Farmers don't mass in large numbers because it would generally take three days off work to do so. A day down to the city, a day getting around the city and a day back. Your IR rentacrowd, on the other hand, flexes off for an extended lunch, does the demo and is back in office without having lost an hours pay. To measure the intensity of concern by street numbers is pure urban-centric ignorance.

I, too, once regarded myself as an ecologist until made aware of what is being done by people who own neither land nor trees in the name of ecology. I was also on a Regional Veg Management Committee and saw first hand the systematic manipulation of both information flow and deliberation process. All were able to recognise a real problem when it was identified but no real farmers representative (there was a number of fakes chosen by DNRM) was prepared to hand over a blank cheque for a disproportionate response.

And the record shows that the proportionate responses developed under the Regional Veg Planning Process were junked in favour of a total clearing ban.

It all gets back to proportionate responses to actual situations. Any departure from that is injustice. Injustice diminishes the whole community and the community will pay, very dearly, for this for as long as the injustice remains unremedied.

Most people understand that clever farmers work with nature. But the departmental brown shirts don't understand that working with nature offers both ecologically beneficial and adverse opportunities. Nothing can get rid of an unwanted forest like nature can. And the great irony of it all is that the best way to get rid of a forest is to do what the greens want us to do. That is, don't touch it.

Farmers have discovered that the bond of trust, the social contract that underpinned their amply demonstrated ecological good works, has been trashed. You and your kind have taken us down the road to ecological Bosnia and you will get the environment you deserve. Repent at leisure.

I dunno Perseus, you seem to make some half-sensible comments, and then you destroy your credibility with complete claptrap like; “You and your kind have taken us down the road to ecological Bosnia and you will get the environment you deserve.” My mind boggles!

Ok so there are issues with the whole tree-clearing regulatory process. Well gee whiz, what would you expect? For something as big and as complex as this to flow along perfectly smoothly?

After the ousting of the Goss Govt in 1995, due to an autocratic attempt to construct a major motorway, which alienated voters in four electorates, Beatty was very careful to see that no such top-down actions happened under his watch. Right from the start of the formulation of tree-clearing regulation, he made it clear that there would be a significant bottom-up factor included in the process, directly empowering landholders in decision-making. Hence the Regional Vegetation Management panels were set up.

Secondly, the whole show was based on good science, of which regional ecosystems were a big part. This was an excellent method of determining what vegetation types / habitats were in particular need of conservation. Along with consideration of rare or threatened species, soil erodibility, slope, salinity, corridors, riparian buffer zones and a few other criteria, a very good system was developed for determining what could and couldn’t be cleared.

Thirdly, the rules for determining remnant vegetation and Of Concern and Endangered regional ecosystems are skewed strongly in favour of the landholder and productivity, as I explained in a previous posting.

In conclusion, this is a good process! Flawed, yes, but still damn good all-told.

OK so you have picked this process to bits and condemned it outright. So how about telling us exactly how you would have gone about the regulation of tree-clearing, or would you have allowed open slather clearing to have continued until it exhausted itself?

Perseus,

You have clutched at all kinds of straws in order to bolster your case.

What you seem ot be saying is that the whole economic basis of much of our agriculture is unsound and I would agree.

If the income we derive from agricultural exports is insufficient to support the proper care of the land from which those exports are produced, then we should not be exporting. In the long term this can only make us poor if our already arid and largely infertile land is further degraded.

One way or another we have to find a way to support Australia's current population without irreparably harming our land, without the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuel based fertilisers, and without relying on cheap temporary labor, which would indeed need to be extremely cheap, if the costs of annual air fares to and from Australia, in a world which is running out of oil, are taken into account.

Ludwig, it was a credible process right up to the point when the whole process was junked by Beattie with the imposition of a blanket ban. This then excluded clearing even in catchments with 95% woody vegetation. It precluded a potentially valuable system of vegetation credits and trade-offs and it provided a pretext to avoid the obligation to compensate those who were compelled to deliver all of the communitys ill-informed whimsy. What compensation was provided was nothing more than a rebadging of the DNRM budget for the VegNazis. Hardly a balanced approach nor a proportionate response. But it did, at least, strip away any residual ambiguity about the predatory motives of QldInc. You see, no-one believes a word you say any more.

So, you're a luddite are you, Daggett? Or are you just constructing a suitable rationalisation in your own mind for the State sponsored depopulation of inland Queensland. It is pretty standard operating procedure of tyrants. Stack all the cards against the target minority and then lament their incapacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

You leave me breathless, and surprised, Perseus.

You say it was a credible process. Well that seems like the perfect contradiction to me.

In your last posting you ripped into the Regional Vegetation Management Committee process. But this was an integral part of the “credible process”. I could pull out 20 other examples from your postings on this thread since you first ripped into me on 6/11.

I’m sorry but I just don’t know where you are coming from.

And again I have to say that your use of extremist language (VegNazis) undoes your credibility entirely.

I reckon it is time to honour your statement of 11/11; “…and I have nothing more to say to you.”

Perseus,

Assigning labels of 'Luddite', 'vegnazi' etc. to your detractors, and other forms of verbal abuse, is no substitute for arguing your case, which you have failed to do.

My simple point is that every society has to live within the means of the resource base available to it. When societies fail to do so, they collapse as Jared Diamond has amply demonstrated. The situation we face today is not fundamentally different to the situation faced by the civilisations of Easter Island, the ancient Sumerians, the Mayans, Angkor Wat, Norse Greenland etc. If our society collapses, then the collapse will affect almost every corner of the globe and the consequences will be almost too awful to bear thinking about.

The main difference, today, is that we have been able to extend our civilisation way beyond the limitations reached by previous civilisations, because we have discovered a lot of captured fossil energy in the form of coal, petroleum and natural gas.

This form of energy in such convenient cannot be renewed, except over tens, or, perhaps, hundreds of millions of years. To have burnt up almost half of this priceless gift from nature in around 150 years, a blink of the eyelid in term of overall human history, is a staggering act of stupidity on the part of a supposedly intelligent species.

If we are to avoid the fate of those societies which Jared Diamond has described, then we must act with a sense of utmost urgency to find a way to live within the means we have at our disposal. If we are to continue to use non-renewable fossil fuels, then the purpose to which they must be put must be to make our environment sustainable, so that when they do inevitably run out, our land can still produce food and other necessities.

(tobecontinued)