Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Even the green leaning Australian ABC is concerned about the arrogant ignorance, of Aussie city politicians lecturing farmers how to improve their farms, by letting the weeds grow.
New South Wales Farmers president Derek Schoen said he was “very disappointed” with the Labor environment spokesman Mark Butler’s approach to climate change policy.
“It is, again, sort of demonising farmers as environmental wreckers, which we definitely are not,” Mr Schoen said.
“We have a vested interest in maintaining the environment and our properties in a sustainable manner, and to again be targeted by Labor, it just proves that some within the party are very slow learners.
“I’m not even sure if Mark Butler has actually put a foot on a property to actually see first-hand how farmers operate their properties in a sustainable manner.”
But the Federal Labor candidate for Calare Jess Jennings, an agricultural consultant, said the Nationals were “scaremongering” on the issue.
He said the policy would encourage farmers to look at ways of reaping the financial benefits of carbon farming and protecting native vegetation.
“The reality is that this vegetation-clearing opportunity represents a positive financial benefit that farmers can tap into,” Dr Jennings said.
“Yes, it’s a different mindset, but I think it’s long-overdue that farmers be recognised for the value that they create in maintaining biodiversity and native vegetation, and Labor’s policies will promote that and reward that.”
…
“When you look at the climate predictions for the central west and the fact that the countryside is going to be getting hotter and drier, I think the last thing that most farmers will be looking at doing is clearing more and more land back to bare dirt.
“The more carbon that you have in the soil, the more protection that farmers are going to have from those hotter and drier climates.”
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-03/labor-defend-climate-change-policy-after-concerns/7378188
During the early years of Australian farming, ignorant government policies enforced total land clearance. Soldiers returning from war were pressured into clearing land granted to them under various returned soldier schemes.
The result of course was an ecological disaster.
The farmers who survived those early years learned from the mistakes. Farming in Australia is now an exact science – vast resources are devoted to working out how to minimise ecological damage, while maximising yields. The last thing any owner of a productive farm wants, is to degrade their valuable land into unproductive desert.
For politicians with little to no farming experience, to waltz into this mature industry with their heads full of green ideas, and lecture farmers on what they are doing wrong, harkens back to the political idiocy of the early years of Australian farming, when armchair bureaucrats with no personal stake in the industry dictated what farmers were allowed to do with their land.
It reminds me of the Waters of the United States scheme in the US. The same sort of ignorant ivory-tower theories.
These bureaucrats are just like Obama! They have a phone and a pen!
I’ve been following wuwt for several years now and, in that, wondering just where some of these “perspectives” really come from. I think this is right on the money (and really worth the read):
https://www.nas.org/articles/sustainabilitys_war_on_doubt
Seems to me that those insisting upon whatever are urbanists, who have no connection at all to what rural, agricultural and forestry really is like. This is where the food they eat is grown. Time to deal with it, but reality is not their realm.
Skimmed (sorry, Bubba, I’m short on time at the moment) that fine description of the ghastly reality that is “sustainability.” I had no idea how FAR-reaching a philosophy it is. Ugh. Just a potato sack chuck full of l1es, the ultimate result of which are: disease — poverty — death.
— Stop using bleach and effective cleaners = disease.
— Anti-CO2 measures = poverty.
— Grossly inefficient farming (along with e coli, etc… from “organic” food) = death.
— put Grizzly Bears back into national parks in lower 48 = death/no going to park
— put rattlesnakes back onto a heavily populated island in Mass = death/pain, at least
(and there are many permutations and additions of/to the above, of course).
Thanks (gag — no, really, it is a fine expose) for sharing!
(: ) )
(: ( )
(8 0)
That’s part of a marketing ploy for cowboy boots. Yep, tall boots qualify as protective gear.
I used to work with a guy who refused to go into tall grass because he was terrified of snakes.
Listeria is the more common organic food-borne illness, I believe. It’s that lack of bleach as a rinse. There have been deaths and recalls due to this practice, but I don’t think people actually understand the connection nor does the news media seem interested in making the point. There were also problems with raw milk. People just think “healthy” with organic and block out all the other information.
If you really want to pull their chain just explain that:
Fertilizers contain NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium) because plants need all three, along with copious amounts of CO2 and H2O in order to thrive. If you take anything off the land, food, fiber, etc., the NPK used in its production has to be replaced. The ‘N’ is easy, just plant a crop of nitrogen-fixing legumes and then plow them under. The only way to replace the ‘P’ and ‘K’ is by volcanic dusting or river flooding. However letting the field revert back to forest for several decades and then burning it will pull buried ‘P’ and ‘K’ up from the subsoil for a few cycles.
.I’m not in favor of the rattlesnake project, but it is just a waste of money, not a cause of death or even pain. The proposal is to place the snakes on an uninhabited island in the Quabbin Reservoir, the source of drinking water for Boston and many other towns. The water and much of the surrounding land is generally off-limits to the public.
@ Bubba Cow, 7:09 pm, May 2 , Thanks for that link, I read it and have to re-read it but it is a great article and was something that was going on not only at colleges but in small communities where these people would show up and hold ” meetings” to influence the people, the support they got from our ” village” was overwhelming, I walked away from it because I saw the premise behind it, although the damage they did was at the time minimal their “sustainability” movement is still strong and the word seems to be in every council declaration.
Thanks for the link Bubba Cow. Scary stuff.
Our daughter had a nice cow she called ‘Mumma Cow’. She had six good calves in her time here and was a very good mother. Whenever I see your name I am reminded of that great animal.
Thanks, Bubba, that commentary and the link to the very extensive study are well worth reading.
You nailed it! Various people on WUWT have tried to explain the forces behind CAGW. The article you link does that better than anything I have seen so far. It also validates what those folks have been saying.
The article is backed up by a 244 page study. (I haven’t had time to read it yet.) This looks like a substantial piece of work.
The article you link should be reprinted on WUWT. CAGW is just part of a bigger campaign. It would be helpful to understand what we are up against.
Yes the whole lot of them seem to think that milk, potatoes, vegetables, eggs, bread, etc all come from the store. I was once asked why I had a two acre garden when it is just so much easier to get food at the stores. Poor blighters don’t know any better.
I have several daughters in law and one was raising chickens.She offered eggs to family, which of course came in differing colors and sizes and slightly soiled from the nest. One daughter in law refused, stating she doesn’t like eggs that come from chickens.
I want to be your friend when the zombie apocalypse hits.
I am so thrilled that many of you followed that link. Peter Wood and Rachelle Peterson indeed did a remarkable study and report on how “sustainability” and other vectors (environmentalism) have been used to capture political/religious claims for prejudicial purposes. (I was very tired and went to bed directly, but checking back now.)
Anthony has been presenting this material, but it hasn’t provoked enough attention, in my mind. This is the propaganda machine that informs those who don’t follow knowledge but rather feelings (McKibben and idealistic Bernie youth):
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/16/national-association-of-scholars-calls-out-threats-to-the-integrity-of-science/
Hi, Janice and good on you others. The National Association of Scholars is well worth following.
Janice forgot to mention putting wolves in national parks and forests = death, predation of livestock and beneficial wildlife.
Thank you for the link to that article. Really refreshing read.
Just a natural result of industry (farming is an industry) not regulating itself. If farmers said here is our own regulation (policy framework) and regulatory body which is far more flexible and grounded that what government could ever do, it would be hard for some politician/bureaucrat to say we are going to needlessly duplicate what is already present.
I guess you have never tried talking to a politician that has his or her mind set on something. And sadly “Farmers” in their eyes are still peasants because the politicians have a “degree’ in “political” science, so what does a jokel from the farm knows what’s best for them?
ASB
Try using “political enthusiasms” rather than “political wisdom”
“Don’t try and confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
This should be the mantra of the political left, where theory is always hugely more important than fact, especially if it supports some political whim, both current and trendy.
The Left’s political whims are nearly always both expensive and wasteful, usually arguing that if we do A, then we get B and that has to be good, but refusing to acknowledge that if you get B, then that causes C, D and E, which are demonstrably bad.
It doesn’t matter where you are from, politicians always think they know best. Even here in Venice FL a few years ago several city planners came from nearby Sarasota to a town hall meeting telling us how they were going to improve the area along SR 776. Most of us homeowners not only rejected their plans but objected to them even being there. What set off a near riot was when one of the planners threw out the fact that they all held degrees in city planning and knew what was best. They were run out of the building and have never returned.
Peter, that reminds me of the young communist I once debated. He readily admitted that communism had failed every time it had been tried.
But he insisted that the THIS time it would work. Why? Because this time, he and people like him were going to be in charge.
Great idea, you are using logic. A fatal error. In Australia, the Queensland family owned trawler fishermen attempted to appease the social engineers with their fundamentalist views on the environment. Modifying nets, fishing times, fishing zones. The truth is when dealing with the Greens, you bend a little for them, then you bend some more and eventually you disappear up your own. The Green Left’s bureaucrats prefer to lunch with a single large industrial fishing corporation. When the local families have left the field, destroyed by compliance costs and exhausted; a slight adjustment to a piece of paper can see a species disappear into a foreign flagged fishing boat’s freezer.
Remember, you are dealing with Totalitarians, it is about the power, the environment is a vehicle to be discarded when it has performed its function.
Broadie wrote: “Remember, you are dealing with Totalitarians, it is about the power, the environment is a vehicle to be discarded when it has performed its function.”
Very true. We should all keep this in mind.
“The truth is when dealing with the Greens, you bend a little for them, then you bend some more and eventually you disappear up your own.”
Very true. They never stop taking. You give a little and you think you’re getting somewhere, but they always want more. They want it all.
I believe the technical term for this is “regulatory capture”. The totalitarians pick a cause with high moral aspirations, such as environmentalism, then proceed to capture economic territory through regulation. This strategy tends to favor existing stake holders in the industry to be protected and raise the barrier to entry for those businesses who would challenge them. It’s a transparent practice, but for some reason nobody twigs to it.
Examples are the the automobile industry and “safety” regulation. The oil industry and “mining” regulation. Those were historical. Then there were “emissions” regulations and when those were effectively knocked down, they’re moved on to try regulating carbon dioxide, the one thine necessary (absent oxygen) in the production of chemical energy.
All this does is limit growth. Of any kind. It eliminates competition. These same people advocate the wholesale killing of children. The carpet bomb people. They destroy ancient civilizations to “protect women’s rights”. And we sit on the sidelines watching it on TV.
Good example of some of the “sustainability” nonsense: LEED certification. Sounds like a good idea, until you realize how many ways one can attain points without really doing anything that will actually positively impact the environment – intentions matter more than actual or even plausible results.
I stayed in a dorm that had LEED Silver certification. (The organization that had it built was VERY proud of this, with displays in the common area touting all the wonders.) This dorm had a shower accessible from the common area, that could be used by workers who biked to the complex. Again, sounds good, addresses an actual obstacle for this transport mode. However, no one actually biked/bikes to the complex, since it is about 5 miles outside town on a winding country road with two lanes and only an occasional shoulder. In addition, this complex is in the Shenandoah mountains, so it gets a fair amount of snow in the winter. The dorm director told me that he thought the shower had been used twice at most, by employees who had gotten really dirty on the job. Still got those points!
House of Sweden, run by the Swedes (!) in DC, also has LEED certification. Super sustainable and eco-friendly, right? Well, like many embassy type places, much of the material, etc. is supposed to be “Swedish”. So the lumber used was first logged in Canada, then sent to Sweden for “processing”, then sent to the US for construction/installation. I am fairly sure shipping all that wood across the Atlantic and back was not emission free, but that did not stop the certification, and has not stopped all the bragging and gushing about being a LEED building!
Last, LEED requires wood product providers to use a particular forest certification group. Another certifying group is better about tracking supply chains, and has stricter standards about harvesting, origins, etc., but they did not have the cronies to become LEED “approved”. Result: wood products used in LEED buildings may be less “sustainable” than products used in non-LEED buildings.
There is eco-friendly, and there is “eco-friendly”. 😛
ya reckon?
sounds good doesnt it?
we DO have a so called industry representation with farmers on the board NFF
sad tale though because its a majority of the big money farmers with industry ties and support who get on as well as the not small detail that politicians own or have interests in farms too.
flexible..is NOT a word I use to describe them at all,
and frankly the organic growers groups are no better and all out for funding big money and control via fees charges for approvals and their own steaming pile of rules regs and crap.
I wont have truck with any of them and choose to go it alone tell em nothing.
would I take the devils silver for funding to green etc my place?
no never.
i opens your land to walk on invasion and regs as they see fit.
would I put wildlife corridors on my land if I had a larger area?
nope
theres more than enough corridors right to farm doors thanks to the volume of parks with bad fencing allowing roos emus n the rest of the native freeloaders access to crops n orchards now.
we have a brilliant man- Peter Andrews -who showed by example how to regen ruined land
so what did our govt of ALL stripes do?
banned his regen pilloried and made his life a misery.
greentards who want only native plants allowed
so they ripped the willows off riverbanks and we got erosion n floods..
smart fellas.
If they had a regulatory body, it would be much easier for the urban idiots to take it over through regulatory capture and still drive the whole thing off the cliff. Look how easily they took over the national science academies to get their cockamamie CAGW policies codified over the objection of the membership!
Of course, the unfortunate (and historically compelling) truth is that this is why God invented machine guns.
Bartleby old soul
I see and reflect your frustrations.
But I know that you know it is jolly bad form to project lead at our Greenfathers, our Profits of g£oom, our $aviour$ of the P£anet – if not of 75% of it$ popu£ation . . . . . . ..
But if I run a thought experiment – life without the watermelons would be better than with them, the £itt£e cutie$!
Ho Hum.
Auto – who wouldn’t harm a hair on their heads.
In Queensland, the draconian vegetation laws were such that as soon as one of the Department of Natural Resources vehicle arrived the farmer was already convicted, just not sentenced. The defense was so expensive, that it was cheaper to admit guilt and pay the fine. So DNR boasted about its wins, until one man could afford to fight through the courts one at a time until he reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court threw the case against him out.
Not sure how they calculated it but estimates are in Queensland that before these property thieving laws were put in place, vegetation was already twice that of settlement because before settlement, raging bushfires could not be controlled. Also, the laws deliberately ignore grass and crops.
Property theft because the lefty government writes itself into the ownership of the farm without spending a single cent on purchase, management or development.
Therefore as we have seen with IPCC being declared a money redistributor, we see here that CO2 fictions are used to rob property rights.
Check out what the United Nations Agenda 21 affiliate says about land.
https://thedemiseofchristchurch.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/unitednations-conference-on-human-settlements_habitat1.pdf
Check out section D (Land). The red emphasis is mine
Agenda21 is right through local governments everywhere. CHeck your local authorities website and search for Agenda 21.
Both UN Habitat and ICLEI are rife through local bodies now. They are the United Nations way of garnering support for propaganda via communities rather than official government influences.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Land has to be confiscated/resumed/reallocated, because whoever originally produced it seems to have gone out of business!
Jack
Try
http://www.beefcentral.com/news/tough-tree-laws-not-backed-by-evidence-senior-ecologist/
and link
Movie night, Eric… won’t be much comment here ’til the movie is over ;o)
The politicians have no skin in the game. The farmers are betting their life and livelihood on getting it right. #@!%#!-straight they don’t appreciate advice from someone who thinks lettuce comes from the produce aisle.
Huh. So THAT’s why its so quiet.
Am hoping we will get a movie discussion thread when it is over.
Yep. Looking forward to the online version, no local cinemas are showing it :-(.
HR
Lettuce – the green stuff – comes from connections, keen to prophet [Spelling?] from bird choppers, bird fryers and any scam that allows them to prophet [Sp?] from not doing a blind thing.
See various Euro agriculture ‘scams’ [Brussels more usually spells it ‘subsidy schemes’ – lord knows why!] – but those with land don’t do too badly . . . . . . .
Seems to me the New South Wales Farmers are missing the boat.
I came to that conclusion after first having an LOL moment at the “financial benefits of carbon farming”. Seriously? Carbon farming? But before I snarked off with a sarcastic comment, I thought I’d better do the google thing… Turns out “carbon farming” is a real thing.
http://www.carbonfarmersofaustralia.com.au/About/what-is-carbon-farming
But wait…. it gets better. Not only is it a real thing, but Aussie farmers can get PAID to do carbon farming. There’s $2.5 BILLION up for grabs!
http://www.carbonfarmersofaustralia.com.au/Landholders/register-for-erf-auction-27-april
Now with that kind of money being dangled, one would wonder how to get some of it. So, going back the first link, it turns out that there are a lot of “strategies” that farmers can follow to earn carbon credits and a piece of that $2.5 BILLION.
NOW I’m going to slide into sarcasm mode. Because the list of things you could do is hilarious. Here’s a few of the possible strategies one can employ in farming practices to earn some of them thar carbun creduts:
water spreading!
Landsmanship!
controlled traffic!
compost!
manure management!
precision fertilizer application!
stubble retention!
no-till cropping!
Lots more, I just cherry picked a few because…. while I don’t know what the best practices are in dry land farming in Australia compared to North America, I find it hard to believe that they are materially different. IOW, these are things that the vast majority of farmers are doing ANYWAY. Well OK, the first two I have no clue what those words even mean, but give me a form to fill out and I’m sure my current practices can be made to fit. The rest… really? this is new?
Were I an Aussie farmer, I’d be I’d be filling out forms as fast as I could while keeping d#mned quiet about the whole thing before the tax payers finds out I’m being paid to do what I was already doing for free.
OMG!
Water spreading is a real thing!
http://www.conservapedia.com/Water_spreading
You divert some water from a stream and spread it on your field! OMG! That’s genius! I bet no farmer in Australia thought of irrigation ever before! AND they can earn money from carbon credits for doing it! AND if environmentalists protest the damming of streams and rivers to divert onto fields, they can claim it is to protect the world from global warming! You can’t argue against protecting the world from global warming unless you are some selfish cretin who doesn’t care what happens to the world. The world is DYING! If those environmentalists want to help, they should build the dams and levies for the farmers for FREE.
Yep, Too much water being taken from the Murray River for irrigation of crops including rice. So we’ll just cutback on water licenses for some farms.
Lee, running the Murray out of Hume at near flood levels through winter to satisfy the eco loons inviromental flows is hardly prudent management of such an important catchment.
Couple that stupidity with the bureau of meteorologys long range crystal ball and full palm readings of below average rainfall every year completes the “perfect storm”.
These eco loons and the Murray darling management “experts” for want of a better word, then cry global warming for their lack of supply of irrigation water in the summer.
It is the “balance” between irrigation and inviromental flows that they have so desperately wrong that is causing the angst in the farming community that live and work the Murray Darling basin.
I’m assuming you and others understand exactly what Hume and it’s upstream partner, Dartmouth, were purposely built for.
A couple of really good posts, davidmhoffer. Maybe I’ll take up “farming” myself!
ALL of those things are being done Now! Have they never looked into the cab of a modern tractor? Precision seed and fertile replacement along with mapped productivity to adjust the amount of fertilizer to soil and previous harvest based on GPS et al has been around for years. Good Grief Charlie Brown,
Oh well. What’s old is new again.
One of the things in carbon farming is exhaust injection; cool your tractor’s exhaust and pump it into the ground. Most of the stuff I can find about it is by people pushing the idea. I must admit it’s not clear to me that this is a good idea.
The Direct Action Plan (DAP) has corrupted Australian farmers.
Farming is risky enough without putting carbon farming into practise.
Green auditors charge you a healthy fee to establish a carbon base line on your farm.
You grow the trees or invest in the technology with all the attendant risk that any other agricultural enterprise entails and then they audit you (for a fee) to see if you have created carbon credits.
If you don’t capture any carbon then you owe the carbon sharks money. Drought, floods or any other weather problem can stop your best efforts to capture carbon for the market.
Only a fool would take on another way to go broke.
Here’s another slant on Australia’s Carbon Abatement Contracts: http://atse.uberflip.com/i/665800-focus-195-innovate-or-perish-thats-the-mantra-we-must-turn-our-ideas-into-world-products-and-services/29
Water spreading – I pee freely
Landsmanship – I man the land
Controlled traffic – I own a shotgun
Compost – The trash heap is behind the barn
Manure management – I dump the horseshit behind the barn on the trash
Precision fertilizer application – see “Manure Management”
Stubble retention – I only shave twice a week
No till cropping – I make very little money from my crops
About 5 years ago, an acquaintance told me that she wanted her next career chapter to be (paraphrasing):
Her: A Farming Consultant to Teach Farmers How to be ‘Sustainable.’
Me: In Washington State (where she was considering hanging out her
shinglecabbage leaf, correction, “ORGANIC” cabbage leaf), most of the farmers went to WSU ( there are 5 different Ag Science majors to choose from, plus masters programs: Wash. St. Univ. http://afs.wsu.edu/majors/ag-technology-and-production-management/) and have at least a Bachelors of Science in Agriculture. They really know a lot… .H: Oh, but, I can tell them how to do it sustainably.
M: What do you mean by “sustainably?”
H: So, they don’t waste water and, you know, use so much petroleum-based, stuff, and well, lots of things.
M: They don’t have a water shortage issue. There is no petroleum “sustainability” link with any rational action that has to do with farming (unsaid: or anything else, for that matter). They aren’t a bunch of bumpkins just starting out in the 1930’s, or something… . They are highly motivated to run their business efficiently. I don’t think your consulting business would do very well.
H: Hm. Say, I think it would be really neat to bake my own vegan stuff, you know, like pastries and things people love to eat, but, sustainable and sell it… online. I could ship it —
M: — via small donkeys?
H: …. no…. Wait – a – minute — YEAH! Great idea!
M: And just how is regular baking and cooking not sustainable?
H: Well, it uses a lot of pesticides and stuff and CO2-based influences..
M: So?
H: So….. so….
M: (as chipper as I can muster, iow, very chipper, lol) So, how about those Mariners? (I can never talk at much length on anything of importance with her… it always gets back to “sustainability” or to “it’s all good” or “I think my mother is trying to tell me…” (Mom has been gone for about 7 years, now).
*** The End. (not — too bad it isn’t, though…)***
“Sustainability” is a philosophical fun house — where the rational know that they are not really tall-and-skinny or short-and-fat as those mirrors say, but the believers think they had better go on a diet or go eat a bunch of lima beans and sea weed ….. a LOT of lima beans and sea weed…
… and all memory of technological progress and human invention over the years — *POOF* — vanishes…. we are done inventing and there is nothing to do but just conserrrrrrrve every drop of whatever, for we are running out!!
*************************************************
Reminded me also of Reb Tevye in the movie, “Fiddler on the Roof” telling the Czar’s agent:
“
”
Private property rights must be defended against the Envirostalinists.
“Labour,” my eye. As if their policies are good for the working person. LOL.
Hi, Janice
please look at link up-thread – really
hi
Hi! Done! 🙂 Thanks. And, Hi.
Hi Janice,
Your friend gave me the best laugh I’ve had all day.
No “CO2-based influences”, huh? She must do all of her baking without baking powder. Hmmmm.
@ Bubba Cow
I read it. An excellent insight into the mind of the enviro-whacko and the whole Marxist mindset on campus today.
Around these parts, we have the University Agricultural Extension Service. Truly a great bunch of people running an outstanding program. (Or at least it was, back in the day) A place you could go and see professors with PhDs and cow manure on their work boots and callouses on their hands. Curiously, the enviros never seemed to want to have anything to do with them. They would certainly would never take any of those courses.
Hi, Tony — good! 🙂 That you laughed was a blessing to me — it means that today, I accomplished something worthwhile.
Re: baking powder, lol, she appears to be in the Orthodox Branch, so, I would not be surprised… in fact, she was talking enthusiastically about making filo pastry……. so might be… only “unleavened” bread (more holy). I’ll have to ask her about that. If she uses SUGAR…. oooh, boy… should I tell her? heh, heh, heh …. she probably uses something “natural” for sweetener, though…. like THAT will make her baked goods taste REALLY good (not!). Well, not bad tasting, just not “good,” as in bland.
Take a course from a regular farmer? As if. Books are the way to learn. And models. And recipes made from stuff you buy using your computer. lolololol
They are SO hilarious…. like hippies (okay, okay, some hippies are just fine — sorry about that, Mr. I forgot your name)….. until you realize they can, ultimately, enforce their policies out of the barrel of a gun…. .
Dear God — help! Amen. (seriously)
Maybe the non-CO2 based influences are like that carbon-free sugar…
They are actually violating basic hippie philosophy: do what you like so long as you are not hurting anyone.
At this point, they are not only hurting other folks, they are hurting those who do overall net good.
This reminds me of an exercise many biology/conservation professors do: they ask, a) what is biodiversity, and b) why is it important? It is actually a great way to shut up a class, if only because they are shocked someone is asking why diversity of any sort is important. The really funny part is that people tend to be really bad at answering both questions, particularly the second. A person might come up with a couple of vague reasons, and a “textbook” definition, but ask him/her to elaborate and you may well see a head explode.
My undergrad prides itself on being really sustainable(!), but as my ecology professor said, the school touts things like building beehives on part of campus, and then rips up all the clover around campus and plants non-native lawn grass. Fortunately, they have purchased their climate indulgences via a “global warming studies center”, so their sins are forgiven.
Some students actually did a project about how the university’s expansion was resulting in “education killing the environment”. It was rather tongue in cheek, though the aerial views showing how much green space had become buildings were unsettling, especially considering the short time frame. I am still amazed their scientific poster was displayed in one of the halls. When I saw it, I stopped in my tracks and just started laughing.
Gerrorf moy laaaand!
http://viz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Screen-Shot-2014-11-17-at-11.05.29.png
Adam –
I shot my neighbor’s dog for killing my turkeys. Then he dropped by to shoot me. I explained I hadn’t killed his dog, just shot it through the neck with a FMJ .223 round, cost him a $60 vet bill.
He hired an attorney to sue me for $60. That’s how smart farmers can be.
I prefer the rabbi’s answer when asked if there was a blessing for the Czar. “God bless and keep the Czar…far away from us.”
Janice Moore writes on May 2, 2016 at 7:43 pm:
Entropy. The most well understood theories concerning the nature and operation of our physical universe categorically refute the concept of sustainability. Sustainability is a physical impossibility.
There is no such thing as sustainability. The pursuit of it is a vain attempt at immortality. It’s juvenile, and doomed to fail.
Hi Janice. Apart from making me laugh, somewhat wryly, your tale above shows the sort of ignorance we’re up against.
Hi, Annie,
Thanks for telling me! And, my pleasure (a bit embellished… but, unfortunately, not much…). Remember in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” where The Ghost of Christmas Present pulls back his robe to reveal the two starving children hidden beneath? One is Want and the other is Ignorance. Ignorance, as Dickens wisely observed, is the more dangerous of the two.
Public education = the key to freedom.
Hope all is well with you in “Kangaroo Crossing” land. 🙂
Janice
This is the reason a distant family member has refused to acknowledge that he has several hundred koalas on his cattle property. If Qld parks and wildlife knew about them they would effectively seize his property by applying draconian rules and regulations about what he could and couldn’t do with his own land. This land has been owned by the same family for 4 generations, the koalas have been there before white settlement and remain a healthy population without any outside interference. The area they live in is natural uncleared bush land close to his home site and he has no intentions of clearing that part of his property. Interfering busy bodies are kept at bay by strictly vetting who can and can’t come onto his land.
That kind of situation must be horrifying for a farmer, living in fear.
Farmers tend to own guns ,and know how to use them.
Fear is for trespassers.
A few years ago, I found a magnificent stone age axe head on a friend of mine’s farm in the northern UK.
I proudly showed it to him, only to be dumbfounded by the vitriol that came out of his mouth, followed by a demand for a promise to keep the location of the find secret.
It seems that this sort of discovery requires an immediate archaeological exploration program, which can shut down the average farm for a generation with little or no compensation.
As already said, it is a tough enough job being a farmer, but when you add in the whims of dogooding politicians and a top heavy oversight bureaucracy, it just becomes a nightmare.
This is the sort of problem that makes it difficult to actually study and preserve history via archaeology. You cannot expect people to give up their livelihood for the “civic good” without fair compensation. To do so results in “shoot, shovel, and shut up”. I took a class about pre-Columbian contact Virginia Indians taught by an archaeology professor. He said the last thing any historical archaeologist (post Columbian contact) wants to find are Indian remains/artifacts. Laws/regulations vary by state and by site ownership (private lands are often exempt), but in many places, a site will be shut down until the local/historic tribe(s) give permission for further excavation, or evidence suggests that the artifacts are from different/extinct tribes. Even if a site is not shut down, artifacts can be subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, meaning that artifacts may have to be given to local/historic/”culturally affiliated” tribes, often without study. Tricky subject as both sides have valid arguments and concerns. I do not know much about how the UK handles sites from different periods, but I hope that if landowners are that inconvenienced (to say the least), such sites are actually studied, and not just explored/excavated without any end benefit to the greater public.
I know that was (really) off-topic, but regulation of ANY kind really can make people’s lives difficult, and often does not benefit the general public. Usually a single group benefits, and while this may be justifiable in some cases, most of the time it is not.
So what did the “Arrogant Aussie City Politicians” actually say?
“Don’t run.
We are your friends.”
(“Mars Attacks”)
Here’s a vid of the AACP’s last year in Sydney:
(youtube — “Mars Attacks” scene)
Mark Butler – ‘Labor will introduce a “climate trigger” in federal legislation to allow the Commonwealth to regulate broad-scale land clearing across the nation.’
http://markbutler.alp.org.au/news/2016/04/27/climate-change-action-policy
Lee, thanks for that on Mark Butler – he has never had a real job, he is obviously frightfully clever, but clearly has not the slightest clue of how the real world actually works.
This attachment is worth reading if only to see the mindset of the political left – it is truly frightening, nothing but a string of smug, empty, platitudes and theories designed to impress gullible greenies and the scientifically challenged.
‘Before entering Parliament, Mark worked for 15 years in the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) including 11 years as State Secretary and was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2003 for services to trade unionism.’
http://markbutler.alp.org.au/about-mark
“…reaping the financial benefits of carbon farming….” that’s what they said. I didn’t make it up!
That’s not an arrogant city politician. It’s a candidate for the rural seat of Calare, who is an agricultural consultant there.
“agricultural consultant” ?
Someone who wouldn’t know one end of a shovel from the other.
But still feels they can tell someone else how to use one.
His profile is here. Doesn’t speak of shovels, but he isn’t a city politician.
From the above link:
‘Dr Jennings has used the recent revelation of local climate change data from the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage to make the case for a “serious” climate change policy.
The figures showed the number of hot days in Orange was set to rise by 240 per cent over the next 44 years.
Bathurst would see an increase of 193 per cent under the modelling, and Dr Jennings said Dubbo currently had an average of 29 hot days over 35 degrees per year, but would endure an additional 10 to 20 hot days in the next 23 years …’.
======================
Memo to Calare Jess Jennings and/or Gavin Coote: data by definition are empirical “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis”, not computer output which is solely the product of the assumptions put in.
Computer model output is/are not data.
+1
Thanks Chris, and you are , IMV, correct. Using consistently wrong over warm predications from the IPCC model mean is not rational. The fact that this gentleman lives in a rural area is irrelevant if he is (A) running for a political seat, and (B), pushing CAGW policy far beyond common sense. as that flawed thought process originates with global politicians.
Indeed.
(my bold)
Much like models are not data, don’t you love the way that ‘climate predictions’ morph into ‘fact’ in order to add some urgency to the agenda?
John in Oz
Sounds like the consulting business might need a cash flow boost by those examples!
Demonizing farmers and sucking them to death by paying next to nothing for their products is the name of the game in the Western world. The Greenies do not have the slightest idea of what it means to be a farmer. In Scandinacia, farmers get 38 c per liter for their milk. When it reaches the aisle in the shop it costs between 1.20 and 1.80 euros per liter. Domestic pig farming is getting killed because of idiotic EU regulations worked out by Brussels bureaucrats. Not that I advocate mistreatíng animals in any way, but an EU pig or cow has a higher standard of living than the average refugee, let alone those who freshly arrive in Europe.
If you recall…. that was why the Prodigal Son {Luke 15:11-32} came to his senses… The pigs he was feeding were eating better than he. So, he went home… .
Scandinavia and the UK and, well, just about all Europe needs to come to its senses and head for “home.”
This is along the same sort of lines as the EU rules that make dredging rivers and streams on farm land illegal unless what is dug out is taken away and put in special landfill sites as toxic waste. It means that farmers don’t do it now as it is expensive and takes weeks to organise and carry out, it also means the wee beasties that used to be able to crawl back into said river or stream now are dumped miles away and die. The net effect is why we have had such bad flooding when we get heavy rain and it is blamed on farmers????
James Bull
James ,the other day I was walking the fields near Dunham Massey , Cheshire and started to talk to a farmer doing late sowing of spring barley . The land around all belongs now to the National Trust who purchased it from the last Earl of Stamford 40 years ago .
I mentioned how envious I was of his soil , like dark chocolate cake (a peat “moss” in pre-Norman times) and he said that as an established tenant he had the right to plough the soil but new tenants either had to let the land to permanent grass or drill through the grass and weeds without ploughing – all to save the planet according to the National Trust .
What makes this somewhat ironic is that since taking over the Estate the Trust has made an enormous success of the Hall, the parklands and the various gardens as a visitor attraction.However because of its location out of town most visitors arrive by car and they have gradually extended the carpark to cater for thousand(?) cars where originally there was only room for about a dozen(and it is usually packed) . So the carbon footprint created by the National Trust at this Hall must be very large and yet they prevent farmers making the best use of what must be some of the most productive soil in the county.
The classic case of green government intrusion that occurred in my district when the Dept of Sustainability & Environment stopped a local family from taking eucalypts for timber from a copse planted 40 years ago by the grandfather expressly for the purpose of providing an on-farm timber source.
If Grandad had planted alien willows or something, taking them down would have been fine, but eucalypts are native trees, and even if you planted them yourself, they are under the “protection” of the DSE.
(Until the next bushfire, of course, then whooooshka!)
The current state of affairs is absolutely shocking, JoNova did some stories about farmers getting into trouble for removing scrub. IMO a lot to do with Aussie politicians expropriating farmers, so they can look good about “accumulating carbon as biomass”, without having to pay anyone.
e.g.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/the-commonfascism-of-australia/
And this link – outrageous. http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/in-australia-if-you-try-to-clear-a-firebreak-on-your-land-you-could-go-to-gaol/
Carbon farming proponents will have to burn themselves some calories & fuel in the process. Kind of facts that get overlooked by linear theories if consider the following studies.
Actual Australian research detailed below addresses (2007) Barker, et.al. “Tillage and soil carbon sequestration – what do we really know” …. & (2003) Machado, et.al. “Effect of non-tillage on turnover of organic matter in a Rhodic Ferrasoil” studies showing not incorporating post-harvest stubble, by not tilling stubble, results in low carbon sequestration. I want to be clear this is a different issue than the farming benefits of no-till methods & am only raking up money makers’ vaporous pitch.
(2013) Kirby, et.al. determined that to increase carbon sequestration the strategy needs to add nitrogen, phosphorus & sulphur to the crop stubble/residue soon after harvest & incorporate all that together “promptly” into the soil. Free full authors’ copy pdf available on line = “Carbon-nutrient stoichiometry to increase soil carbon sequestration”, originally published in journal Soil Biology and Biochemistry 60.
Back from the movie; viewed in Westminster, Colorado (about 20 minutes from Boulder). Roughly 120 in the audience, mostly gray hairs, though there were some who had the Boulder “look”. Took my daughters and granddaughter, the latter being the only youngster in the audience, which disappointed me. A well done movie although the sound was too low. As one who reads WUWT every day since its beginning, it was fun seeing the folks we have come to love and respect for their anti-CAGW stances. Nothing new in the movie for me, but my family got quite a bit out of it and appreciated my taking them. A number of audience laughs were elicited and there were no groans or boos so presumably the audience was generally anti-CAGW. Was a little disappointed that Anthony did not get more exposure but he did well – though he should have worked a little harder for a John Wayne look. 🙂 I was hoping to stick around to see if any of the audience got into discussions, but the grandkid has school tomorrow and we had to get going. Kudos to the producer and those who appeared.
(I realize this is off-topic, but commenters above cleared the way for me, so there!)
All good – wish I could see it :-). Do a write up, send it to Anthony.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-a-story/
“The last thing any owner of a productive farm wants, is to degrade their valuable land into unproductive desert.
For politicians with little to no farming experience, to waltz into this mature industry with their heads full of green ideas…”
Remove those commas, dammit!
Thats what my English teacher kept telling me… 🙂
Probably the most important discretional use of commas is the parenthetical (i.e., what is opened must be closed).
Better to remove the heads.
Just like in the US, farmers are being targeted in Australia and regulated off of their land.
independent farmers are not something the UN wants, they’d like to make farming a collective Stalinist enterprise.
Sure look at the BLM, land managers with snipers grenade launchers and helicopters flying around Nevada shooting and running cattle to death over grazing fees.
In Australia a farmer cant move a rock without the sayso of the biodiversity nuts.
This was a great post by Eric Worrall, yet again. The idea of green-leaning government backed by the green-leaning ABC lecturing to farmers is ludicrous. One only has to think back to earlier government initiatives like mandatory tree-clearing, rabbits, cane toads, prickly pear, etc. to see how big the benefits of government advice would be. Letting the weeds grow would be getting off lightly. Farmers are already taking a big enough beating from bureaucracies and are being regulated out of business. As for “Carbon Farming”…..a green blueprint for ecological disaster again.
Butlers idea seems sound enough, every National Park I have ever been nine is overgrown with blackberries. lots of carbon farming there.
I’m not an aussie myself, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Australia, most of it in the outback. The main problem is that Australia is extremely urbanized and most townies there know nothing about the bush.
They think it is a virgin wilderness. It is nothing of the kind. It is an entirely human-created environment, quite probably the oldest cultural landscape in the World, created and maintained by 50,000 years of periodic burning (“firestick farming”) by the aborigines.
The end result is that the bush is very different from the vegetation of earlier interglacials. Most plants in the bush now are pyrophytes, i e tolerant of or even dependent on frequent fires. Eucalypts are dominant almost everywhere, which they have never been before. During earlier interglacials native conifers and non-sclerophyllous trees were much more widespread, but now you can only find them in relict patches where they are protected from bushfires. It is even likely that the changed vegetation is the reason that central Australia is much drier during this interglacial than during previous ones.
Now, theoretically you might be able get the “natural” vegetation back if you could prevent all bushfires for many centuries (it takes time for trees to disperse several hundred kilometers). However you can’t do this in practice. Eucalypt woodland always burns, and if you manage to put it off for a few decades the result will just be a much hotter and more destructive fire. So, the most sensible thing is to keep up the aboriginal practice and have controlled fires every several years. In most cases following aboriginal customs would be a very green and PC thing to do, but not in this case it seems.
Also in some cases the recent disastrous bushfires have been made worse by a recent craze for native trees and flowers in gardens, in contrast to older practice when exotic (often European) trees and plants were popular. These are vastly less fire-prone. I recently visited the area hit by the “Black Saturday” bushfires and this effect was quite noticeable there.
Battling bushfires is challenging enough, but having to get past the follies of the greens first just makes it that much harder.
Not that we’d ever value their help (god forbid!), but it would help if they just kept their stupid ideas out of the way.
In Western Australia you have to get past Parks and Wildlife before you can enter Crown Land to fight the fire. Permission was refused at Esperance.
“… harkens back to the political idiocy of the early years of Australian farming, when armchair bureaucrats with no personal stake in the industry dictated what farmers were allowed to do with their land.”
That is what all bureaucrats do. They are consumed with the power they have over others. They are corrupt and power mad.
I wrote the following a long time ago, but it is still appropriate:
https://markstoval.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-state-answers-winston-smith/
And so it is with all States and their henchmen in the various agencies. Heck, the family farmers are lucky the State allows them to farm or ranch. In the US it is coming to the point that only large corporations are allowed the privilege.
Peter Andrews: Natural Sequence Farming
I have both of Peter’s books.
His research would not pass peer review practices in environmental science these days.
He applies his theories to real-world situations and records the actual results.
/sarc.
So Eric Worrall can cite Wikipedia as the ‘ecological disaster’ (salinity) that befell Australian farmers. Never a more moronic citation could be found obviously, particularly given that the whole ‘salinity’ issue was found to be a complete fabrication perpetrated by Government appointed scaremongers and misfits.
Shame on Worrall for this obtuse citation.
What was it from the Aborigines:
Him white fella can’t manage the land.
Can’t remember the context of that sometime back….?
Reading this thread reminds me of the idocy in Zimbabwe when the beuracrats decided that shooting 40, 000 elephants would save the environment.
When they saw the error of their ways, they decided that destroying their stockpile of confiscated ivory would end the poaching of elephants; as opposed to driving the market price for ivory so high that poaching has become even more profitable.
Every time I think I have seen the ultimate in beurocratic stupidity, they fool me and establish a new record.
I am pretty sure that was Kenya.
Every post i read which promotes Sustainability, Green, Smart Growth, comes from the UN Agenda 21 – just Google Rosa Koire, and she’ll tell you all about it. – Phil
Australia, unfortunately, is still technically a British colony, and sometimes that translates to a ‘holier than thou’ attitude by politicians, not to mention academics.
Technically a British colony–what colour is the sky on your world?
It is a constitutional monarchy.
Every post I read a post which promotes Sustainability, Green, Smart Growth, it comes from the UN Agenda 21 – just Google Rosa Koire, and she’ll tell you all about it. – Phil
Modern farming is a capital intensive business — land, machines, “inputs,” buildings. A farmer that doesn’t look after his/her land will quickly become a former farmer.
“…when armchair bureaucrats with no personal stake in the industry dictated what farmers were allowed to do with their land.”
And yet that very principal is a core tenet; not just a suggested feature or something that only some countries have done at various times, but a central “feature” of any socialist organization of government.
And yet in spite of the myriad ecological disasters caused by this mindset, we still have millions of people in the West demanding we abandon the capital/democracy model and wholeheartedly embrace socialism.
It’s an insanity I have a hard time understanding.
Peter Morris commented: “…we still have millions of people in the West demanding we abandon the capital/democracy model and wholeheartedly embrace socialism….”
I don’t think it’s “millions” that even understand what is happening. It’s a well orchestrated and funded plan taking place world wide since the turn of the 19th century. Up until the AGW scare began the UN was a well hidden advocate of destroying Capitalism in favor of one world government masked by “wealth redistribution”. They are very open about it now and getting away with it because Democratic and Capitalistic countries are too complacent and believe the unending onslaught of MSM propaganda either bought by Socialists or owned by Socialist controlled governments. Vote while you can.
Decadent college students, professors, and administrators.
Read:
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun
Leftists believe that they are so smart that all they have to do is study something for 10 minutes, and they become world class experts in that subject.
The one interesting thing about all these folk that want sustainable anything is that all they want to do is use resources more slowly. How does that solve any problem? You are going to run out anyway.
So the only issue is: will you have developed a successor technology that will support the human race at a higher standard of living and intellectual development so that future is capable of developing the NEXT successor technology for the survival of the human race.
This has only been done in human economy by employing technologies that are more energy dense than previous modes of production. THAT has been NATURE’S answer to the survival and prosperity of our species It will require even more energy and husbandry for us to preserve significant scenic Parks for future generations to enjoy not less. Humanity was become the dominate species on the planet by personifying and complying with the laws of Nature. We and what we learn and decide is evolution in action there is no going back to some fantasy equilibrium. Earth has not been in biological equilibrium since it cooled enough to have liquid water!
“When you look at the climate predictions for the central west and the fact that the countryside is going to be..”
The career path of anyone deducing ‘facts’ from climate predictions should be limited to flipping burgers.
It seems the Dunning-Kruger Effect is working in the Australian Government. It is particularly strong among Liberals and Progressives.