Friday, January 6, 2012

Reflections from the Bush: Part 2

Halliday Bay, Queensland, Australia
0845 local time
Wynne Hedlesky

After our two-day trek along the bottom of Carnarvon Gorge, Kristian and I headed east. Our next stop on the way back to the ocean was Blackdown Tablelands National Park. This landscape was again different from the others we had seen, and, as usual, inspired new reflections about nature and human beings’ interaction with it. The delicate, arid ecosystem of Blackdown Tablelands got me thinking about what resources are necessary for living organisms to survive—and what happens when there aren’t enough.

As the name suggests, the park covers 47,950 hectares of mesa-like sandstone highlands in central Queensland. Like Carnarvon Gorge, these highlands were formed from the erosion of soft sandstone, creating dramatic gorges and leaving sandstone mountains that rise suddenly out of the flat, arid countryside. Elevation is another form of isolation. Just as the blue crayfish of Lamington exist only in remote valleys, several unique species have evolved in Blackdown, isolated on the cooler, slightly moister highlands.

            The eucalyptus woodlands of the Blackdown Tablelands were the home to Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years. Their art is still visible. Signs throughout the park described how they used various plants for food and medicine. Sacred to them was a stream that flows through the park, and, at Rainbow Falls, gracefully descends a gorge from sandstone ledge to sandstone ledge. Though it is no Mississippi River, this water was essential for their life.

            Later human inhabitants in the region were less successful at eking out their livelihood. Cattleman William Yaldwin arrived in 1869. Though he named the area after Blackdown House, his family home in England, these hills were not to be his permanent home. Hidden beneath the thick grasses he observed when he arrived was a soil so poor in essential nutrients that cattle grazed there developed rickets, a disease in which bones become weak, soft, and brittle, and had to be moved to other pastures after just a few months. Not even kangaroos, which are also herbivores, live in large numbers in those hills due to the extremely nutrient-poor soil.

            Infertile soil is one of the many problems that plague Australian agriculture. As I discussed in Part 1, the harsh, erratic climate is another. I was aware of some of these issues before I even arrived in Australia from reading Collapse, an informative and well-researched book by Jared Diamond on the relationship between the success or failure of various societies, and the way in which those societies use or misuse their natural resources. In one chapter, he uses modern Australia as an example of a society that wrestles with serious resource shortages. To some extent, these shortages predated the arrival of Europeans on the continent; they are a result of Australia’s geological and climatic history.

Australia’s poor soils are due to the fact that there have been none of the usual geological processes that refresh the nutrient content of soils in the continent’s recent geological history—little volcanic activity, little glacial activity, little crustal uplifting. But there has been plenty of time for nutrients to slowly erode out of the soil. Also contributing to Australia’s soil infertility is a massive problem with soil salinization, often exacerbated by human activities such as over-irrigation and land clearing, both of which allow water to seep further than normal into the ground, dissolving deep-lying salts and allowing them to leech into topsoil and groundwater supplies. But Australian agriculture could not exist without irrigation. Australia is the world’s driest continent. Rains are infrequent, and, just as significant for agriculture, unpredictable, being highly dependent upon the fluctuating El Niñno Southern Oscillation. 

Yet many organisms have adapted to survive in these unfavorable conditions. In fact, when the first Europeans arrived, thick grasslands, forests of enormous blue gum trees, dense rain forests, and rivers and oceans full of fish convinced them that this must be a fertile land indeed. Diamond says the first Australian settlers also happened to land in a relatively wet period, and so did not realize the full extent of the continent’s problems with drought. Europeans proceeded to harvest what Diamond calls Australia’s “standing crop” of organic resources, grazing, fishing, and chopping down trees as fast as they could. They planted crops, expecting the soils to yield the kind of harvests they were used to back home.

Little did they realize that most of Australia’s vital nutrients were locked in these standing crops themselves. Once they were harvested and removed, there was very little left for the next generation. Regrowth was slow, and, in some cases, impossible. Many of Australia’s fisheries have collapsed; the blue gum, once Australia’s most valuable tree, is now grown more profitably overseas. Diamond even compares the “wheat belt” of southwestern Australia, one of the country’s most productive agricultural areas, to a “gigantic flowerpot.” Agriculture there is now impossible without the constant application of fertilizers to the nutrient-drained soil.

Diamond compares this activity of over-exploiting organic resources to mining. Once a mineral is removed from the ground, it never returns. Australians were extracting, and in many cases continue to extract, organic resources from Australia at such a rate that these resources become, practically speaking, non-renewable.

Added to this over-exploitation were several policies that, to someone aware of the delicacy of Australia’s environment, seem tailor-made to exacerbate already existing problems. For a long time, Australia had a policy of mandatory land clearance. Farmers and settlers stripped the land of the native vegetation adapted to the arid climate, leading to desertification and loss of topsoil. There were also minimum—not maximum—stocking requirements for sheep and cattle. Ranchers had to stock animals at levels that lead to vegetation loss and soil erosion, or risk losing their government land leases. These measures were aimed at rapidly increasing Australia’s agricultural productivity, but, in the long run, have had quite the opposite effect.

Settlers also introduced many foreign species of plants and animals that ended up being extremely destructive to Australian ecosystems. Many of the most costly introductions were actually deliberate, such as rabbits, foxes, cane toads, and prickly pear. Now Australians spend billions of dollars a year trying to rid the continent of these pests.

Of course, the country suffers from chronic water shortages. Man-made irrigation systems were hailed as the salvation of many arid, inland towns. But so much water is removed from the largest Australian river system, the Murray-Darling, that, in some years, there is no water left to flow into the sea. On the news I have often seen coverage of the heated debate between farmers, who naturally feel they have a right to the water necessary to irrigate their crops, and conservationists who are desperately pushing for limitations on up-stream water usage for the sake of the health of river ecosystems—and hoping it’s not already too late.



This is a rough overview of what I have learned of Australia’s daunting environmental problems, from Diamond’s book and from several months of being in the country—absorbing information provided by the national park system, watching the news, talking to Australians, and even spending some time on a commercial fruit plantation. As I walked through Blackdown Tablelands National Park, and saw echoes of the different people that lived there—the ruins of cattle ranchers’ camps, and evidence of an Aboriginal presence in sandstone caves—I wondered how one group managed to thrive in this arid, infertile land, while the other couldn’t; how one group seemed to understand how to manage Australia’s resources delicately, while the other stubbornly clung (and still clings) to the expectation that they could can extract what they wanted, as quickly as and in whatever quantities they liked, and the land would yield profit indefinitely.

In an area with limited resources of nutrients and water, it seems obvious that this cannot work. As I sat by Rainbow Falls, I began thinking about this issue in terms of a net quantity of the “stuff of life” within an ecosystem—a certain limited amount of water, a certain limited amount of nutrients. As I rather more poetically than scientifically described my new insight while sitting by the falls, “one could say that these plants hold the future of life in this region. They are they nourishment for future generations. Likewise, they are more than mere descendents, but rather a direct continuation of the life that came before. The same life-stuff that made up those earlier generations now constitutes the current population.

“Life supports life. It is all one continuous process, without beginning or end. The life process of each individual organism is part of this larger happening in which all organisms nourish each other, into the past and the future. As long as organisms are born and die within this happening and are not prevented from being part of the cycle, from nourishing future generations, life can continue for a very long time even in a place where time and erosion have left the soil itself devoid of nutrients.”

It turns out that my poetical musings actually share some of the same vocabulary as the scientific terminology for these processes. Ecologists actually talk about “nutrient cycling” within ecosystems. There are natural processes that put nutrients into an ecosystem, and natural processes that remove them, such as the geological activities I mentioned earlier. The harvesting of organic material (plant or animal) is one such process. Harvesting prevents nutrients from cycling, and, along with other processes that remove nutrients from an ecosystem, can contribute to a net loss of nutrients. 

But to answer the question I posed earlier: What had the Aborigines, who made their home on one of the world’s driest, most infertile continents for forty thousand years, done differently from the European settlers? Not being an ecologist or an anthropologist, I didn’t have much in the way of tools to help me answer that question. It does seem like the Aborigines managed to harvest organic material from their environment for their sustenance without tipping the balance toward a net loss of nutrients.  Perhaps their ability to do this has something to do with two vastly different attitudes toward the natural world and the sources of their sustenance. In short, the European settlers considered themselves to exist outside of the “cycle of life” I described above, while the Aborigines must have found a way, over thousands of years, to live sustainably within that cycle.

The early Australian settlers, as well as many people in the world today, saw nature as something they merely use, not as something they are also a part of. They saw in the world around them a wealth of natural resources that they could take as they please, not just for their own personal sustenance, but in order to export them to other places and amass wealth. By doing this, they broke the cycle of life; they prevented organisms from nourishing later generations.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, three-quarters of Australia’s population of about thirty million lives in urban areas. Much of their food and other organic products come from Australia’s agricultural land. This results in a flow of nutrients out of the areas of production and into the cities. If all of these city dwellers were appropriately distributed over Australia’s productive land, would the land be able to support them? Probably not. Yet there are elements in the Australian government who are pushing hard for policies that would encourage further population growth, believing for some reason that, without twenty million more people, they won’t have the influence or economic clout to be a player on the world political stage.

We must not forget how much of Australia’s agricultural products—livestock, timber, food—are exported overseas, adding to the net loss of nutrients in Australia’s agricultural land. Simplified (and perhaps oversimplified) in this way, it seems clear that Australia’s infertile soil and delicate ecosystems cannot provide the nourishment required to sustain such a large population of organisms that are not themselves part of that ecosystem, that are not part of that regional cycle of life. Hence the constant necessity of man-made fertilizers, and the plight of Australia’s fresh water supply.

Yet this attitude that man is separate from nature, that we have a right to exploit it however we choose even while living in cities and distancing ourselves from it for our own convenience, is shared by countless millions of Westerners (I use this word more for the convenience of choosing a term than because I think it is a truly accurate appellation). In fact, this attitude is so common, that it comes as a surprise to many people that there could be any other type of relationship with the natural world. We’ve done such a good job at distancing ourselves from it that many people feel uncomfortable in nature—it’s full of bugs, dirt, germs; there’s nowhere to sit, no entertainment, nothing to buy. Even though I love being in natural settings, I would be lying if I said I’m not susceptible to similar feelings from time to time. When I’m soaking wet, smelly, my feet are covered in blisters and my ankles are covered in leaches, I occasionally long for the sterility of a dry, air-conditioned hotel room and food that comes pre-prepared in a neat little box.

But I experiment in suppressing these feelings of disgust. I am, at least intellectually, aware that peoples like the Australian Aborigines had a different attitude toward the natural world, and I try to understand what that would be like. Unfortunately, I fear this is basically impossible. How can I know what it would have been like to see myself as completely integrated into the natural processes taking place around me, rather than as a visitor from outside? How would it have felt to travel not just to places I thought were pretty, and not when I have the money and time off work, but when certain plants were producing fruit, or in order to follow the animals I ate for food? How would it have felt to have the ability to scan the eucalyptus woodlands of Blackdown Tablelands in search of food the way I scan the price tags at the supermarket? What would it have been like if Rainbow Falls was not just a pleasant place to sit and write in my journal, but as indispensable for my life as money is today?

However difficult it may be to bridge the gap between these different perspectives, I think that at least diminishing that distance will be necessary if human beings want to continue to survive on this planet. The Aborigines survived in the harsh environment of Australia for forty thousand years, while Westerners have managed to significantly reduce the continent’s resources in just a few hundred. What did the Aborigines do right? They lived as part of the place that provided their sustenance, in smaller populations, and they did not overexploit nature’s resources. That’s not to say they had no effect on the natural world at all. They commonly used bushfires as a way of coaxing the woodlands into producing the types of plant foods they preferred. Although I know little of their history, I can only assume that at some point their practices had a detrimental effect on certain species. However, over the course of their long inhabitance in Australia, they developed a way of living in balance within their ecosystems.

The first step for Western society to find such a balance is to actually admit we live within an ecosystem. We must realize this not just on an intellectual level; this perspective must not be limited merely to ecologists. Everyone—miners, doctors, farmers, bankers, the guy who works at McDonalds—must realize he does not exist outside the natural world, but within it. He must realize that, though our society has trained us to think that food comes from grocery stores and water comes from the tap, the sources of our sustenance really lie in the icky, buggy, dirty, germy nature we’ve learned to fear, and desire merely to control and exploit. Perhaps an awareness of the necessity of “getting back to nature” will compel him to find a way to get over its dirtiness and lack of refinement; or perhaps, just going outside and seeing how nice it is will make him think twice about tossing that chip bag out the car window.

 The first step to saving the world might just be to go have a picnic in the park.