Burning off our biodiversity
The Clarence Environment Centre is also witnessing and questioning the arson being carried out in their local area. The immense damage being done to wildlife and ecosystems, under guise of ‘public safety’ is galling. So many of our rare and threatened wildlife are dependent on large old trees with hollows for nesting and sheltering.
“Knowing that critically important habitat features such as hollow-bearing old-growth trees are fast disappearing from the landscape through natural causes is bad enough. To know that these forest giants are burned to the ground as a result of deliberate hazard reduction activities is even worse, but then to learn that those trees that actually survived the burning are then callously knocked down by the very people charged with protecting biodiversity, is hard to stomach.”
Australia is home to some of the world’s most iconic flora and fauna, the like of which occur nowhere else in the world. Sadly, our extinction rate is a national disgrace, and today literally hundreds of species are listed as threatened, a recognition that unless their declining numbers are reversed, they too are heading for extinction.
Read the entire article (PDF) here