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The Forum > Article Comments > Sold down the Murray > Comments

Sold down the Murray : Comments

By Will Mooney, published 28/11/2012

Crucially, we still don't know how much water the Plan will deliver for the environment or whether the promised allocations will be enough to ensure the survival of the river.

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I can deny most of what you have said! Whenever this rubbish is peddled you always forget the elephant in the room! 15,000 years ago there was an ice age on the Northern Hemisphere. Ice 5 kilometres thick took so much water there was no Bass Strait and our climate would have been much wetter. 15,000 years is a short time in history and that ice age went on for a million years so much for your view of history. Never comes into the equation. The fact is the Murray dried out every few years until we dammed it and CONSERVED water. Beat yourself up but also read a book written in 1960 called Water into gold this will give you much to ponder on. I think we do a good job with our environment.
Posted by JBowyer, Wednesday, 28 November 2012 9:13:59 AM
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Well well, what do you know.

After finally, totally destroying their states economy, so the entire state is reduced to beggar status, the Tassie greens now want to have a say in how we earn the money that supports them.

They don't even have enough sense to realise that someone has to earn their living for them. The fact that they would rather sit on their asses, gazing at trees is not enough for them. They want to make us fail along with them. I guess failure loves company.

Bugger off mate, do some more damage at home, if that's possible. We don't need the type of stupidity here that has destroyed your state. It is bad enough that you infest Canberra with the strange ratbags you elect to the senate, without trying to infect the entire nation.
Posted by Hasbeen, Wednesday, 28 November 2012 11:05:36 AM
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I agree mostly with JBowers erudite comments.
Before white settlement, indigenous populations managed their water very differently.
For starters, they left their mountain forests largely untouched, save harvesting some of the more nutritious seeds and dead-fall firewood.
This slowed the flow and release rate from the upland, which moderated the feast or famine nature of water flows.
We need to emulate this wise example, with myriad upland dams, forcing trillions of mega-litres into the landscape, from where it slowly releases, [during the exponentially extending droughts that are predicted as part and parcel of a climate changed future,] substituting for the now missing forests!
We can't un-engineer one of the most engineered rivers in history.
But, we can fix those things that we did glaringly wrong.
Around 50-60% of the losses are solely down to evaporation and seepage.
Fix all the evaporation/seepage problems, with pipes replacing open channels; and, ensure that only underground application of irrigation water, which allows doubled production outcomes for half the water allocation!
Just this much and no more, would return around 75% of the current water flow, back to the Murray.
Substituting very low water use algae, as a farmed low water use, high value, oil rich crop, for current irrigated crops, could return as much as 98% of current irrigation needs, back to the flow streams.
Oil peak and subsequent energy cost increases, would make this the most valuable crop we could grow, all while returning all but around 2%, of the water, back to the Murray.
Even then, we could grow better algae/mop crops, by using recycled water, which our preferred crops would clean, and wetlands would then purify!
If management teaches us just one thing, it teaches us that there is always a better way.
And indeed, that better way almost always produces a win/win outcome!
Building our future towns and cities, on known flood plains/potential wet lands, never ever part of that better way.
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Wednesday, 28 November 2012 11:38:45 AM
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What utter garbage Rhrosty.

The main management the indigenous populations indulged in was to burn the tripe out of the place. It drove game to their spears, & made finding it much easier.

It also made much penetrable where with out fire it becomes a vast thicket, useless to man & beast.

Studies using satellite imagery have found there are more trees in Oz today, than when white man settled. Of course many are now useless thickened impenetrable scrub.

Even the much loved by greenies river red gum forests are an artifact of white settlement. They did not exist in aboriginal times, they were burnt out before they could establish.

Where are you getting this idealistic garbage from mate? I think you are reading too much Green propaganda. You should stop that, it rots the soul.
Posted by Hasbeen, Wednesday, 28 November 2012 3:24:29 PM
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