Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Bodies of water like Lake George near Canberra can be dry for more than a hundred years then fill up in months. Our land has many dry lakes. They may have been dry for decades, or even centuries. But they will not always be dry. This can be a land of long, long seasons.

  Even a hill that is above sea level may not be safe for long. Islands exist either because their rocky shores protect them from waves and storm or because storms deposit even more sand as dunes, which protect the land behind. A hill may survive the night’s deluge but not the next few storms.

  Prediction 7: Pacific Islands like Vanuatu will vanish within a few decades.

  Not because of global warming but because they are sinking, part of the cycle of plate tectonics of our planet2, whereby some territories rise and others are subducted into the sea, and because sand islands have always been relatively temporary, washed up by storms, held together as birds drop seeds while different pieces of land washed up and eventually eroded away again. Other areas, like the land under Greater Jakarta, are dropping by up to ten centimetres a year due to the pumping out of groundwater. Large parts of the city, including the airport, will be sea, not land, by 2030. The head of water resources at Indonesia’s Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, Dodid Murdohardono, has stated that groundwater has dropped by thirty metres since the 1960s. Indonesia has the financial and technical resources to combat this, with a giant dam around the bay and other measures. As I write this there are several plans around the world to create man-made islands, both residential ones off major cities where land prices are high or local violence is prevalent, and to be used as cropland. But small and impoverished nations don’t have that option. Sixty thousand years ago our land was settled because of local natural disaster. Where should islanders go for refuge now?

  Prediction 8: Expect earthquakes.

  Earthquakes happen; usually we don’t notice them because most of them happen in unpopulated areas. But as populated areas expand, expect more devastation. It is likely that humans sometimes trigger earthquakes, too, as well as the more common land subsidence, by pumping too much water from aquifers.

  To a limited extent, earthquakes in some areas can be predicted, at least with a known level of risk even if not with the precision to say, ‘On the fifth of June at 5 p.m.’ Stress levels on some known major fault lines are routinely measured, and information like this has led scientists to predict an even worse earthquake for the South Island of New Zealand than the one that caused so much damage in Christchurch. There are predictions for massive quakes near Indonesia, Tokyo and California. With all of these it is ‘when’, not ‘if’.

  But most fault lines in Australia are not adequately mapped, including one that runs through our property and is adjacent to the mining project that will dig half a kilometre into the earth, nor have stress readings been taken along it. There is insufficient data to assign any level of risk; and this is the case with nearly all of Australia’s fault lines.3

  Prediction 9: Expect a major east coast tsunami.

  Sand deposits inland along the east coast of Australia indicate that tsunamis occur roughly every two hundred years, as the detritus on the continental shelf builds up and then collapses down into the depths. Today? Tomorrow? A hundred years hence? Just don’t think our east coast is immune. (Nor is it alone: New York exists under threat of a major landslip in Madeira, a large part of the USA will be made uninhabitable when the super-volcano under Yellowstone National Park erupts, and California will be unrecognisable when the San Andreas Fault rips again.) Our north and northwest coasts are even more vulnerable to the effects of frequent underwater earthquakes in the ‘rim of fire’ regions nearby.4

  Prediction 10: Expect a new pandemic within the next twenty years.

  This will probably be caused by a zoonosis, a mutated virus or prion passed on by mosquitoes, droplets, blood, mucus, or faecal or food contamination from other species that are the normal reservoir for that disease, such as poultry, pigs, fruit bats (via horses infected by flying fox droppings in their feed in the case of hendra virus), waterbirds or even from wildlife such as chimpanzees.

  Plagues of pests are eventually attacked by predators. The plague build-up of human numbers will host a new virus, or many viruses. Pandemics are worst when humans move large distances to major population centres, as happened at the end of World War 1 when there were more deaths due to influenza than the war. These days we move more than ever: twenty mutated smallpox carriers in twenty planes each infecting twenty people, who infect another twenty – you do the maths. How many are infected in eight weeks’ time?

  But a pandemic can be predicted just by looking at a map of human settlement. There are a lot of us. If we were grasshoppers or rabbits we’d be called a plague. Plague numbers crash due to a rise in predators or disease or starvation and a host of other controls. The more crowded a species is, the easier it is to transmit disease or parasites; the more a species travels, the wider the infection area. What is the most common cause of death for women? Hands up if you said heart disease, childbirth, cancer or starvation.

  It’s none of these – it’s AIDS. In 2012, 14.4 per cent of global female deaths were from AIDS. The most common cause of male deaths is heart disease (12.8 per cent), with AIDS and road traffic accidents in second place (10.7 per cent each).5

  Plague proportion populations are not viable indefinitely. Humans are not immune.

  Prediction 11: There is a brown snake slithering unseen in the salvias outside my study window.

  The red-browed finches are trilling ‘snake alarm’ calls. (I never promised you all the predictions would be profound.)

  Prediction 12: Expect fire from the sky. Also locust plagues. And boils.

  At 10.49 p.m., fifteen years ago, I looked up at the night sky to see the burning wreckage of a giant plane silently hurtling down on us. I blinked, and then it wasn’t a plane, but a spinning ball of burning green and pink that split in two, then three, then vanished behind the mountain. After several calls to astronomers at Stromlo, Parkes and Coonabarabran, that giant fireball was identified as a large meteor, mostly nickel, quite common. As there’d been no sound, despite its size, and given its trajectory, it probably landed in the sea between Sydney and Lord Howe Island. No one else reported seeing it; relatively little of our skies are surveyed. If it had landed a few seconds earlier, on Sydney, the office of HarperCollins Australia may not have survived in its present form to publish this.

  Asteroids that explode before they hit the ground and are large enough to damage areas wider then a kilometre probably land on earth about every 1.3 years. Asteroids large enough to form a crater 1.2 kilometres wide, with far greater surrounding devastation from the impact blast, occur about every 5200 years. About five hundred much smaller meteors make it to the ground each year. Asteroids usually land in the sea, because seventy-one per cent of the earth’s surface is ocean (these may cause tsunamis if the asteroid is large enough), or where there are no people to see them. Australia has about thirty known and ancient asteroid craters. One of the most recent is about 5000 years old at Boxhole in the Northern Territory and about 170 metres wide. The 20,000-year-old crater at Veevers in Western Australia is about twenty metres wide. Both are well within the time of human settlement.6

  As the world grows more populous and people remote from cities now have phones with cameras to record such events, expect to hear about more them. It won’t necessarily mean that there are more, just that they are now being seen and causing damage that affects us.

  Locust plagues? We’ve already caused them, and with increased water use that drains the swamps where their predator ibis live, there are increasingly fewer natural controls. As rain is one of the best ways to prevent swarms growing to plague size, expect more in future droughts.

  Boils? Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a growing threat, but one that ingenuity, combined with relatively immediate financial gain for the company that produces them, might counter.

  Prediction 13: The
weather will change.

  It has always changed. Do not expect the last decade to be a guide to the next. For at least the past 60,000 years Australia has been a land where dry times can last centuries, or decades as did one from 1877 to 1903, and flood seasons last for years. But what we face now is more rapid change. According to the Australian Climate Commission, Australia is already experiencing a pattern of increased weather extremes, drought in southeast and southwest Australia, heavy rain and cyclones in northern Australia, bushfire in southeast Australia, as well as unprecedented flooding. The commission also stated that the climate has already changed in parts of Australia, since the 1970s for southwest Australia and the 1990s for the southeast. The commission’s report has been backed by climate scientists in Australia as well as the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and the UN’s chief science body on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

  As well as rising temperatures there also seems to be a rise in extreme events, as weather patterns move more slowly, globally. This means that their effects intensify: hotter periods get hotter, colder ones get colder, dryer ones even more dry, and wet ones more rain. A cold front that lingers means metres of snow, instead of centimetres or at least a longer period of more severe cold; a rain depression that stays steady for weeks, not days, means increased flood. In our area of Australia we are experiencing longer periods of hot, dry bushfire winds before a cool change arrives. Forty years ago most hot days ended with ‘Araluen Billy’, the cool southeasterly mist which arrived at about 4 p.m. The weather fronts are weaker, too, so that many cool southeasterlies no longer reach our valley, thirty kilometres inland.

  Even without the variable of global warming, expect the unexpected – and promote both traditional as well as new technological ways to reduce the unexpectedness.7

  Prediction 14: Heatwaves will continue to kill more people and animals in Australia than floods or fire.

  Flood and fire are dramatically televised; death from heat-precipitated heart failure mostly isn’t. A prolonged heatwave here has long-ranging and complex effects on animals: several species of frog stop breeding; bees may not forage for as long and so not have the pollen to feed young bees; wombats may go hungry as it’s too hot to feed till late at night, and so become more prone to mange; our hens stop laying; and native birds that may normally raise two broods a year only raise one, or none successfully. But nectar-eating birds may also starve during long wet springs, when the nectar is too dilute to feed them. On the other hand, in tests here and elsewhere, many or even most indigenous food species have shown the ability to survive in climates far hotter and colder than where they originally grew, and after the January heatwave of 2013, seven introduced species of spring-blooming fruit tree flowered again, with a second crop ripe by autumn. We still know very little about the species we share this continent with.8

  Prediction 15: Expect famine.

  For the first time since global measurements began, obesity is a greater global problem than malnutrition.9 But, as always, there are and will be areas that because of war, natural disaster or crop failure can’t rely on their normal food sources or delivery systems.

  Much of the world eats globally now, which means there is an enormous reliance on transportation systems – and the fuel that runs them. An eruption of a super-volcano, a war that disrupts oil supplies, or a problem with the satellites that are necessary for most transportation systems (a large solar flare would be enough to cause this) and areas may not get enough food. But climate change brings another threat.

  As I write this, wheat rust has decreased the Middle East’s harvest of wheat over the past three years by about forty per cent. It is possible that part of what we call the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2011 and the subsequent political unrest was triggered as much by the rising costs of food as the direct desire for political change. (The mobs of the French revolution called for bread before they called for the death of the aristocrats.)

  A warming world means rusts and other diseases in farming areas that used not to be susceptible to them. Much of the world’s food is grown in river deltas that may be flooded or affected by increasing salinity as sea levels rise.

  Countering this, vast areas of the now frozen or semi-frozen tundra beneath the Arctic may be opened up for cropping, and extraordinary achievements are being made in breeding crops that will grow in brackish or even salt water, or in solar-powered greenhouses or floating man-made islands that turn seawater into fresh water for growing vegetables. But here the more affluent nations have the advantage, with both the educational resources and the capital needed to experiment and establish new growing systems.

  This prediction should probably specify ‘expect famine in poorer nations and expect food prices to rise in affluent ones’. This is not, I admit, a prediction that should startle anyone, although the reasons for it may not be what they’d have assumed.

  Prediction 16: Australian agriculture will adapt to climate changes.

  All Australian farming is an adaptation to this land. We’re a wealthy, educated nation. Farmers will keep adapting.10

  Prediction 17: Storm surges will worsen.

  There is no consensus and probably far too little data to predict what effect global warming has had or will have on cyclones, tornadoes and other major weather events. They may increase in numbers and intensity in some areas; decrease in others. But storm surges of four to eight metres or higher appear to be increasing. According to the Australian Climate Commission, March 2013, Australian sea levels have risen by twenty centimetres since 1880, and the rate of increase is rising.11 Suggestion: do not buy beachfront land, or any land near the coast that has been reclaimed from a swamp. Or, for that matter, any land that can only be reached by beachfront road or rail, unless you are happy to get home by rowing boat. In Bangladesh it is the poor who are most affected by flood. In Australia it will be the rich. This may make taxpayer-funded compensation or mitigation more or less likely: the rich have more political clout but are the focus of a lot less public sympathy.

  Prediction 18: Invest in unreality.

  When times are bad, humans like escapism: movies and sport in the Depression, computer games, online communities and the virtual world supplying a lot of our escapist fantasies now. I prefer a life of flood and drought to air-conditioning, and an orchard to a supermarket. On the other hand I am tempted by the idea of ‘eating’ a calorie-free box of chocolates, or having my mind spliced into the speed, data and breadth of a hard drive.

  Prediction 19: Invest in (well-managed and innovative) health care companies.

  My grandfather said that if you wanted to understand human health, you only had to look at our bodies, the long legs that make us walkers. Walking makes us healthier. Sitting makes us crook.

  Look at our broad shoulders and pelvises – weight-bearing exercise makes and keeps our bones strong. Look at our mobile faces – we evolved as communicators, happiest with our clan. Now we sit. Machines do our lifting. We communicate through machines and not our faces.

  Our life span is also increasing dramatically globally. Since 1970 the average age of death in Australia has risen by nine years; 7.5 years in the USA; 14.3 years in Central and South America; 24.1 years in Bangladesh; 13.2 years in Africa, 12.9 years in Asia, with the Maldives leading with 28.4 years following improvements in health programs. But that also means that the problems associated with old age, from dementia to arthritis to bone loss, are increasing.

  Expect more crook humans. Also expect more ingenious humans to come up with solutions and others to form companies to market them. The good ones will make money.

  Prediction 20: Nuclear power costs per kilowatt hour will go up; solar and wind power costs per kilowatt hour will go down.

  According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report from July 2012, of the fifty-nine current nuclear reactor construction projects around the world, eighteen are behind schedule by more than a year and, of the remainder, none have yet reached projected start-
up dates. Nuclear projects are failing to attract the capital to build or complete them.12

  The arguments about the dangers of radioactivity or nuclear waste may be irrelevent. Nuclear power plants generate vast amounts of power, but also have enormous construction and maintenance costs, as well as the costs of containing their waste products.

  Wind, wave, thermal and solar power stations can be small – small enough to fit on three million rooftops or the walls of ten million buildings. The cost of doing that may be higher than a nuclear power station for the same or even less power (though that is now debatable). But these decentralised power stations can be built up piece by piece, rooftop by rooftop. And if disaster comes, as it did with the tsunami at Fukushima, we would not see a third of the country lose its power. Decentralisation equals resilience.

  Decentralised power provision is also more cost-effective. Few Australians – and also possibly planners – know that between thirty and forty per cent of power generated is lost in its transmission. Small regional or even suburban power plants are far more efficient than centralised ones. But our power infrastructure is not set up to allow enough feed in from stand-alone systems to the grid. Changing the way we get our power will require the ability and the courage to imagine and implement a different world.

  Prediction 21: Expect extinction and to watch parts of the bush die.