Activism drives land clearing exaggeration



Mulga woodlands, photo sourced [here]

‘Drought drives mulga hunger’, an article published late February in the Queensland Country Life warned of extremist environmental groups using the increased tree clearing rates in the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) report due in August to pressure the Palaszczuk Government to introduce new restrictions on vegetation management. We didn’t have to wait that long as in late March a group of “concerned scientists” had the opinion article published, ‘Land clearing in Queensland triples after policy ping pong’ published on The Conversation web site,  that used the QCL article dishonestly as they omitted the reasons given for the increased rates.

To wax lyrically about Queensland’s woodland and forests being lost is deceptive when there is no breakdown yet available between remnant and non-remnant vegetation.


No mention was made of the largest contributor because of drought, with 80% of Qld drought declared, the feeding of the regenerating acacia, mulga, as invaluable fodder to livestock.

The coal seam gas industry has made a contribution with the construction of three export pipelines that take the gas to the port of Gladstone, 2 of which are around the 540 km’s in length and extensive infrastructure including the clearing for gas wells, in field pipelines, very large water storages, compressor stations and water treatment plants. Other contributing factors include mine sites and urban encroachment. This did not fit the environmental paradigm as the article falsely claimed that the Vegetation Management Act had been rapidly watered down by the Newman government bringing back broadacre land clearing for agriculture.

To the contrary the Newman government amendments were modest including the restoration of basic tenets of our legal system, civil rights that the wider community take for granted but were denied to landowners under the Vegetation management Act.  The clearing of remnant vegetation remains extremely restricted. The “concerned scientists” berate the removal of high value regrowth from the Act which is a nonsense invented by environmentalists and ignores that their high value regrowth is encroaching on high value pastures.  In the research report, ‘Recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass’, published on March 30 2015, vegetation in Australia has actually increased with the encroachment of trees into grassland a key factor. The report states:

“We also found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America. Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this increase.

On average, Australia is “greener” today than it was two decades ago. This is despite ongoing land clearing, urbanisation and the recent droughts in some parts of the country”

Mean annual change in vegetation biomass between 1993 and 2012. Blue represents an increase; red a decrease.
Image modified from Liu et al., 2015.                          image sourced [here]

The “concerned scientists” article, ‘Land clearing in Queensland triples after policy ping pong’, is alarmist and attempts to make very broad associations to pull at the heart strings. For example:

“There are 778 species listed as “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” in Queensland. Loss of habitat is a major threat to most of them. In addition, 45% of Queensland’s ecosystems are threatened because of land clearing”

The opinion article fails to give any data at all that any clearing has been allowed where there is endangered fauna and flora.  It also pulls out a favourite trump card of the environmentalist of a calamity about to fall upon cute and cuddly, in this case the koala, with no substantiated specific data in direct correlation to the projected increase in SLATS figures.

 The core proposition by the “concerned scientists” and where they are seeking political action is:

“But in 2012, a newly elected Liberal-National government rapidly set about watering down many aspects of environmental legislation. The Vegetation Management Framework Amendment Act 2013 brought back broadscale land clearing for agriculture, and the protections for high-value regrowth on freehold and indigenous land were removed.”

Again this can clearly be demonstrated as an exaggeration. The Newman government elected in early 2012 did not bring its first amendment to the Vegetation management Act until May 2013. Hardly rapidly! Far from a complete “watering down” of the Act, the amendments in May and December 2013 were in the scale of things modest and most certainly necessary.  Amongst the amendments was the restoration of civil rights denied to landowners under the Vegetation management Act and improvements were made to how the Act worked such as the application for fodder harvesting of mulga which retained a code of how drought feeding to staving livestock was to be conducted. Also the introduction of guidelines for vegetation thinning to counter the environmental and production problem of thickening as authenticated by a lifetimes work by internationally renowned woodland scientist Dr Bill Burrows. The term high value regrowth was always without foundation and was rightly removed. This is after all land that had been cleared and is being maintained for agricultural production.

The article recites the so-called “litany” of perceived problems of land clearing as if they are automatic in every instance and without background which points out instances where improved grass cover from clearing actually decreases erosion and improves water quality but that does not fit within the environmental paradigm. There is not much science to this article but much environmental activism.

Most agricultural land clearing is undertaken on land that had been cleared once before. The fact is that most agricultural production essential to feed our population by necessity occurs off land that is thinned of its vegetation or a large percentage cleared.  Land has been set aside for different purposes and its time environmentalists reserve full conservation management to National Parks only and don’t transfer these expectations to agricultural production systems.

Editorial 26th March 2015 Queensland Country Life

Meat Free Misinformation

Photo Tegan Kristine, sourced from the youtube 'Where does my meat come from?

 

First of all there has been the Meat Free Monday’s campaign with its sweeping statements of helping to stop climate change, saving the environment, health improvements and even helping world hunger. Fiona Lake answered very well these promoted benefits of abstaining from meat once a week in her blog article, Meat Free Monday Propaganda.

Now thanks to Voiceless this very week, March 18^thto 24^th, has been promoted as the designated week to go without meat in their Meat Free Week campaign. The same sweeping misinformed statements about saving the environment and also reducing perceived animal cruelty from what is an emotionalised  manufactured term, ‘factory farming’.

If we were taking notice there was a warning of this event back on the 1^st of March in his Choice Cuts opinion blog on farmonline Brad Cooper wrote in Voiceless campaign gains traction:

A CAMPAIGN urging Australians to eat less meat proves that some people truly do have more dollars than sense with a reported $60,000 already pledged to the cause. 

…The majority of the funds raised go to my old friends Voiceless, who wasted no time in climbing into me last week after I called them a “pro-vegan organisation opposed to producing food from animals”.

Well, given that Voiceless is prepared to pursue its own profit from a campaign aimed at discouraging people from eating meat – peddling misinformation, sucking in the gullible and misinformed, and undermining free enterprise – it’s not difficult to see which lifestyle it prefers 

The Beef Central article, Farm leaders question Meat Free campaign, gives quotes from NSW Farmers president Fiona Simson and VFF Egg president Brian Ahmed. From Fiona Simpson:

Ms Simson said the campaign seem like a good way to raise the profile of groups such as Voiceless campaigns like these organised by animal activist group Voiceless, but failed to take into account the people it was affecting the most.

She said there were 44,000 farming families in NSW whose livelihoods depended upon consumers eating the produce they worked hard to grow and this campaign lacked compassion for farmers - many of whom had recently experienced multiple natural disasters from bush fires to floods.

Ms Simson said farmers were committed to high animal welfare standards and many had been extremely distressed witnessing the deaths of their own livestock during recent natural disasters.

"I find the timing of such a campaign ill thought out and I encourage consumers to ignore the pleas of such groups and get behind our farmers who work extremely hard every day at growing the best for us to eat," she said. 

But the best response so far to the Meat Free Week misinformation comes from Tegan Kristine, a NSW beef producer in a youtube clip, Where does my meat come from? Tegan writes in the introduction to the youtube clip:

This Meat Free Week, Voiceless asks consumers to learn more about where our meat comes from. Come for a tour of Yandilla Beef Farm to find out more about beef production, animal welfare and the environment!

So let’s do just that and play the youtube, available at the link immediately above.