Australia's growing disaster

Farming is threatening to destroy the soil and native flora and fauna over vast areas of Australia. What price should be put on conservation?

Australia's National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Committee estimates that burning wood from cleared forests accounts for about 30 per cent of Australia's emissions of carbon dioxide, or 156 million tones a year. And water tables are rising beneath cleared land. In the Western Australian wheat belt, estimates suggest that water is rising by up to 1 meter a year. The land is becoming waterlogged and unproductive or is being poisoned by salt, which is brought to the surface. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) reckons that 33 million hectares has been degraded by salivation. The federal government estimates the loss in production from salinity at A$200 million a year.

According to Jason Alexandra of the ACF, this list of woes is evidence that Australia is depleting its resources by trading agricultural commodities for manufactured imports. Ineffect, it sells topsoil for technologies that will be worn out or redundant in a few years. The country needs to get away from the "colonial mentality" of exploiting resources and adopt agricultural practices suited to Australian conditions, he says.

Robert Hadler of the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) does not deny that there is a problem, but says that it is "illogical" to blame farmers. Until the early 1980s, farmers were given tax incentives to clear land because that was what people wanted. If farmers are given tax breaks to manage the land sustainable, they will do so. Hadler argues that the two reports on land clearance do not say anything which was not known before.

Australia is still better off than many other developed countries, says Dean Graetz, an ecologist at the CSIRO, the national research organization. "A lot of the country is still notionally pristine," he says. "It is not transformed like Europe where almost nothing that is left is natural." Graetz, who analyzed the satellite photographs for the second land clearance report, argues that there is now better co-operation between Australian scientists, government officials and farmers than in the past.

But the vulnerable state of the land is now widely understood, and across Australia, schemes have started for promoting environment friendly farming. In 1989, Prime Minister Bob Hawke set up Landcare, a network of more than 2000 regional conservation groups. About 30 percent of landholders are members, "It has become a very significant social movement," says Helen Alexander from the National Landcare Council. "We started out worrying about not much more than erosion and the replanting of trees but it has grown much more diverse and sophisticated,"

But the bugbear of all these conservation efforts is money. Landcare's budget is A$110 million a year, of which only A$6 million goes to farmers. Neil Clark, an agricultural consultant from Bendigo inVictoria, says that farmers are not getting enough. "Farmers may want to make more efficient use of water and nutrients and embrace more sustainable practices, but it all costs money and they just don't have the spare funds," he says.

Clark also says scientists are taking too large a share of the money for conservation. Many problems posed by agriculture to the environment have been "researched to death", he says. "We need to divert the money for a while into getting the solutions into place." Australia's chief scientist, Michael Pitman, disagrees. He says that science is increasingly important. Meteorologists, for example, are becoming confident about predicting events which cause droughts in Australia. "If this can be done with accuracy then it will have immense impact on stocking levels and how much feed to provide," says Pitman, 'The end result will be much greater efficiency."

Steve Morton of the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology says the real challenge facing conservationists is to convince the 85 per cent of Australians who live in cities that they must foot a large part of the bill. "The land is being used to feed the majority and to produce wealth that circulates through the financial markets of the cities," he says. One way would be to offer incentives to extend the idea of stewardship to areas outside the rangelands, so that more land could be protected rather than exploited. Alexander agrees. "The nation will have to debate to what extent it is willing to support rural communities," she says. "It will have to decide to what extent it wants food prices to reflect the true cost of production. That includes the cost of looking after the environment."

AUSTRALIA'S FIRST COMMERCIAL WIND FARM

A

HARVEST time in Esperance is constant. As long as the wind blows - which is pretty much all the time –nine identical synchronized wind turbines reap the benefits of the dependable winds that gust up around the southern coastline of Western Australia. These sleek ,white, robot-like wind turbines loom up on the horizon forming part of Australia's first commercial wind farm. They're not only functional machines that help provide electricity for this secluded coastal town, but increasingly, they're also draw cards for curious tourists and scientists alike.

B

Because of its isolation, Esperance is not linked to Western Power's grid which supplies electricity from gas-, coal-and oil-fired power stations to the widespread population of Western Australia. Before the wind turbines went in, Esperance's entire electricity needs were met by the diesel power station in town.

C

The $5.8 million Ten Mile Lagoon project is not Esperance's first wind farm. The success of a smaller, experimental wind farm, at a spot called Salmon Beach, encouraged the State's power utility to take Esperance wind seriously. Today the wind turbines at Ten Mile Lagoon work in conjunction with the diesel power station, significantly reducing the amount of the town's electricity generated by expensive diesel power.

D

The wind farm is connected to the power station by a 33-kilovolt power line, and a radio link between the two allows operators to monitor and control each wind turbine. The nine 225-kilowatt Vestas wind turbines produce a total generating capacity of two megawatts and provide around 12 per cent of the energy requirements of Esperance and its surrounding districts.

E

The power produced by a wind turbine depends on the size and efficiency of the machine and, of course, on the energy in the wind. The energy in the wind available to the wind turbines is proportional to wind speed cubed. Thus, the greater the wind speed, the greater the output of the turbine. In order to achieve optimum wind speeds, the right location is imperative.” You have to accept the nature of the beast," Mr. Rosser, Western Power's physicist said.” As surface dwellers our perceptions of wind speeds are bad. As you go higher, wind speed increases significantly."

F

The most favorable wind sites are on gently sloping hills, away from obstructions like trees and buildings and where the prevailing winds are not blocked. Computer modeling was used to select the best site for Esperance's wind farm. Scientists were concerned not only with efficiency, but also with protecting the coastal health environment which is rich in plant life and home to tiny pygmy and honey possums, and a host of bird species. In addition, the wind farm is adjacent to Esperance's popular scenic tourist drive.

G

Strict erosion controls have been implemented and access to the wind farm is limited to selected viewing areas. The wind turbine towers are painted white and devoid of corporate logos or signage. According to Mr. Rosser there is something of a worldwide backlash against wind farms with regard to their visual impact,” But because wind turbines perform best in the most exposed positions, they will always be visible. There is a very real need to balance environmental and technical requirements. I think the Ten Mile Lagoon Wind Farm sets the standards for environmentally friendly developments."

H

In fact, the project has become something of a tourist attraction in itself, Esperance shire president Ian Mickel said the wind turbines had been well accepted by locals.” We have watched the wind farm develop with great interest, and now we find visitors to Esperance are equally enthusiastic about it," he said. The aim now is to identify other remotelocations where wind turbines will be a feasible means of supplementing existing power stations.

Effects on Salmon Biodiversity

The number of Pacific salmon has declined dramatically but the loss of genetic diversity may be a bigger problem.

Each year, countless salmon migrate from the river and streams along the western coasts of Canada and the US to the Pacific Ocean, while at the same time others leave the ocean and return to freshwater to spawn a new generation. This ritual has been going on for many millennia. But more than a century ago, the number of salmon returning from the sea began to fall dramatically in the Pacific Northwest. The decline accelerated in the 1970s and by the 1990s the US Endangered Species Act listed 26 kinds of salmon as endangered.
In North America, there are five species of Pacific salmon: pink salmon, chum, sockeye, coho and chinook. Most of these fish migrate to the sea and then return to freshwater to reproduce. They are also semelparous - they die after spawning once. The life cycle of typical salmon begins with females depositing eggs in nests, or redds, on the gravel bottoms of river and lakes. There must be large quantities of gravel for this process to be successful. The young emerge from here and live in freshwater for periods ranging from a few days to several years. Then the juveniles undergo a physiological metamorphosis, called smoltification, and head towards the ocean. Once in the sea, the salmon often undertake extensive migrations of thousands of miles while they mature. After anywhere from a few months to a few years, adult salmon return - with high fidelity - to the river where they were born. There they spawn and the cycle begins again. Stream-type chinook spend one or more years in freshwater before heading to sea; they also undertake extensive offshore voyages and return to their natal streams during the spring or summer, often holding in freshwater for several months before spawning. In contrast, ocean-type chinook move out very early in life, before they reach one year of age. But once these salmon reach open water, they do not travel far offshore. They usually spend their entire ocean residence on the continental shelf and return to their natal streams immediately before spawning. Because salmon typically return to reproduce in the river where they were spawned, individual streams are home to local breeding populations that can have a unique genetic signature and the state of the oceans influences this. Also, salmon react in complex ways to human-induced changes to their environment. The extensive development of hydropower on the major rivers of the western US has clearly disrupted populations of salmon. Other problems come from the very engineering fixes made to protect these fish from harm. Dams on some rivers are equipped with submersible screens designed to divert migrating juveniles away from turbines. Unfortunately, these measures do not benefit all fish. These screens steer as many as 95 percent of the stream-type chinook around the turbines, but because of idiosyncrasies in behaviour these measures redirect as few as 15 percent of ocean-type chinook. One thus expects to see genetic shifts in favour of the stream types. Fish ladders too have drawbacks. Although these devices have helped to bring survival rates for mature fish closer to historic levels, dams have certainly altered their upstream journey. Rather than swimming against a flowing river, adults now pass through a series of reservoirs punctuated by dams, where discharge from the turbine can disorient the fish and make it hard for them to find ladders. Such impediments do not kill the fish, but they affect migration rates.  Dams may also modify salmon habitat in more subtle ways. An indirect effect of the 92metre Brownlee Dam on the Snake River provides a dramatic example. Historically, the upper Snake River produced some 25,000 to 30,000 chinook salmon that spawned during the early fall. The completion of the dam in the late 1950s not only rendered the vast majority of their habitat inaccessible, but also led to more extreme water temperatures downstream from the dam. These changes, in turn, altered the life cycle of the small population of Snake River chinook that remained. Today young chinook emerge from the gravel later than they did before the dam was built, and thus they migrate downstream later, when temperatures are higher and water levels lower.