Jennifer Marohasy wrote: "Australia’s elite really have forgotten where their milk, bread and trout come from."

Nearly all of Queensland's milk now comes from Victoria and we have virtually no dairy industry left in Queensland today, thanks to the 'free' market 'reforms' of recent years. I learnt this last Friday 4 November at a public meeting in Montville, Queensland, which used to have a large dairy industry, from Andrew McNamara the Labor member of the Queensland Parliament who gave the gave the famous speech back in February concerning Peak Oil ( see http://www.energybulletin.net/4654.html).

The only reason it is economic for milk to travel all of that distance is the current unsustainably cheap price of oil, which cannot last. When that changes we will have to either go without milk, or find a way to somehow rebuild our dairy industry having lost almost all the knowledge which kept it going, and having lost most of the best dairy farming land to property speculators.

Also, both Jennifer and Jared Diamond have omitted to mention that our agriculture is also unsustainably dependant upon non-renewable fossil fuel in another sense, that is nearly all of our agriculture requires both fertilizers and pesticides manufactured from petroleum. In other words, we are literally eating petroleum. How we can either feed the world, or maintain our current levels of agriculture productivity after this resource runs out by the middle of the decades starting 2030 at the latest has not been explained. For further information, see article by Richard Heinberg at http://www.museletter.com/archive/159.html

Perseus, the extent to which regrowth vegetation has come back to within the definition of remnant under the Vegetation Management Act, is not of “vast tracts”. It was a very minor component in the clearing of remnant vegetation. For vegetation to come back to this state, it cannot be of “comparatively recent age”. It generally takes a couple of decades to grow back this far. And of course landholders try to minimise the amount of regrowth that gets to a height and density anywhere near that of the original vegetation.

Anyway, vegetation that has advanced to such a state should simply be thought of as essentially equivalent to old-growth, as it holds just about full original ecological values. So this point of debate really is lost. So what if the remnant vegetation that was cleared had been largely near-mature regrowth??

We can’t base our conclusions on the stats, because just about every figure you look at on this whole issue is fraught with problems in how it was derived or interpreted. You have levelled plenty of criticism about some of the shortcomings in these figures, but you are at the same time using them to build your whole case. You can’t pick out the bits you like and ignore or condemn the rest.

I base my views on nearly 25 years experience in Queensland, having witnessed the vast clearing of the 90s in the wet tropics lowlands, central Qld (eg Nebo to Duaringa) and far southern Qld (eg Dirranbandi and St George areas), having had a great deal of experience in assessing remnant and non remnant vegetation, having observed thickening and encroachment across the state and having done enormous amounts of satellite image and aerial photo interpretation. I say profoundly that there is no way that the increase in forest cover in Qld in the 90s or even throughout the history of European settlement, in terms of area, has been of a greater extent than the clearing of remnant vegetation in just the one horrific decade

Wrong again, Ludwig. Most species can achieve the 70% height threshhold in no time when a chain is used, leaving viable root mass in situ. The dryer Qld forests are mostly lignotuberous, with stored energy for rapid regrowth. A coppiced stump on my place hit 20m in 3 years.

There is also some serious fudging of threshholds. One coastal forest (1200mm RF)had the canopy cover of sites 100km inland (800mm RF) used as the "normal extent". It had formed an 80% canopy but was assumed to have a normal 40% canopy so bits of adjoining paddock with shade trees at 20% canopy were captured as "remnant".

I have observed NRM officers surveying "normal height" over a 5ha sample, deliberately avoiding reference to mature plots in adjacent State Forest. It was akin to calculating the "normal height" of humans from the heights of primary school kids. The Act carefully avoided the word "too" from the term "the height to which the trees normally grow (too)". And this enabled the widespread capture of regrowth as remnant.

To call this stuff "nearly mature forest" is highly misleading. You have also compared new regrowth to remnant clearing when the real test of sustainability is the rate that regrowth reaches remnant status. In the upper Brisbane valley the area of existing regrowth (still growing)suggests the annual rate of new remnant formation is about 18 times greater than the remnant clearing rate.

Also, official clearing stats have always recorded the percentage of woody vegetation left in each catchment but provide no indication of the original woody veg cover. So the Condamine, with only 27.9% woody vegetation appears to have been drastically altered but, in fact, the original forest cover was only 35% anyway. It is a gross misrepresentation by omission but par for the course in public sector land management.

Crikey Perseus. I don’t know what magic fertilizer you use, but in my world, regrowth, the vast majority of which is from root stock, takes many years to get anywhere near 70% original height, and 50% original cover, except for rainforest, where pioneer Acacia species come back much faster. But in that situation, the composition of the canopy is quite different to the original, and thus the vegetation is still classed as non remnant. If regrowth has attained 50/70, then it is much more akin to old-growth vegetation than it is to a cleared paddock. So it rightly gets placed under the banner of remnant vegetation. It no longer matters whether it was previously cleared, or how old it is. You haven’t questioned the veracity of the 50/70 rule, so I think you just have to accept this.

Regarding the (alleged) fudging of thresholds. Again I say, you are being very critical of some stats and/or the methodology behind them, while using other stats from the same broad dataset on which to make your case. You just can’t do that!

You entered this debate with; “The additional forest in Qld at the height of the clearing was vast areas that had previously not been classed as forest because the canopy was less than 10%” You have highlighted various aspects of the whole tree clearing picture that you think are bodgy, but nothing can be bodgier than this. It is simply the most extraordinary claim. You have steadfastly avoided any response on this in your last 3 postings. Instead, you have beavered away at attempting to make this absolutely enormous extent of clearing in the 90s seem much less significant. Well, anyone who has any feel for this business isn’t going to buy that. And I am sure they must be laughing at the notion that the small portion of thickened vegetation that crossed the 10% canopy cover threshold could be of a greater extent than this decade’s worth of clearing. I think we have exhausted debate on this issue.

Hi Jennifer. Sorry for taking so long to respond.

Yes, I heartily agree that the Murray is much improved from 20 years ago, just as a patient who has had successful open heart surgery is much improved compared to before the operation. A little difference is that the surgery to save the Murray is ongoing and will need a lot more effort over the next 10 – 20 years, if it is to be ultimately successful.

That is not my point, though. You criticise Jared Diamond for using misinformation and propaganda, but you do the same thing. When you say that the salt concentration in the Murray is halved in the last 20 years and you imply that the problem is therefore solved, that is just as misleading as the “Murray is dying” campaign by the Green groups.

I don’t think spin doctoring on either side helps get the problem solved. I think you are doing the right thing by pointing out that the salinity in the Murray has dropped at Morgan and I applaud your efforts in going through Chapter 13 of ‘Collapse,’ and commenting on the places where Jared Diamond has been misleading or has his information wrong. I hope you keep doing that sort of stuff. I think you are trying to find solutions to environmental problems that are more evidence based and that is a goal that we should all strive for, but when you spin the evidence or leave something out, then it becomes harder to find good solutions.

I think you have a lot to offer Australia in our efforts to live sustainably and we need your help if we are going to be successful.

Ludwig, I have read some seriously silly statements in my day but your suggestion that I cannot use one set of data to refute other data is “sind doch nur scheisen gestalten”.

The data on forested area is compiled by the National Forest Inventory (ACT) while the State-wide Land And Tree Study (SLATS) satellite analysis of clearing is done by QLD DNRM. The remnant maps are prepared by the Queensland Herbarium. But even if it was all done by one entity it is ridiculous to suggest that because one detects an error in part of a work then the entire work becomes invalid, or worse, is off limits to those who detected the error. That is ideology not science.

For the record;

SLATS detects woody vegetation cover and clearing of that cover. It can detect significant reductions in canopy cover and can determine what use the cleared land was put to. It can classify that woody veg cover by composition but the task of measuring fluxes in veg composition is well beyond budget. They do not measure natural changes in canopy.

The Qld Herbarium maps remnant vegetation as well as possible under grossly inadequate budget. Particular Regional Ecosystems (RE’s) have had their area substantially revised in consecutive map versions. RE 12.3.11 for example, had one map version with 69,300ha left out of an original 315,000ha, and another had only 49,000ha left out of an original 129,000ha.

The National Forest Inventory defined what a forest is and measures the area that falls within that definition. And last time uncovered 35 million hectares across Australia that had changed status, either from non-forest to forest or the other way. There was an extra 7 million hectares of forest in Qld.

The “bad news” of clearing is easy and cheap to detect while the “good news” on regrowth is hard and expensive to detect and a political decision was made to only fund a half truth.

Less than half of Qld clearing is forest clearing. Remnant is not old growth and regrowth is very substantial in Qld