sediments above and below the skeleton, which could later be used to help date it. It wasn’t until much later (and after significant scientific debate) that a series of studies confirmed that both Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were about 40–42 000 years old, but Jim’s knowledge of geological layers already told him the remains were older than any others in Australia.
As the excavations proceeded, the researchers found red pellets and staining in the grave. It began to dawn on Jim that this was a kind of ochre used as body paint by Aboriginal people today. ‘There’s no ochre for miles around here – you have to transport it in. Then you have the ritual of grinding the ochre. There was a fire alongside the burial … so perhaps a smoking ceremony. The ochre was ground up and painted or sprinkled on. Either way, it demonstrates this community around him was in mourning. It’s the sort of ceremony and ritual that does justice to any church service today.’ These were among the world’s earliest recorded funerary rites.
The bones of both Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, as well as the fragmentary remains of as many as 100 other people found at Willandra, made their way into ANU collections in Canberra during the 1970s and ’80s. The NSW State Government purchased Mungo station and turned it into a national park in 1979 (funds from Australian Geographic’s founder Dick Smith helped establish the visitors centre, which includes a small museum). Gazetting of the larger WHA followed in 1981. However, unease and resentment would grow in the following years because the remains were removed from Willandra without consultation with people from the area’s three Aboriginal groups, the Paakantyi (also spelled Barkandji), Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi.
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The Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area covers 2400 square kilometres of semi-arid saltbush plains, dunes and sparse woodlands in the Murray Basin of south-western NSW. It consists of 19 dry relict lakes that were once filled with glacial meltwater flowing east along the Willandra Creek from the Great Dividing Range. These Pleistocene-era lakes, which were full from about 50 000 years ago, vary in size from 6 to 350 square kilometres; all have crescent moon-shaped dunes called lunettes on their eastern sides, formed by prevailing winds. Mungo National Park itself covers about 70 per cent of Lake Mungo, including the striking Walls of China, which are part of the lake’s 26 kilometre-long lunette.
As the last ice age (which ran from about 110 000 to about 12 000 years ago) waned, the glacial ice dwindled and water no longer flowed from the highlands to replenish the lakes, the last of which dried up 17 500 years ago. Despite their age, the flat expanses of the lake floors and the dune systems that surrounded them are still obvious today.
While the lakes were full, the lush wetland system teemed with life. People would have camped along the shores, hunting and foraging for freshwater mussels, yabbies, golden perch and Murray cod, as well as emus, kangaroos and other large species. The fossils of more than 55 animals have been found in the lunettes – snakes and wombats, but also extinct species such as Procoptodon and Genyornis. Alongside the animal fossils are stone tools and ancient fireplaces that reveal extensive human occupation. Most significant, though, are the human remains scattered throughout the eroding dunes.
‘Some of the very earliest modern human remains in the world are here at Mungo,’ says Harvey Johnston, a NSW Office of Environment and Heritage archaeologist, who’s been involved with Willandra since the late 1980s. ‘You have this record of human occupation going back 40 000 years and burials and ceremonies associated with that: cremations, burials with ochre, multiple individuals and burials with unusual features.’
A number of other scientifically significant remains have been discovered at Willandra but never disturbed or studied, in line with the wishes of the area’s Aboriginal custodians. ‘Mungo Child’, as it has become known to scientists, was discovered in 1987 and may be of similar antiquity to Mungo Man. ‘There are no other juvenile skeletons in this 40 000-year age range in the entire Australian and Asian region,’ says Dr Michael Westaway, from Griffith University in Brisbane. ‘The remains of Homo sapiens of this antiquity are very, very rare globally.’
When the top of the juvenile skull was discovered, just a few centimetres of sand were brushed off it before it was reburied. ‘It was never fully excavated,’ Harvey says. ‘Some years later, part of the mandible [jaw] became exposed through natural erosion, and confirmed it was clearly an adolescent or child.’ Since the mid-1980s, park rangers swiftly rebury any exposed human remains, often covering them with shadecloth to retard erosion.
* * * * *
‘It’s incredible to think this place was a freshwater lake filled with fish and mussels and people fishing – and it just dried up. Nature has its own way of doing things,’ says Mutthi Mutthi elder Mary Pappin. Mary is one of a number of passionate and outspoken Aboriginal women who’ve pushed hard for the rights of their people here. Her late mother, Alice Kelly, led the fight to have Mungo Lady returned to the park in the 1990s (the remains have since been kept in a locked vault on site).
‘Every time I’m out there I know I’m walking with my mob. With my elders, my past and my present,’ Mary says. ‘It’s just something that you feel and it makes you proud to know you belong to a race of people that survived in a landscape for many thousands of years without destroying it.’
Along with the Paakantyi and the Ngiyampaa, the Mutthi Mutthi are custodians of Willandra today. Mutthi Mutthi country lies east and south of Willandra; it encompasses sections of the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Lachlan rivers. Paakantyi land stretches north from the Victoria border, to Broken Hill and Wilcannia. It includes sections of the Darling River and its tributaries. The Ngiyampaa once inhabited the plains and hills east of the Darling River and north of Willandra Creek. People of these three groups now live largely in local towns such as Ivanhoe, Pooncarie, Mildura, Balranald, Hay and Wilcannia.
The issues surrounding the unearthing and sc
ientific study of human remains at Willandra are complex and sensitive. The Aboriginal community feels they have an unbroken connection with the people buried here and a responsibility to see their spirits left in peace. ‘These are relatives. These are ancestors,’ Harvey says. ‘The people are associated with these remains in a very strong way. That’s very critical to the whole equation.’
Ngiyampaa elder Roy Kennedy says his people are unhappy about what happened here in the ’70s and ’80s. ‘They just come in and dug them out of the ground, took them to Canberra without any consultation. That in my book is wrong,’ he says. ‘It’s alright for white blokes to come out here and dig up Aboriginal people, throw them in a box and take them down to Canberra and scan them, rescan them, turn them over and put them back in their box. But if we tried that – went into a white fella cemetery and done that – we’d have been shot.’
Paakantyi man Ricky Mitchell is a community project coordinator with the Willandra Lakes Region WHA. He says the remains at ANU are ‘crying to come home to country. The country where they’re held, it’s not their country. They want to come back out here and then they’ll rest.’
In the 1970s, when Mungo Man’s remains were estimated at 40 000 years old, this was startling for many, though perhaps not for Aboriginal Australians, who’d always known from their Dreamtime narratives that their ancestors had been here a long time. ‘It was modern science confirming what Aboriginal people knew all along,’ says Harvey. Nevertheless, the discovery was profoundly significant and its implications still reverberate today. The phrase ‘40 000 years’ was quickly adopted by land rights campaigners and became a tremendously powerful political statement used to reinforce messages of Aboriginal heritage, history and ownership.
Mary Pappin believes the bones returned to the surface for a purpose. As she said to Jim Bowler: ‘You didn’t find Mungo Lady and Mungo Man – they found you. Because they had a story to tell even after 45 000 years. They wanted to let white Australia know that the Aboriginal people had been here for a long time and they are still here.’
