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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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

• Ruminants and methane: Not the fault of the animals by Alan Broughton
• Veggie is the most low-carbon diet, right? Well, it depends where y...