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

The battle over Abbot Point

 by Alison Jones and Dr Brett Kettle

Abbot Point near Bowen in Queensland. Source: The Australian

“Save the reef” has become a popular catch-cry among many environment groups, with Greenpeace’s Great Barrier Reef website shared more than 125,000 times on social media to date. It and many similar campaigns have focused heavily on “massive dredging, dumping and shipping” for coal and gas ports, particularly the recent Abbot Point dredging decision.
There is no doubt that there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the Great Barrier Reef, with less coral in some parts of the 2300 km ecosystem than three decades ago (the finer points of the issue are detailed here, here, here and here).
Yet groups such such as Greenpeace, the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS), WWF, as well as The Greens, some scientists and, increasingly, the media and community, are wrong to portray dredging and dredge spoil disposal as a major threat to the reef’s survival.
This deliberate misrepresentation of the facts is evidenced in a recent comment by Felicity Wishart from the AMCS that: “If we are scaremongering it’s because the evidence is clear that there are real concerns to be worried about.”
Rather than saving the reef from decline, “scaremongering” over the Abbot Point dredging plan and the subsequent diversion of management, research and conservation efforts, are now threatening to undermine efforts at tackling the more serious issues facing the reef.
We risk seeing hundreds of millions of dollars poured into studies, offsets, monitoring, campaigning, legal costs and holding costs unrelated to the major factors that really affect the reef – just at a time when every available dollar is needed to focus on measures aimed at improving the reef’s resilience.

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Wanted: reef science free from politics

Image sourced: Reef hysteria

According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science, nearly half of the reef’s decline to date (mostly in the southern part of the reef) can be attributed to impacts from cyclones, 42% to the crown-of-thorns starfish, and 10% to coral bleaching.
It is clear that the Abbot Point disposal site has no coral or seagrass and that risks from dredge spoil are low. Even ardent opponents of dredging have acknowledged that it is possible to manage port developments properly, pointing to the 1993 dredging at Townsville as an example.
Of the many dredging programs in Australia, there are few cases in which trigger levels have even been breached, and none where impacts have exceeded those that were predicted.
If coral really has declined by half since 1985, as reported by the Australian Institute of Marine Science study, Australia appears to have as little as a decade to identify solutions, and then another decade to trial, implement, and scale them up.
If that time frame is correct, then it is even more urgent that we avoid devaluing the role of science in helping us “manage, mitigate, adapt or even discover solutions”, as Australia’s Chief Scientist Ian Chubb recently wrote on The Conversation.

A more urgent set of priorities

Granted, scientists need to get better at predicting and measuring the low-level, long-term, far-field and cumulative effects of dredging.
However, most of the technical ambiguity around dredging impacts is about fine-tuning tactical operational issues of dredge operation, or the optimum location of material placement to achieve a balance of community priorities.
The more important science challenges for the future health of the Great Barrier Reef are aimed at sustaining its various uses. These include improving our knowledge of how the reef changes and adapts to disturbance, and learning how to manage the reef to minimise harm and to boost its ability to recover. These will involve refocussing a bewildering array of scientific resources into a unified strategy.
So what should we be putting more effort into if we’re to look after the health of the Great Barrier Reef in a future that includes accelerating change?
Significant funds that might otherwise go to research are currently spent on trying to remove Crown-of-Thorns Starfish, even though scientists acknowledge that “manual killing can only work on the scale of a few hundred square metres”. This is despite the fact that the causes of outbreaks are still inferred, rather than known with any confidence.
Nutrients in municipal sewage are discharged all year round, but the relative risk this poses to the reef compared to that in agricultural runoff and flood waters, is still unclear.
Maintenance dredging, which involves the removal of fine sediments from near the coast, has the potential to reduce catchment-generated fine sediments that impact coastal reefs. The extent of this possible benefit has not been studied.
The ultimate problem is that the body of science available is often incomplete and there is no overarching, risk-based synthesis.

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Intervention

If the Reef indeed faces accelerating change at a time when human uses also continue to accelerate, then it is inevitable that intervention programs for high value reefs – currently confined mainly to small-scale starfish control and coral reseeding – may become more urgent.
Mangroves, corals, seagrasses, fisheries and even the seabed itself are all capable of deliberate manipulation if it were deemed necessary to do so to protect, preserve or enhance a use or value of the reef. Options like building artificial coastal wetlands or even “barrier islands” to protect the coast might seem outlandish, but are technically feasible.
Yet little of the underlying science for this has been done, leaving a significant policy gap to guide potential future works. We should start studying these problems now.

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Barriers to decision-making

As scientists, we like to imagine that regulators devour our work and convert it into useful policy. The unfortunate reality is that our work is unintelligible to all but a handful of people, and in the real world, reef users struggle to adapt their everyday practices to such complex advice.
For instance, reef managers now insist that industries that use the reef should incorporate the concept of resilience into their impact assessments. But many are understandably frustrated at being asked to adopt something so poorly defined.
Scientists need to rise to the challenge of translating their work into practical guidelines that can be implemented today. In the words of another contributor to The Conversation, “scientists should be provoked into thinking about the way science advice is given and how they communicate".
This also means shying away from “scaremongering” that masks the real issues, creates widespread confusion and destroys the public’s confidence in their ability to rely on scientists. Its time for scientists to reject scaremongering or distortion of their results; to produce more cogent and practical guidance for policy makers; and to restore the faith of the community in science as a tool to help solve environmental problems. For the Great Barrier Reef, the clock is ticking.

Originally published as: The battle over Abbot Point risks losing the Great Barrier Reef war

Cross post under The Conversation republishing guidelines.

Corals – the Great Survivors

Photo sourced [here]

by Viv Forbes

For at least fifty years, agitated academics have been predicting the end of the Great Barrier Reef. Now international “experts” are also sprouting coral calamity. But despite the alarms, the reef is still there.

An early scare focussed on the Crown of Thorns Starfish which was going through one of its sporadic population booms. Such plagues come and go with the natural cycles of growth and decay. But the reef survived.



Then experts got scared in case someone drilled for oil on the Reef – so we had a Royal Commission and banned all that. However marine life seems to flourish around all artificial reefs such as jetties, shipwrecks and drilling platforms. Rigs have to be regularly cleaned of marine growth.

Natural hydrocarbons have been part of the wild environment for longer than corals, which may explain why corals are remarkably tolerant of hydrocarbons. Despite natural oil and gas seeps, man-made spills, and hundreds of offshore drilling rigs, corals still thrive.

After the worst oil spill ever during the First Gulf War there was no clean-up attempt apart from oil skimming because the 700 oil-well fires had priority. Fresh crude oil floats and is a danger to sea birds, but it soon reacts with air and salt water to become solid tar balls which sink to the sea floor. An inspection of the sea bed later to catalogue “the disaster” found teeming wildlife, with sea-grass, snails and fish thriving after the fertilising effect of the oxidising oil.

Corals are even thriving at the exact spot in the Montebello Islands where two atomic devices were tested by the British in 1952



Photo sourced from [here]

Another scare concerned coastal development and agricultural run-off. Again destruction of the Great Barrier Reef was forecast. Academics were summoned and a huge national park was established for their playground. Run-off still occurs, rivers still flood, but the reef is still there.

Lately global warming scares such as coral bleaching and ocean acidity have mesmerised the media. These are supposedly caused by wicked humans burning hydrocarbons and using energy by doing things. So we introduced a carbon tax, despite the fact that no unusual warming or acidity can be measured. And the reef is still there.

Now we are told that port dredging near Bowen is going to destroy the Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is 2,400 km long – stirring some mud at one small spot 40 km from the reef is unlikely to be noticed by the coral. Moreover, the stuff being dredged is comprised of natural material eroded from the land and put there over millennia by coastal rivers. Compared with the silt load discharged by rivers like the mighty Burdekin in a normal wet season, or stirred up by cyclonic surges, dredging is a non-event. The Reef has been coping with sediments like that for thousands of years





Photo sourced from [here]

All plants and animals need minerals for optimum health. Marine life gets its minerals from erosion of rocks on the land. Coastal rivers (and dredging of river silt) stir up the minerals which supply the off-shore environment. Like all nutrients, some is necessary, too much brings harm.

Corals are among the greatest survivors on Earth and have been here for about 500 million years. Many of the types of corals found on reefs today were present in similar forms on reefs 50 million years ago.

Since corals first appeared there have been five mass extinctions when over 50% of all life forms on land and in the seas died. These episodes usually included massive volcanic events that filled air and sea with debris, lava, heat and acid fumes. And still corals survived.

Then there were asteroid impacts that created huge craters that dwarf man’s puny ports. Debris, rock, mud and slush were flung in all directions – far more and further than man’s dredging will ever do. Corals even survived this.


Corals also survived several deadly ice ages when sea levels fell so low that many coral reefs left their skeletons stranded as limestone hills on dry land. But always some colonisers followed the retreating seas and survived.

Then came the hot climate eras when the great ice sheets melted and sea levels rose dramatically. Some coral reefs drowned, but others just built on top of the old drowned corals forming the beautiful coral atolls we see today. Corals flourish in gently rising seas such as we have today – it gives them room to refresh and grow vertically.

And if the water gets too warm, coral larvae just drift into cooler waters closer to the poles. The Great Barrier Reef would move slowly south.

Corals have outlasted the dinosaurs, the mammoths and the sabre-toothed tiger. Captain Cook’s ship was almost disembowelled by the sturdy corals of the Great Barrier Reef in 1770. If Cook came back today, he would be unable to detect any changes in the Reef.

We should of course minimise soil erosion, human pollution of offshore waters and direct damage or interference with the Reef. However, green extremists would like to sacrifice all of Queensland’s coastal industry on the coral altar - exploration, mining, farming, land development, tourism, forestry, fishing, and shipping. They need reminding it is only rich societies who can afford to care for their environment.

Photo sourced Drive Great Barrier Reef

No matter what the future holds, corals are more likely than humans to survive the next major extinction.

In the event of yet another Ice Age we must hope that reef alarmists have not denied us the things we will need to survive - food, energy, chemicals, shelter, concrete and steel generated by carbon fuels.



Viv Forbes, BScAppGeol, FAusIMM, FSIA
Rosewood    Qld   Australia
forbes@carbon-sense.com

Viv Forbes is has a degree in applied science, and has spent a lifetime working in, studying and writing about the geological history and primary industries of Queensland. He is a sheep breeder and a semi-retired coal industry manager. He is certain that the Great Barrier Reef will outlast him.
He is Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition.




PRA: QLD vegetation management legislation update

 

Image scanned from 5th December issue of the Queensland Country Life

 

There are many new self-assessable vegetation management codes under the amended State

Government legislation. DNRM is conducting a series of meetings in various areas to explain the

codes and the operation of Qld Globe.

 

http://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/land/vegetation-management/public-information-sessions

http://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/mapping-data/maps/queensland-globe

 

There are codes for fodder harvesting, thinning, weed management encroachment, property

infrastructure, clearing of high value regrowth, clearing of regrowth watercourse area, clearing to

improve operational efficiency of existing agricultural developments. Some purposes will still require

a permit.

 

Landowners need to notify DNRM (There is a form to fill in. Can be done online.)

 

http://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/land/vegetation-management/self-assessable-vegetation-clearingcodes/

notification-form

 

But they have a new philosophy of working co-operatively with landowners to ensure codes are

complied with. DNRM still wants to speak with people who want to carry out developments.

An Approved Area Management Plan is another way to get approval. You still need to notify the

Department before clearing starts.

They still do have compliance officers and satellite monitoring and illegal clearing will be detected

even if it is small areas done over a number of years.

One useful change is that there is no longer a category called high value regrowth on freehold land

only. The category still exists on leasehold land. The maps on Qld Globe should reflect this.

PMAV’s are still relevant. The mapping will only reflect a new PMAV once it has been certified.

 

http://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/land/vegetation-management

Getting clearing permits for the new uses of High Value Agriculture (HVA) and Irrigated High Value

Agriculture (IHVA) will involve a fair amount of research with it being necessary to show with

accountants figures that it is viable and that the soil type and expected rainfall are suitable. In the

case of the IHVA it will be necessary to have a water license and will increase operational efficiency.

 



 

Scan of an article in the 5th December issue of the Queensland Country Life

 

Previous related posts

 

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 1

 

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 2

 

.PRA: Qld reforms to Vegetation management act 

Coal and gas projects can't be rushed: here's why

by Matthew Currell

New environment minister Greg Hunt recently announced 50 large coal and coal seam gas developments to be pushed through Australia’s environmental approval process, including assessment under the new federal “water trigger” introduced in early 2013.

The proposed mines are predominantly in NSW and Queensland, already sites of conflict over coal exports and CSG. A draft report from the Productivity Commission highlights the central issue: proponents of coal and CSG projects want rapid and simple assessments, while communities and environmental groups want baseline studies, more information and cumulative assessment. All of which cost time and money.
Minister Hunt’s announcement follows strong indications that the federal government wishes to speed up environmental approvals.

The decision to start assessing these 47 projects en masse and so quickly after the election seems to match the pre-election rhetoric. Greg Hunt has also suggested support for adopting an upper time limit, such as nine months for the assessment process.
However, we need to treat these assessments with caution. For many communities that will be affected by the projects the biggest concern is groundwater.

Groundwater: a sensitive resource

Most of the proposed mines will affect groundwater; in many cases from aquifers already used by people and important ecosystems. It’s not realistic to expect proper groundwater assessments be conducted in a nine-month period, or under any other form of “fast-tracking”. Let’s have a look why.
Currently, groundwater supplies about 30% of Australia’s total water use. It is an important resource in a country where most easily accessible surface water is already allocated or used. It is expected to meet a significant proportion of future water demand and help to buffer against a changing climate.
Its worth to the economy is in billions of dollars every year. Many ecosystems also depend on groundwater; recent mapping shows that groundwater is vital for ecosystems right across Australia.
Groundwater can be a highly sensitive resource for a number of reasons. In particular, the time between an impact on groundwater pressure in one area, and a corresponding change in flux of groundwater somewhere else can be lengthy. Aquifers, particularly deep aquifers, can take many thousands of years to recharge and they can be quickly to contaminated or depressurised, but more difficult to fix.

Uncertainty demands caution

Our power as a scientific community to model impacts of major projects on groundwater is still limited, despite today’s sophisticated data collection and computer modelling techniques.
All models used by hydrogeologists are characterised by uncertainty. For example, we generally can’t determine exactly by how much or how quickly one aquifer may register changes in water pressures in response to de-watering somewhere else.

Rather, a range of possible outcomes, with a certain level of confidence could realistically be provided.
Similarly, it is not easy to predict exactly how quickly pollution will move through an aquifer, and whether or when it might ultimately reach a wetland or stream. To make these predictions, extensive field studies and baseline monitoring data need to be put into our models.
In the words of one of our most eminent hydrogeology professors, Dr Craig Simmons, it is time for hydrogeologists to “level” with decision-makers and communities. Groundwater models do not give us a crystal ball to predict future impacts, and they will produce highly uncertain results if time, budget or field data are too limited.
While proponents and governments may not like to hear it, a long period of data collection and hydrogeological investigation is needed to make confident predictions with groundwater models. Proper assessment of the impacts of large coal mining and coal seam gas developments on groundwater are going to need time and resources.
The new government, proponents of major projects and communities need to bear these issues in mind. Approvals may take a long time but to protect such a precious resource as groundwater, it is worth taking it.

Author

Matthew Currell  Lecturer in Hydrogeology, School of Environmental Engineering at RMIT University

Article first published at The Conversation and republished under creative commons

Alternative to The Precautionary Principle?

by Don Aitkin

 

First published at Online Opinion, cross post via  license under a Creative Commons License

 

 



I've written about the Precautionary Principle before. With that title it was adopted at the 1992 Rio conference on climate, and it has been used a great deal by proponents of the need to 'combat climate change' internationally. Built into it is Pascal's Wager about the correctness of believing in God, and it has analogies in the medical precept 'first do no harm'. I didn't like it when I first came across it, partly because it was dressed up as a 'principle' and partly because of the capital letters, which suggested importance and longevity.

Image sourced [here]


I've come across a most interesting paper by Max More, an English philosopher and futurist, which offers instead a 'proactionary principle'. There's a lot in it, and it's well worth reading. I'll discuss his alternative in a later post, but use this one to show his demolition of the precautionary principle. It is clear and accessible.

'The precautionary principle has at least six major weak spots. It serves us badly by:

assuming worst-case scenarios

distracting attention from established threats to health, especially natural risks

assuming that the effects of regulation and restriction are all positive or neutral, never negative

ignoring potential benefits of technology and inherently favouring nature over humanity

illegitimately shifting the burden of proof and unfavourably positioning the proponent of the activity

conflicting with more balanced, common-law approaches to risk and harm.

First, the precautionary principle always assumes worst-case scenarios. Any release of chemicals into the environment might initiate a chain of events leading to a disaster. Genetically modified organisms might cause unanticipated, serious, and irreversible problems. By imagining the proposed technology or project primarily in a worst-case scenario, while assuming that refraining from action will have no disastrous consequences, the adherents of the principle immediately tilt the playing field in their favour.

Second, the precautionary principle ignores background risk, distracting our attention from established dangers to health. Nature itself brings with it a risk of harms such as infection, hunger, famine, and environmental disruption. We should apply our limited resources first to major risks that we know are real, not merely hypothetical. The more we attend to merely hypothetical threats to health and environment, the less money, time, and effort will remain to deal with substantial health problems that are highly probable or thoroughly established. The principle errs in focusing on future technological harms that might occur, while ignoring natural risks that are actually occurring.

Third, adherents of the precautionary principle assume that proposed regulations and restrictions will cause no harm to health. Yet the very application of the principle itself can endanger our health. Consider, for instance, the consistent correlation between the health of a nation's citizens and their standard of living. Widespread application of the precautionary principle, by hampering economic activity, will tend to reduce living standards and thereby worsen health. In addition, major efforts to eliminate small, speculative risks can unleash far greater and more likely harms.

Fourth, the precautionary principle fails to treat natural and human threats on the same basis. Users of the principle routinely ignore the potential benefits of technology, in effect favouring nature over humanity. The principle does not account for the fact that the risks created by technological stagnation are at least as real as those of technological advancement. As biochemist Bruce Ames of UCLA has demonstrated, almost all of our exposure to dangerous chemicals comes in the form of natural chemicals. Yet fear and attention are primarily directed toward synthetic chemicals. A particular chemical has the same effects regardless of whether its source is natural or synthetic. Despite this, scientifically unsound activists treat human-derived chemicals as guilty until proven innocent, and naturally occurring chemicals as innocent or insignificant.


Fifth, the precautionary principle illegitimately shifts the burden of proof by positioning advocates of proposed activities or new technologies as reckless, in contrast with the 'responsible' advocates of 'precaution'. The content - even the very name - of the precautionary principle positions environmental activists and Luddites as friends and protectors of the common person. The innovators are made to prove safety, having already been portrayed as indifferent to the common good and interested only in profiting.

Image sourced [here]

Having illegitimately shifted the burden of proof, activists can impose their values without troubling themselves with evidence and without taking responsibility for the results of overly-precautious policies. For example, the Environmental Working Group opposed the use of pesticides, speculating about possible carcinogenic effects of trace amounts of their residues. They do not seem to have taken into account the probability that restricting pesticides would increase cancer rates.
Activists get away with the burden of proof trick by managing perceptions of risk instead of examining the real risks. This move is particularly dangerous because we have limited resources to address a multitude of risks. We cannot afford to make decisions driven by manipulated perceptions. It's crucial that we rely on a comprehensive, scientifically grounded perspective when choosing which risks have the strongest claim on our attention.

Sixth, and finally, the precautionary principle conflicts with the more balanced approach to risk and harm derived from common law. Common law holds us liable for injuries we cause, our liability being proportionate with the degree of foreseeable risk. By contrast, the precautionary principle dismisses liability and acts like a preliminary injunction, but without the involvement of a court, without the burden of proof, and without taking responsibility for harm caused by the injunction.'
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The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life

By Natasha Geiling

Crossed post under Smithsonian Terms of Use

 Modern archaeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artefacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archaeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey.
 There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. But there’s something about honey; it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old. Moreover, honey’s longevity lends it other properties–mainly medicinal–that other resilient foods don’t have. Which raises the question–what exactly makes honey such a special food?


The answer is as complex as honey’s flavour–you don’t get a food source with no expiration date without a whole slew of factors working in perfect harmony. The first comes from the chemical make-up of honey itself. Honey is, first and foremost, a sugar. Sugars are hygroscopic, a term that means they contain very little water in their natural state but can readily suck in moisture if left unsealed. As Amina Harris, executive director of the Honey and Pollination Centre at the Robert Mondavi Institute at Univeristy of California, Davis explains, “Honey in its natural form is very low moisture. Very few bacteria or microorganisms can survive in an environment like that, they just die. They’re smothered by it, essentially.” What Harris points out represents an important feature of honey’s longevity: for honey to spoil, there needs to be something inside of it that can spoil. With such an inhospitable environment, organisms can’t survive long enough within the jar of honey to have the chance to spoil.

Honey is also naturally extremely acidic. “It has a pH that falls between 3 and 4.5, approximately, and that acid will kill off almost anything that wants to grow there,” Harris explains. So bacteria and spoil-ready organisms must look elsewhere for a home–the life expectancy inside of honey is just too low.

But honey isn’t the only hygroscopic food source out there. Molasses, for example, which comes from the by-product of cane sugar, is extremely hygroscopic, and is acidic, though less so than honey (molasses has a pH of around 5.5). And yet–although it may take a long time, as the sugar cane product has a longer shelf-life than fresh produce, eventually molasses will spoil.

So why does one sugar solution spoil, while another lasts indefinitely? Enter bees.
“Bees are magical,” Harris jokes. But there is certainly a special alchemy that goes into honey. Nectar, the first material collected by bees to make honey, is naturally very high in water–anywhere from 60-80 percent, by Harris’ estimate. But through the process of making honey, the bees play a large part in removing much of this moisture by flapping their wings to literally dry out the nectar. On top of behaviour, the chemical makeup of a bees stomach also plays a large part in honey’s resilience. Bees have an enzyme in their stomachs called glucose oxidase (PDF). When the bees regurgitate the nectar from their mouths into the combs to make honey, this enzyme mixes with the nectar, breaking it down into two by-products: gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. “Then,” Harris explains, “hydrogen peroxide is the next thing that goes into work against all these other bad things that could possibly grow.”

For this reason, honey has been used for centuries as a medicinal remedy. Because it’s so thick, rejects any kind of growth and contains hydrogen peroxide, it creates the perfect barrier against infection for wounds. The earliest recorded use of honey for medicinal purposes comes from Sumerian clay tablets, which state that honey was used in 30 percent of prescriptions. The ancient Egyptians used medicinal honey regularly, making ointments to treat skin and eye diseases. “Honey was used to cover a wound or a burn or a slash, or something like that, because nothing could grow on it – so it was a natural bandage,” Harris explains.

What’s more, when honey isn’t sealed in a jar, it sucks in moisture. “While it’s drawing water out of the wound, which is how it might get infected, it’s letting off this very minute amount of hydrogen peroxide. The amount of hydrogen peroxide comes off of honey is exactly what we need–it’s so small and so minute that it actually promotes healing.” And honey for healing open gashes is no longer just folk medicine–in the past decade, Derma Sciences, a medical device company, has been marketing and selling MEDIHONEY, bandages covered in honey used in hospitals around the world.
If you buy your honey from the supermarket, that little plastic bottle of golden nectar has been heated, strained and processed so that it contains zero particulates, meaning that there’s nothing in the liquid for molecules to crystallize on, and your supermarket honey will look the same for almost forever. If you buy your honey from a small-scale vendor, however, certain particulates might remain, from pollen to enzymes. With these particulates, the honey might crystallize, but don’t worry–if it’s sealed, it’s not spoiled and won’t be for quite some time.

A jar of honey’s seal, it turns out, is the final factor that’s key to honey’s long shelf life, as exemplified by the storied millennia-old Egyptian specimens. While honey is certainly a super-food, it isn’t supernatural–if you leave it out, unsealed in a humid environment, it will spoil. As Harris explains, ” As long as the lid stays on it and no water is added to it, honey will not go bad. As soon as you add water to it, it may go bad. Or if you open the lid, it may get more water in it and it may go bad.”
So if you’re interested in keeping honey for hundreds of years, do what the bees do and keep it sealed–a hard thing to do with this delicious treat!


Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/08/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life/#ixzz2crMYAeRS

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 2

Dr Bill Burrows as a rangeland scientist in his essay, Bushland at risk of continued tree and shrub thickening in Queensland, disciplined his reply to his field of expertise of woodland ecology to WWF’s Dr. Martin FJ Taylor’s paper, Bushland at risk of renewed clearing inQueensland.

Property Rights Australia provides these additional observations to the legal aspects mentioned in the WWF Taylor report.

 

 

Wyandra Landowner Trenton Hindman with his Barrister Phillip Sheridan outside the Charleville Magistrates court after being fine $110,000 for selectively clearing a woody weed. 

 

 

Not only has WWF’s Mr. Taylor attempted to quantify potential effects on the environment of the Vegetation Management Framework Amendments in his report, Bushland at risk of renewed clearing in Queensland, but he has waded into the strictly legal aspects of the Amendments based on scant legal knowledge other than the deep convictions held by WWF that any end justifies the means including vandalism of our legal system.

According to Mr. Taylor,

"The VMA amendments would also allow defendants facing prosecutions for illegal clearing to be able to employ new defences of ‘mistaken belief”. 

There is no “new defence” of ‘mistaken belief’. What has been reinstated by the Amendment is the old defence of “mistake of fact” whose removal in the Vegetation Management Act 1999 was considered an abrogation of civil liberties.

Similarly he contends that,

"Defendants would be allowed to withhold incriminating information from the prosecution."

The Rule of Law Institute of Australia (RoLIA) has condemned the NSW Government for removing the right to silence in the case of a serious indictable offence which is an offence which carries a penalty of 5 years imprisonment or longer. The right to silence was removed from landowners by the Vegetation Management Act 1999 (VMA) along with the presumption of innocence.

In fact (RoLIA) was under the impression that

“Until now, no jurisdiction in Australia has tampered with the principle that no person is required to incriminate themselves”

This just demonstrates that as a small community agriculturalists can be used as guinea pigs and the rest of the country, including professionals in the field, can remain unaware.

 "The right to remain silent when being investigated is a fundamental principle of our system of justice, alongside the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It is the “golden thread” that runs through our common law system of criminal justice, as well as international human rights law, civil law and Sharia law."

Taylor also takes issue with the removal of the presumption that it is necessarily the landowner who has carried out illegal clearing or that “a person other than the defendant was responsible for the clearing.” He virtually explains this himself by stating that 12.5 % of clearing is unexplained and rising. The disrespect shown by referring to the landowner as the defendant is palpable.

All other contentions in this section of the paper are simplistic at best and dishonest at worst.

Self assessable codes will not make it more difficult to detect illegal activity as detection is carried out by satellite.

The Vegetation Management Act 1999 has always ignored the complexities of science, the civil rights and property rights  of landowners, has shown scant regard for the basic tenets of our legal system, there has been injustice, inconsistency and heavy handedness in sentencing and ill resourced landowners have had to contend with the unlimited financial and technical resources of the State. All this adds up to a system of justice which leaves fewer rights available to landowners than are generally considered minimal to the most violent of criminals including organised crime.

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Queensland Country Life published an article about Dr Bill Burrows essay, WWF in wilderness on veg reform.

 

Previous related posts

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 1

PRA: Qld reforms to Vegetation management act

Betrayal of Trust - Part 1

Betrayal of Trust - Part 2

Betrayal of Trust - Part 3

Betrayal of Trust - Part 4

  

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 1

Illustrious and internationally renowned woodland scientist Dr. Bill Burrows has been reluctantly lured from retirement by the ill-advised claims of environmental devastation made by WWF’s  Martin FJ Taylor’s report,  Bushland at risk of renewed clearing in Queensland.  

The thrust of the paper was supported by 27 Queensland scientists in a public statement.

In an essay entitled, Bushland at risk of continued tree and shrub thickening in Queensland, Dr. Burrows has accused Mr. Taylor and the WWF scientists of selective reading of the scientific literature.  They certainly do not recognise the complexity and diversity of ecological processes, many of which landowners and others have been warning have been disadvantaged by the broad brush of the Vegetation Management Act.

Encroachment of native woody weeds into what has previously been open forest with good grass cover disadvantages granivorous birds. Many ecosystems named in Dr. Burrows’ essay are so disadvantaged including mulga thickening in country east of the Warrego River and encroaching rainforest invading wet sclerophyll forest in the wet tropics. The cause of the move to woody plant dominance is thought to be changed fire regimes.

Much of the State is zoned for agriculture and the vast majority of that land is leasehold land where the only allowable activity is livestock and agriculture and the State is paid rental monies for that privilege.

There is a huge investment involved in clearing for agriculture as Dr Burrow writes in his essay,

So allowing land to be cleared and then preventing subsequent (and necessary) regrowth control amounts to the imposition of damaging retrospective legislation, without compensation for the harm inflicted. This is obviously unjust, inequitable, and even darn right vindictive-targeting as it does landholders who did nothing illegal.

Property Rights Australia welcomes this critique of aspects of the Taylor paper. The paper has been widely pedalled by WWF in the urban press along with their hysterical, alarmist and emotional claims as being a statement with authority based on science. The Taylor report was also quoted at length in the opposition’s speech in Parliament at the second reading of the VEGETATION MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK AMENDMENT BILL. [refer to page 1567] It is disappointing that the opposition during the speech [refer to page 1579] relied so heavily on information sourced from WWF which is no more than an unelected, unaccountable multinational money making corporation.

Obvious to those who live, work and manage the Australian landscape on reading the Taylor report is that it is no more than a desktop study based on a lot of assumptions and filled with a lot of irrelevant data. At best it could be called a literature review at worst it is shallow and lacking in substance. The literature referenced by the Taylor report is merely previous WWF papers also dubious in their scientific rigour.

It compares poorly to the essay, Bushland at risk of continued tree and shrub thickening in Queensland by Dr Burrows, an eminent woodland ecologist scientist with 40 years study in this field before his retirement. Dr Burrows’ paper is only five pages long but is extensively referenced by scientific papers in the following three pages.  

The Taylor report places a lot of emphasis of farmers achieving financial reward from carbon sinks. Dr Burrows in his essay points out,

The WWF document advances the cruel illusion that woodland resources on agricultural land will provide some type of carbon sink reward for rural landholders. First, let it be unequivocally stated that any such sink must be guaranteed to be kept in place, or replaced if lost, for 100 years before any advanced cash benefit would be forthcoming under the Kyoto Protocol.

To be rigorous in the measurement of a carbon sink one must measure below ground fluxes as well as above ground processes but the former is technologically constrained.

Third, the document states that the “difference between predicted standing biomass and maximum potential biomass was taken to represent the carbon sequestration opportunity from protecting and restoring native bushland”. Under these circumstances (potential biomass attained) any bushland on any property in Queensland would have no value for grazing or cropping anywhere in the State.

WWF would conveniently like to ignore that Queensland agricultural lands are not meant to be a free extension of the State’s national park system but are primarily to be used for the production of food and fibre.

Property rights Australia supports the science advanced by Dr. Burrows. It was science that was rejected by the Beattie Government in favour of the jingoistic wishes of the big environmental organisations who have no respect for property rights or people’s right to earn a living.

Any claims that rural industry has not suffered as a result of the Vegetation Management Act are simplistic and ill researched with ABARE, the Productivity Commission and the Reserve Bank of Australia  recording disturbing declines in the industry.

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Queensland Country Life published an article about Dr Bill Burrows essay, WWF in wilderness on veg reform.

Later published post

PRA: Bushland at risk – part 2 

Previous related posts

PRA: Qld reforms to Vegetation management act

Betrayal of Trust - Part 1

Betrayal of Trust - Part 2

Betrayal of Trust - Part 3

Betrayal of Trust - Part 4

 

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