Josh Frydenberg’s actions belie his words and show a disregard for the significance of forests to our survival, writes Dr Oisin Sweeney. ON THE MORNING of 21 March, I got a call from a journalist in response to a media release our organisation, the National Parks Association of NSW (NPA), had put out for International …
Wayne Thorpe uses ‘Indigenous storytelling’ to tell a story of how Bung Yarnda (aka Lake Tyres) and other coastal tidal estuaries, work. It is a very important story because it applies to all estuaries and the Indigenous style of telling a story of Bung Yarnda brings the environment to life for adults and children. Like …
Just because it’s been done before, doesn’t mean it should be done again. European colonisation brought logging into the Bellingen Shire and throughout Australia. It was the keystone for large-scale development providing both housing and an agricultural base. But more than 200 years later, a comprehensive review of 150 scientific papers on land-clearing and rainfall, conducted by Dailan …
Vegetation creates rain. That’s one of the conclusions of a comprehensive review of more than 150 scientific papers on land-clearing and rainfall, conducted by Dailan Pugh of the North East Forest Alliance. Clearing Our Rainfall Away, released today, summarises the evidence of how land-clearing affects rainfall, and the impacts that land-clearing has had on Australia’s …
Habitat loss is the most insidious of all threats facing land-living wildlife, and protected areas like national parks are one of the best ways to combat the destruction. But in research published recently in Conversation Letters, we show that in some places the pace of protected areas isn’t keeping up with the losses. We found …
This ANU report proves the logging industry is worth 1/70th what the forests produce in water value. Professor David Lindenmayer said plainly “This is really dumb economics…” Logging in the central highlands generated a tiny $29 per hectare of additional net economic activity in 2013-14. That compares to a $2,023 per hectare contribution to the …
In East Gippsland our freshwater ecosystems are threatened by clearfelling in most catchments, by industrial and agricultural pollution and excess nutrients, fire fighting chemicals broadcast over large areas, all of which end up in the Lakes system that is also threatened by deepening of the entrance at Lakes Entrance. This is changing a brackish-freshwater system …
Mining in Australia is a rogue industry that feels it can ride roughshod over the people of regional Australia. The Australian mining industry has sold out their own nation, they have picked clean the easy to get mineral deposits, they have destroyed communities and environment and have pilfered away and sent offshore the wealth of …
Water and forests are inextricably linked. Pressures on forests from population growth and climate change are increasing risks to forests and their aquatic ecosystem services (AES). There is a need to incorporate AES in forest management but there is considerable uncertainty about how to do so. Approaches that manage forest ecosystem services such as fiber, …
People have been warned not to eat or take mussels and other shellfish from Victoria’s Gippsland Lakes region, as health authorities test for a rare, potentially fatal toxin. While no-one has recently become ill from eating the shellfish, the warning was issued as a precaution, the Health Department said. It said it was still safe …
