Nov 20, 2019

Nationals betray the bush — again

Among the death and destruction left in their wake, one can observe some positives that have come from the devastating bushfires that ripped through New South Wales and Queensland.
One is that the conservative taboo on linking bushfire intensity and frequency to the climate crisis has been broken. The other is that the National Party has well and truly revealed itself to be no friend of regional Australia.

The desperate attempt by Nationals leader Michael McCormack to dismiss any reference to climate science as the preserve of "woke capital-city greenies" — in stark contradiction to the clearly expressed views of firefighting experts and people in the bush — marked a genuine turning point.
The frantic insistence by former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce that the Greens bear some responsibility for the fires, even though the Coalition has been in power for several years, both federally and in NSW, was truly unhinged.

Once upon a time, the National Party was characterised by its "rural socialism", a mixture of rural pork-barrelling and support for farmers. Those days have long since gone.
It now functions as a simple sidekick for the extension of the Liberals’ ruthless neoliberal agenda into the bush. The Nationals’ unconditional support for coal mining and billionaire cotton producers, at the expense of the Darling River ecosystem and downstream agricultural industries, is brutal proof that they represent agribusiness and fossil fuel capitalists, not family farmers.

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Oct 18, 2019

NSW rivers crisis: A ‘perfect storm’ of drought, theft and corruption

“The problem is mismanagement of the Barwon-Darling rivers” activist Fleur Thompson told the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival bus tour, as it passed through the western New South Wales town of Bourke on September 30.
“The federal and state governments could step in anytime and fix it, but they don’t and won’t. To do that the governments would have to admit fault.”
Between September 28 and October 4, some 300 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people travelled through western NSW towns that have been badly affected by a lack of water in the rivers, as part of the corroboree organised by First Nations activist and artist Uncle Bruce Shillingsworth.
Discussing the causes of the lack of water, Thompson explained: “There is a water crisis. It is a perfect storm, which includes drought, water theft, mismanagement, political interference and corruption.
“It came about because the rules about irrigation and allocation of water in the river were changed by governments in 2012.”

Is NSW deliberating shutting down towns to mine underground?

“It seems that towns in western New South Wales are being shut down and nobody is listening,” local resident Mark Merritt told Green Left Weekly on the banks of a non-existent river.
Together with Susie Peake and Cath Eaglesham from Earthling Studios, Merritt attended an event organised on the Baaka River (the local Aboriginal name for the Darling River) as part of the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroborree Festival tour held between September 29 and October 4.
The tour was organised by Uncle Bruce Shillingsworth to expose the state of the Baaka.
Broken Hill’s water has always come from the Menindee Lakes, a gigantic lake system in the middle of a semi-arid desert that contains water bodies more than 15 kilometres wide.
In 1949, infrastructure works modified the lakes to act as huge water storages to mitigate flooding and hold water supplies for South Australia. A more than 30-kilometre long levy was built along the eastern bank of the Baaka to form a human-made lake, named Lake Wetherell, as an additional water storage to supply the townships of Menindee, Sunset Strip and Broken Hill.
In the past 60 years Broken Hill has never run out of water.
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Sep 16, 2019

La Via Campesina: Burning the Amazon is a crime against humanity

La Via Campesina is a global social movement that unites 148 groups representing small farmers, peasants, rural workers and indigenous communities around the world.
It fights for food sovereignty and ecologically sustainable agriculture.
It released the following statement on August 24.
***
Over the past few days, peoples and governments from around the world have been witnessing the consequences of the recent and serious crimes committed against the Amazon rainforest.
The thick clouds of smoke that covered the southeast of Brazil, especially São Paulo, are a direct result of the dramatic increase of fires set in several parts of the forest and transition areas with the Cerrado tropical savanna.
It should be clear for society in Brazil, Latin America, and the world that this is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it is the result of a series of actions taken by agribusinesses and big miners since the beginning of the Jair Bolsonaro administration, which has been actively supporting and encouraging them.
After nearly two decades of reduction in deforestation, the country’s current president and his environment minister, Ricardo Salles, engaged in violent rhetoric against Brazilian environmental conservation legislation and mechanisms, while also increasingly targeting and criminalising those who have historically protected the Brazilian biomes — peasant families and indigenous peoples.

Darling River fish removal is no solution

Nature conservation groups have criticised the NSW Coalition government’s $10 million plan to remove threatened fish species from the Darling River in the state's south-west, following the disastrous fish kill last summer.
The plan involves relocating thousands of stranded native fish from drought-ravaged Menindee from September 9 in a two-week rescue mission, targeting pools that will not survive the summer.
Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said the rescue mission was part of the government’s strategy to create “a modern day’s Noah’s Ark” to protect native fish species. “This summer is going to be nothing short of fish Armageddon,” Marshall said.
The fish will be stunned and scooped up into boats with special climate-controlled containers. They will then be taken to a section of the Lower Darling which fishery experts say will offer better quality habitat and long-term water security for the fish.

Aug 22, 2019

Killing rivers for mines and irrigators

The Broken Hill water pipeline has been exposed as a vital element in a plan to sacrifice the Lower Darling and Murray rivers to the interests of the cotton and mining industries.
A 2016 business case report into the $500 million Broken Hill pipeline, made public by Independent New South Wales MLC Justin Field on August 14, has revealed the project was built to meet the needs of irrigators and mines while ignoring impacts on the environment and regional towns in New South Wales and Queensland that are run out of water.
The report focused on shifting the water source for Broken Hill, in far west NSW, from the Menindee Lakes to the Murray River to free up extraction for irrigators further upstream and provide water for two new mines.
Quoting figures from the Cotton Growers Association, the report said that going ahead with the pipeline and drying up the Menindee Lakes would put 50 billion litres of water into irrigator dams in the northern reaches of the Darling River, contributing an estimated $120 million to agricultural output.
Field said: “Any way you cut this, the pipeline is a half-billion dollar gift to Northern Basin irrigators,” adding this is “a disaster” for the dying Darling River.
Field said the business case report echoes findings of the recently released Natural Resources Commission review of the Barwon-Darling Water Sharing Plan, which found over-extraction by irrigators and other users had brought forward drought conditions in parts of the river system by three years.
“The reality is that this [drought] has been a manufactured crisis,” Field said. “Broken Hill didn’t have a water security problem until upstream irrigators were allowed by the NSW government to suck the river system.
“This pipeline allows that unsustainable water use to continue and risks the long-term health of the river and the Menindee Lakes.”

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Jul 19, 2019

Broken Hill: ‘Give us our river back’

The Murray-Darling river system is the lifeblood of Australian agriculture, but it is now in serious crisis.
The river system is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, and with mass fish deaths in the headlines and farmers struggling to survive, the water crisis is deepening.
But the current crisis has long-term roots in a river system that for years has been controlled by big business and corrupt governments.

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Jul 17, 2019

On guardianship of the biosphere

Guardianship: the position of protecting or defending something.”
Eating meat is increasingly condemned as an unethical choice that murders sentient beings. But we need to understand that more animals die in plant food production than in abattoirs.
Those deaths in industrially-farmed fields and grain silos are terribly cruel and painful: minced alive by farm machinery or poisoned by the millions around silos. The insect apocalypse from pesticide use in industrial agriculture is creating a wave of extinctions of the birds and smaller species that eat insects.
Is the taking of one life any different to the taking of another life? Is a human life more important than a dog’s life? A dolphin’s? An orangutan’s? A cow’s? A hamster’s? A mouse’s? How about a cockroach? A social city-building insect then, like a bee or an ant? What about plankton? Amoebas?
Where do you draw the line between which life we should give a damn about and which life is unimportant?

Rivers in crisis demand real water solutions now

A key federal election issue, which the carefully stage-managed leaders’ debates are ignoring, is one on which all our lives depend: access to clean drinking water.
Our rivers are dying and our artesian basins are being poisoned because river water is being sold off at bargain basement rates to the major parties’ corporate donors.
Corruption and water theft is just a part of how business is done in large parts of the Murray-Darling Basin.
Water security is vital for rural communities because water sourced from artesian bores and rivers is crucial for farming, especially as prolonged drought bites hard all the way down the east coast.
Given that cities are sited on the coast where rainfall is more regular, access to clean water can be seen as a rural issue, rather than something we all need to be concerned about.
Protecting our water is vital for all of us.

Corruption is killing our rivers

The ABC 4 Corners program “Pumped”, which screened on July 24, 2017, showed that far from saving the river system, the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has created a financial windfall for a select few.
Political corruption and fraud have been a part of the process from the beginning, ensuring that big irrigators, who are also National Party donors, have been the major beneficiaries of the extra environmental water being returned to the river. Water speculation has been encouraged. Environmental water purchases have ended up as simply a way to privatise water for the financial gain of a handful of big corporate irrigators.

Rivers in crisis: Redesigning river systems for profits

As prolonged drought bites deeply in New South Wales and Queensland, and regional towns run out of water, state and federal governments are continuing their push to deliberately dry out the Menindee Lakes.
The Menindee Lakes, located in far west NSW near the town of Menindee, are a chain of big shallow lakes along the Darling River that form an important water storage system.
Although politicians claim there is too much evaporation from the lakes and associated wetlands, ecologists state that they are a key part of maintaining water flows and preventing mass fish kills in the river systems. They have also pointed out that the lakes are crucial migratory waterbird habitats and key fish breeding areas.

Rivers in crisis: The deliberate murder of the Menindee Lakes

After five years and $13 billion of public money spent on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, there is less water in the river than ever before — and more in the private water storages of a handful of National Party donors.
While everyone in charge is saying only more water will fix the problem, none of them are talking about pumping water back out of these storages, even though billions of litres have been illegally drained out of the rivers.
Instead state and federal governments are pushing on with their Menindee Lakes Water Saving Project that seeks to “decommission” the lakes by drying them out. The effects of this policy will be devastating for the Lower Darling.
These lakes are a key wetland in the Murray-Darling Basin freshwater ecosystem and an important fish breeding and waterbird habitat, with more than 30 species of waterbirds, including threatened species such as freckled ducks and migratory waders, inhabiting the area.

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Ecological agriculture needs to be made a priority

The number of farmers moving to ecological agriculture in its various forms — agroecology, organic, biological, biodynamic, regenerative — continues to grow as farmers and consumers become more aware of the harm pesticides and synthetic fertilisers cause to health and the environment.
Alan Broughton takes a look at this phenomenon and asks why the majority of farmers are still holding on to chemical methods and what can be done to increase the ecological uptake.

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Alan Broughton -- biological farmer: Grazing, soil carbon and methane

Alan Broughton is a biological agriculture researcher and organic farming teacher based in Eastern Victoria. He has had extensive experience in farm management and setup both here in Australia and overseas. I had a chance to discuss with him some of the assumptions being made about livestock as climate change drivers and how a new approach to grazing animals can impact on the sustainable ecology of agriculture.

[This interview was recorded in March, 2016]

(Duration:29.01 — 31.1MB)  mp3.

For more information visit The Soil Alliance
Further Reading

Feb 2, 2019

Rivers in Crisis:Water theft and corruption in the Darling River system

by Elena Garcia 

 
After a blue green algal bloom deprived the water of oxygen and left a million dead fish along a 40km section of the Darling River at Menindee Lakes, and as the massive NSW drought leaves rural communities like Walgett, wildlife, graziers and stock running out of water, politicians and bureaucracies are holding endless inquiries to appear to be dealing with the crisis. However they have been very slow to implement recommendations, and there are few moves to get more water into the river system or to deal with the mismanagement that is letting the river dry out.

Meanwhile Federal Drought Envoy Barnaby Joyce is rubbishing claims that corruption within the Murray Darling Basin Authority is to blame. “It’s not corruption. That’s a load of garbage,” he told 2GB’s Steve Price on January 11. “What we have is a massive drought. This is one of the worst on record.”

Joyce denied claims from locals that big irrigators up north are being given unfair access to water, leaving none for those down river. Instead he blamed a combination of two factors- that cool weather killed the algal bloom in the drought-reduced water, taking oxygen out of the water and killing the fish. And “bad management” which he said released water from Menindee Lakes for Adelaide use, to flow out the barrages.