Helioskiagrablog is back...

... from...

• the land of amber liquid and dingos
• where ladies, gentlemen, boys, and girls smear vegemite on their bread — even when under no apparent duress
• where football (aka "footy") is played without an offsides rule by men in shorts and tanktops who brutalize anyone spotted carrying an oblate spheroid, and who are apparently distinguishable from rugby players by having necks, a predilection for oval fields, and for passing said oblate spheroid forward as well as backward — though rarely before being brutalized
• the only country aside from New Guinea with extant representatives of monotremes (the egg-laying, most ancient order of mammals), as well as marsupial and placental mammals, the latter absent any native primate and restricted to bats and rats
• the only continent in which the "foxes" fly (and are really mega-bats) and give a new meaning to "hanging out"
• the only continent where there are no native hoofed species or, for that matter, carnivores aside from mice and rats
• the only continent where half the mammals are marsupials — compared to North America's single species and South America's single family
• the only country where cedars (Toona) are not cedars, pines (Araucaria) are not pines, yellow robins are not robins, willy wagtails are not wagtails, choughs are not choughs, magpies are not magpies, shrike-thrushes are not thrushes, fairy- and scrub-wrens are not wrens, and where kingfishers don't fish
• a "megadiverse" country with 600,000 - 700,000 species
• a country that is a hotspot for endemism — where 82% of the mammals (including two of three extant monotremes and the vast majority of marsupials), 45% of the birds, 90% of the inshore, temperate-zone fish, and most frogs, reptiles, and flowering plants cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.

Of course, this could be none other than the land of Oz. Our visit — to south Queensland (in the east-central part of the country) — included temperate and subtropical rainforests in and around Lamington National Park and Fraser Island — a sand island off the Queensland coast where fresh water wells up and runs out to sea in extraordinarily clear, free-flowing creeks.

And how have Australians treated this wonderfully exotic (to a North American's eye, unique, and profigately diverse natural heritage? They have...

• cut down virtually all temperate woodlands and plowed under virtually all native grasslands
• eroded soil at rates often exceeding soil formation by 2 1/2 orders of magnitude
• salinized the soil with chemical fertilizers, over-irrigation (evaporating water leaves salt deposits), and (in seeming contradiction) by introducing crops that absorb less water than the displaced natives — producing a rising water tables that bring salt to the surface
• desertified the land on a widespread and accelerating basis — largely from gross overgrazing and subsequent erosion
• vastly overcommitted the use of water despite an epic, decades-long drought and explicit warnings in the IPCC Working Group II Report on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" (http://www.ipcc.ch/) on the effects of climate change in Australia and New Zealand
• the fourth-highest per capita ecological footprint — of 6.4 hectare — about the size of 9 rugby league football fields (got that, mate?)
  

But perhaps the greatest tragedy is in the loss of plants and animals — or in the day's catch phrase, "biodiversity".

Contemplate once more all those wonderful creatures unique to Australia. According to Prof. David Linenmayer, of The Australian National University Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (http://cres.anu.edu.au/people/userprofile.php?user=davidl), Australia has the highest per capita number of extinct and threatened species in the world. Most tragically, Australia leads the world in recent mammal extinctions. 27 mammal species that lived in continental Australia at the time of European settlement in 1788, now presumed extinct under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act (http://www.environment.gov.au/epbc/). Ten of those species have been lost since 1900. Half of Australia's marsupials and 30 per cent of its native rodents have become extinct or had their distributions drastically reduced in the last 220 years. Some animals can be found in less than 1 per cent of the area they occupied just 220 years ago. The Australian State of the Environment (SOE) Report 1996 (http://www.soe.wa.gov.au/links.html) states that more than 100 mammal species (out of some 275 in all, including marine mammals) in Australia are endangered, vulnerable or potentially vulnerable. Other sources put the figures of mammals at risk at close to 55%.

Putting this in perspective, the notes for a Central Queensland University course in "Conservation in Australia" (http://humanities.cqu.edu.au/geography/GEOG11024/week_2.htm) state:

What are the primary causes of environmental problems in Australia? These are much the same as elsewhere in the developed countries: consumption overpopulation.

Add to this the massive land clearing that has occurred in the last 200 years, and the inherent vulnerability of the Australian environment and its native species to disturbance, and the result is one of the most appalling environmental records in the world today.

When you consider that scarcely 200 years ago the entirety of the Australian continent was in a virtually unblemished environmental condition, the magnitude of change since then probably has no parallel in Earth history.

Even the Americans took some 400 years to do the damage they have done, but arguably we 21 million Australians have done even more damage to Australia's natural environments in just 200 years than 300 million Americans have done in twice that period.

Of course, the Aussies beat the North Americans at their own game. They accelerated their plundering of the land by taking up the technologies, lifestyles, and economic institutions that the US had already developed and put to similar use. In today's world, China may need just 20 years to reap similar destruction.

How are Aussies reacting? They

• continue to have one of the highest land-clearing rates in the world
• continue to have profligate consumption patterns that result in one of the highest per-capita carbon and ecological footprints in the world
• continue to over-extract water from rivers, streams, and wetlands
• talk about "sustainable growth" and "sustainable consumption" and "sustainable management".

In short, Aussies continue to follow the North American model of regarding their natural endowment primarily or nearly exclusively as fuel for an economy that "must" continue to grow in order to produce more of what people want — or what the economic forces persuade them that they want. It seems that people are sometimes persuaded only long enough to feed the economic engine with their purchase. According to the Australia Institute report on "Wasteful Consumption in Australia" (www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP77.pdf), Australians buy $10.5 billion worth of "stuff" that they don't use every year. As it happens, that's about the same amount that the 2007 Australian federal budget earmarks for environmental projects.