Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Even on our place I have catalogued the death of species: the giant ants with high, gold abdomens that looked like they’d been wrapped in gold thread – it has been over a decade since I have seen any – and the green ants with a savage bite that couldn’t be identified. I have never tried to study or catalogue the ants here, but those two were unmistakable.

  And they are gone, like the blue bees, the black native bees, the giant striped ground wasp, and the tiny blue-winged butterflies. I don’t even know why they have vanished. Species do become extinct, and not necessarily because of humans. Perhaps they may even reappear from remnant populations. I do not know. I have watched and studied my impact on my land – and that of others – and yet, I do not know.

  CHAPTER 16

  This generous land: Terrapaths, moral omnivores and how to survive the next millennia

  When a wombat ‘sees’ the land, they smell it. The scents tell them not just what is happening now, but what happened days or even months or years before. Looking at land ‘like a wombat’ means seeing today’s land as a continuum, a small blip in a long line of past and present. The greater your knowledge of the land today and yesterday, the more accurately you can predict what will happen tomorrow.

  Listening to the land does not just tell you whether there will be rain, drought, fire or locust plague or when and what to plant. It is – or should be – the basis for our economic and defence strategies, our health and population and migration policies. Humans are an integral part of Australia’s ecology. That ecology, in turn, influences outbreaks of new and old diseases, economic booms and busts, even how we relate to each other on a day-to-day basis, or in an emergency.

  You need good baseline data to make good political and planning decisions.

  Even though much traditional knowledge has been lost, our power to ‘read’ the land is now far greater than it’s ever been. With tools that range from satellite mapping to the examination of ice cores, we can watch storms gather force thousand of kilometres away and read the fossil records to tell us the story of evolution and the changing environment over millions of years.1

  Yet much of this data is never used in land management or political decision-making – political decisions are even made to deliberately not get the knowledge, so that no action need be taken. Australia’s previous chief scientist resigned because in the three years of her tenure she had never once been consulted. CSIRO has been more than decimated, its research – and that of most university departments – turned to short-term economic gain, not the long-term pursuit of knowledge that can lead to far greater financial gains from new technologies.

  Most political and planning decisions are re-active: produced with little forethought because of opinion polls or political necessity. Too few are pro-active: produced from a long-term study of trends and necessities. Our nation was created and shaped by the land. It is time we paid more attention to its voice.

  Sixteen suggestions for survival in a changing world

  1 Learn your land

  One lifetime isn’t enough to know a valley, nor even ten lifetimes. I have been lucky to have teachers, who had teachers too. In a small way – I am all too aware of how much I do not know – I’ve been given the knowledge of hundreds of generations, mostly women’s knowledge, but some from men, too.

  ‘Drought’s good for the land,’ said Bernie Ffrench at eighty as I looked at the ridge of gum trees, browning in the heat and dry. ‘You look how it grows again after.’

  He was right. Trees died, wattles crumbled, vines withered, but after two years of almost average rainfall the accumulated fertility meant a lushness I’d never seen before, the eucalypts that seemed dead sprouting thicker leaves than before, losing branches but providing more new leaves and blossom for the animals and birds to feed on.

  ‘Kurrajong will give you all you ever need,’ said old Neeta Davis.2 ‘I spent years bringing kurrajong seedlings up to the house paddocks. Chop them up for the stock when it’s dry; bake the roots if you’ve got nothing left. You can make a rope from kurrajong, or a light. It’s a woman’s tree,’ she said. ‘It’ll give you everything you need.’ A dozen uses later, I was convinced.

  Jean, in her seventies, knew the magic of getting raspberries to grow in forty-degree summers. She could kill, gut and pluck a chook in under three minutes. Ned had been watching floods and fires for sixty years and knew pretty much what any of them would do. There was Bill, too, whose memory I’d probe in his rare visits back to the place where he’d lived most of his life.

  ‘When will it rain?’ I asked Bill, the third summer I was here, when what had been a reliable twice-weekly rain shower suddenly turned into month after month of dry. He shook his head. ‘If the gully dries up in spring it won’t rain till after Christmas. But I reckon we’re in for a few dry years.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s feeling like it did back in the sixties.’

  He was right. It didn’t rain properly for another five years.

  I’d almost forgotten Bill’s answer when someone asked me during the 2003 drought when we’d have good rain and, without thinking, I said March next year.

  ‘Why?’ they asked, and when I thought about it, there were answers I could give: the various shrubs had set seed, as though their roots knew that later in the season there’d be solid rain to make the seedlings grow, the smell of mating wombats and their shrieks in the night.

  Before my son was born, I walked this valley most nights for years, watching and tracking the animals, seeing how plants really do grow, not how books said they must. Why did the wild fruit trees – even the seedling apples and peaches – bear year after year without pruning or fertilising, while my trees had to be fed and watered, pruned and sprayed? But, of course, those wild trees were being fed, with the droppings of those that the tree fed in its turn.

  If we are going to adapt to the changing world – and the world always does change, even if not at the speed with which it is changing now due to human impact – we need not just to listen to the land, to learn it, to study it, but also to use that knowledge to make political and planning decisions. Good decisions need good data. Each major planning and political decision should require substantiation, independently aquired and then verified, with publicly available data to support it.

  2 Leave areas of biodiversity, even if large areas must be developed

  The present vast areas of Queensland rainforest were once reduced to small pockets. Then the climate changed, and the species spread. Our creek has been polluted five times in the six months since a mine project began upstream. Fish and frogs vanished. Yet there have been fish and frogs again as the water cleared and I hope that they will return once more, if there’s no long-term soil contamination or changes to the creek bed, and be here in the future, too.

  I’m not saying it is safe to devastate land as long as a small area is left with species to recolonise it. But if that devastation is going to happen, it is even more important to preserve the areas of biodiversity, with as many species surviving in them as possible, and areas that have shown themselves to be resilient, or havens in drought, fire, heatwaves, storm or flood. Endangered species may not be significant in themselves, but they may be an indication of resilient land that needs to be preserved The very fact that they are endangered may also be a red light indicating poor or non-existent land and resource management. To paraphrase John Donne, ask not for whom the bell tolls. Today the hairy-nosed wombats. Tomorrow, the world’s fish reserves, or us.

  3 Be part of the society around you

  Humans survived as a species by cooperation. Individuals survive best by cooperating too. But generosity between people isn’t enough. We need to be generous to the world as well, to rejoice in it and extend to it the duties and rights that we offer each other. This isn’t because of any religious or pantheistic imperative. It’s because humans operate most efficiently when we are generous.

  In the last decades we have begun to
learn that other hominids survived right up until the last Ice Age, almost beyond it: the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis (the ‘hobbit’ people of Flores). I suspect we will find more.3

  But only Homo sapiens survived. Was it the ‘sapiens’ bit, our cleverness, that let us outlast the most recent Ice Age and the rising waters after it, not just the cold but the unexpected disasters that fast climate change brings, like the floods that broke open the Straits of Gibraltar and turned the Mediterranean into a sea, or isolated the islands off the Great Barrier Reef or Kangaroo Island? Fifteen thousand years ago Tasmania was part of the mainland and we were joined to present-day New Guinea. The changes to our coastline in the next hundred years may be as dramatic as that – and faster.

  So how did we survive?

  We walked. We talked. We cooperated. We had the intelligence to be able to communicate with strangers: we bring no threat, just hunger and desperation. We had the empathy to understand the needs of strangers. A community doesn’t have to be geographical. It can be a stamp club or an amateur dramatic society or the place where you work; it can even be a community threaded throughout the world via the World Wide Web.

  Many longitudinal studies conducted by different, mainly American universities have shown that churchgoers had longer lives, even though theoretically the more social contacts you had – especially in a crowded church – should have meant more infections. Prayer? Possibly not, for the studies also showed that the more of any kind of social encounters you have, the better your health, and the slower your deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease is too.

  Of course, if you’re in poor health you probably don’t manage to go to church often, and you’ll probably miss out on many other social encounters too. I’d rather believe that even though the methodology might have been slightly shonky, the results are true: the more you involve yourself in a community, even if it’s the Woop Woop Embroiderers’ Guild, the healthier you’ll be, and the longer you’ll retain your sanity for good years to come. If you sponsor a local netball club for teenagers, you may just find that one of the kids on drugs who goes along but also mugs people for money will ‘sort of know you’ – or even someone in your family – and say, ‘No, don’t hurt him. He’s okay.’ The more we are linked by good things, the safer we are.

  * * *

  How to tell if you’re a local

  1. Do you know the names of the main native and introduced trees in your area and the main native flowers? Not necessarily the Latin names. They can be the names your gran or kids gave to them - billy eyes or dainty sues or butter berries. If you’ve given them your own names because you love them (or hate them, just as I call vetch ‘sticky weed’ because the stuff sticks over everything), all the better. Pet names denote knowledge and intimacy.

  2. Do you have pet/family names for any local features: road, sharp corner, big hollow tree, locally owned shop?

  3. Which direction do the worst bushfire/cyclone/heatwave winds come from?

  4. How do the local bird/lizard/insect/frog populations change in winter?

  5. Who looks after your [insert name of rec ground, local hall, cemetery or church garden here]?

  6. When was the last local flood/frost/cyclone/tornado/earthquake (insert favourite local disaster)? How often do they occur, and when you might next expect one? What is the likely damage, where would you go for refuge, and how could damage be reduced?

  7. Do your neighbours know you well enough to accurately (if good-humouredly) insult you, to rescue you if you call them at 2 a.m, or work with you to survive an epidemic/tsunami/terrorist attack or months-long power failure?

  8. Name or describe three likely sources of local graffiti and whether they indicate a social danger or just that Bill got drunk last Tuesday.

  9. Compare and contrast the recipes from two local church, preschool, community group or school cookbooks.

  10. Does it take you at least five minutes of chat when you dash in to the bakery/coffee shop and grab a loaf of bread/coffee on a Saturday?

  * * *

  4 Evaluate what experts say rather than stick with your preconceptions and ideology

  Which part of the economy employs the most people?

  If you said ‘mining’, disqualify yourself from public office and any planning role. In 2011 (the latest year’s data available as I write this) mining employed 1.9 per cent of the Australian workforce, less than the number employed by the arts and recreation industries (2.9 per cent).4 Mining contributed only ten per cent of our gross national product (GNP) at the height of the last mining boom. (The figure may be lower now the boom is bust) Sixty per cent of GNP was contributed by the service sector of the economy, including tourism, education and financial services.

  The mining industry, however, contributed more than half of the export income earned by Australia in 2011. The profits go to far more than the 1.9 per cent employed in the industry. Part goes to government revenue; a larger part goes to shareholders, of which I (or at least my superannuation fund) am one. It’s often claimed that about eighty per cent of profits go overseas. I haven’t been able to verify the claim, nor find a different estimate. I am (in an extremely small way) enriched by the mining boom. But the associated costs must also be evaluated.

  The mining boom has pushed up the price of the Australian dollar, vastly reducing the opportunities for other industries as they are less competitive globally. Factories close as mines open.

  In 2012 the OECD economic survey recommended dropping the subsidy to extractive industries. Subsidies? To what are supposed to be the most lucrative industries in Australia? Yet the diesel subsidies alone are $2 billion a year. Ditching that one subsidy would pay for a heck of a lot of education and technological research, increasing employment, productivity and long-term economic prosperity.

  Why subsidise the supposedly most lucrative industry in Australia, and one where a large chunk, at least, of profits go overseas? Lack of imagination? The power of lobbyists? I suspect the real answer is that just as England, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal kept hunting for the land of gold they knew was somewhere around here, our leaders – political, industrial, media and others – are locked into a world view that says extractive industries are the foundation on which our prosperity rests, and we niggle at them at our peril.

  This mindset is equally bad for the mining industry. It may get the diesel subsidy, but much that is vital to maximise development and regional benefits and new projects – or even make them possible – is also ignored. Our mining industry is usually boom or bust, instead of steady, productive development – better for communities, as well as profits.5 Give northern and regional Australia better infrastructure – roads, rail and, especially, northern port facilities that are nearer to the mines. If the port of Darwin was expanded, and roads to it improved, there’d be less need for ports and shipping near the vulnerable and economically valuable Barrier Reef. Encourage technical apprenticeships instead of closing down tech colleges. The approval process requires an overhaul: it needs to rigorously look at the cost–benefit analysis before any project is even given encouragement to work towards approval but it also needs to be far faster, so that major projects aren’t kept dangling for years while their prospective market vanishes to competitors. Don’t subsidise major industries – facilitate them.

  The cliché syndrome doesn’t just relate to mining. What proportion of the Tasmanian workforce is involved in forestry – or was, in 2011, before the cutbacks? Half of one per cent.6

  From 2001 to 2013, General Motors Holden received $2.2 billion in subsidies from the federal government to keep their factories operating in Australia. In the same time it spent $5.9 billion on wages.7 This too appears to be a decision based on a mindset – large car factories are major employers – instead of based on cost-benefit analysis. Subsidising smaller, innovative companies may well create more reliable long-term employment than can be provided by an industry that must be massively subsidised to keep operati
ng. If you are a politician, bureaucrat or voter, demand substantiated data. Do the cost–benefit analysis. Listen to what the scientists say.

  All humans are ignorant. Some exist in a state of ‘aggressive ignorance’, where they reflexively and forcefully reject any information that makes them rethink the way they prefer the world to be. ‘I don’t know’ is a courageous and necessary statement, and should be treated with respect, not derision.

  5 Develop sensibly

  We need to evaluate all criteria of a development to be able to say that we have weighed the losses and the gains. If the gains outweigh the losses the project will go ahead. If the reverse is true, it won’t. All development proposals need a cost–benefit analysis, as is now done in China, looking at health and quality of life impacts as well as financial. At the moment too much emphasis is put on too few environmental criteria.

  Those assessments need to be independent: paid for by the developer, but carried out by an independent public service, who will not be swayed by what their employer wants. At present the terms of environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are set out by the developer and carried out by contractors paid by that company. Conditions may be imposed to limit environmental damage, but I have not been able to find an example where a single mining development has been ruled out at EIA stage. (Developments however have been halted by public appeals against the approvals, involving extraordinary amounts of research and fund-raising.) Except in rare instances of major pollution – and again, usually only after public objection or whistleblowing – the company is responsible for policing their own conditions of approval.