Thanks,Ian, for this excellent article.

Revegetation of Australia's clapped out agricultural and pastoral land is indeed one very badly needed solution to our environmental problems and it can be done now at relatively little expense.

There is some very good work going on but it is a drop in the bucket given the scale of the damage.

Proactive governments are needed for a suitable scale scheme to be put in place.Given the appalling stupidity,ignorance and arrogance of the reigning oligarchy that is not going to happen without political change.

Tony Abbott's Eco Army could take this up as an ongoing task.

A real solution, not just more ALP taxes.

We need political change from the current ALP governments and their tricky ways.

The work of Henderson-Sellers and McGuffie receives support from a recent study by two Russian physicists, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva of the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute.

See: RAINFORESTS MAY PUMP WINDS WORLDWIDE, New Scientist, Issue 2702,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227024.400-rainforests-may-pump-winds-worldwide.html (subscription required)

The gist of the Gorshkov's and Makarieva's theory is this. A rain forest creates its own rain. Australia may be largely desert because the Aborigines burned down the old forests

Some quotes from the New Scientist article:

"If correct, the theory would explain how the deep interiors of forested continents get as much rain as the coast, and how most of Australia turned from forest to desert…."

"The volumes of water involved in this process can be huge. More moisture typically evaporates from rainforests than from the ocean. The Amazon rainforest, for example, releases 20 trillion litres of moisture every day."

"In conventional meteorology the only driver of atmospheric motion is the differential heating of the atmosphere. …"Nobody has looked at the pressure drop caused by water vapour turning to water." The scientists, whose theory is based on the basic physics that governs air movement have dubbed this the "biotic pump" and claim it could be "the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth". …"

"To back up their hypothesis they show how regions without coastal forests, such as west Africa, become exponentially drier inland. Likewise, in northern Australia, rainfall drops from 1600 millimetres a year on the coast to 200 mm some 1500 kilometres inland. In contrast, on continents with large forests from the coast to interior, rainfall is as strong inland as on the coast, suggesting the trees help shuttle moisture inland"

"…Australia once had forests but is now largely desert. Gorshkov and Makarieva argue that Aborigines burning coastal forests may have switched the continent from wet to dry by shutting down its biotic pump."

End quotes

We may be able to drought-proof Australia by planting trees.

Thanks for this Ian. I am totally on side with the idea of revegetating for all kinds of reasons, let alone combatting drought and climate change - but the emphasis should be on restoring native vegetation and habitats, as you say, rather than adding grist to the monocultural plantations mill. I fear that Abbott - and Rudd/Wong - will use a simplistic interpretation of these kinds of arguments to extend the managed investment schemes which have already swallowed up good agricultural land and displaced farmers in some areas.

The potential of a revegetation program for providing employment in rural communities is of particular interest. Plantations actually reduced jobs in our area - and interestingly, the company destroyed houses on the farms they brought up reducing opportunities for people to move to this depopulating district.

I would be interested in contacting you in regard to writing an article for a community development journal I am editing for publication later this year with a focus on rural Australia - how can I do that?

It is all very good to argue that we should re vegetate but how do we manage these new forests.
Having just lost my house in a bushfire before Christmas I can tell you that the current standards of managing forests in SE Australia is pretty damn poor.
The fire that took our house has also reduced 1000's of hectares of montane forest landscape to sticks and bare earth.
No one in their right mind can argue that this is a good result for the forest and can be directly traced to the decisions made by Carr and Debus in the mid nineties that resulted in the SEP 46 regulations (NSW Govt)

I believe that you are optimistic in your desire to stop head-wall erosion in gullies also.
If you look at Barry Starr's work looking at the attempted repair of these erosion gullies in the Googong and Cotter catchments you will find that these erosion gullies only stop when they reach bedrock.
The natural forces at work are just to great to stop without large engineering intervention.

Ian, I support your concept.

But I wonder about the practicalities.

< This approach has been utilised, in part, by some Australian land care groups with good results apparent over the past 10 to 15 years >

Yes. It is widely evident in the WA wheatbelt for example. However, it is still of very limited extent, all told. So I wonder about the prospects of considerably boosting the planting rate to the extent of it making any real difference to albedo, rainfall, salt mobilisation and groundwater, and doing it without significantly reducing the extent of productive land.

< Without the cooperation of local communities, farmers and other land managers such a scheme is doomed to failure. >

Indeed. In Queensland and New South Wales, rural landholders have recently had restrictions on clearing old growth and regrowth greatly increased. So to expect them to plant up significant portions of their properties on top of this is going to meet with strong opposition, to say the least!

So unfortunately, it is not a simple solution.