Essay by Eric Worrall
How much do greens hate green spaces? If they’re not hacking down forests for renewables, they’re trying to turn the water off?
The public history, climate change present, and possible future of Australia’s botanic gardens
Published: April 28, 2023 6.17am AEST
Susan K Martin
Emeritus Professor in English, La Trobe UniversityCan we justify maintaining water-hungry botanic gardens in an age of climate change and rising water prices?
Perhaps such gardens are no longer suited to Australia’s changing climate – if they ever were.
It is easy to argue Australian botanic gardens are imperial remnants full of European plants, an increasingly uncomfortable reminder of British colonisation.
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Facing the climate emergency
Water for trees and decorative plants drawn from very different climates were always an issue for these gardens.
As early as 1885, Richard Schomburgk in his role of director of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens told Nature about the drought affecting that city and the drastic impact it was having “upon many of the trees and shrubs in the Botanic Garden, natives of cooler countries”.
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Finally, we don’t need to rip out non-hardy introduced trees: climate change will progressively remove them for us.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/the-public-history-climate-change-present-and-possible-future-of-australias-botanic-gardens-198864
What’s next? Extinction Rebellion Australia, or one of the alphabet soup of radical green groups which have sprung up like toadstools, invading our beautiful garden spaces and wrecking them in the name of saving the planet?
The funny part of this climate rant is you could make a similar argument about universities. I mean, other than a handful of laboratory facilities or studies which require in person training, like physical fitness, what is the point of maintaining large lecture halls and gardens, when people could simply learn online from home, or visit factories or hospitals to complete practical units of their work? An awful lot of water and energy is wasted maintaining the beautiful green spaces and large lecture halls and offices most universities host.
I’m not actually suggesting universities should be closed, I think the entire premise is nonsense. But if someone wants to class water and energy use as paramount considerations, logical consistency demands that universities with their heated halls and well maintained garden spaces should be high on the list of facilities which need to be reviewed.
Why aren’t students protesting and demanding their own universities practice what they preach, live by the green ideals they claim to uphold?
I doubt academics have even considered the possibility the rules they promote should be applied to them. I mean, look at the air miles academics clock up attending climate conferences, where one of the regular topics of conversation how to restrict ordinary people’s access to air travel.
Surely the proliferation of international students to Australian universities, Circa 35% of enrolments, is far more deleterious … think of all of that CO2 that they create from their return passage to their subsistence and internal travel. Maybe they should ban international students !?
Can’t believe they haven’t though of that /s
Why would they wish to “think” about any subject which is clearly against their own interest?
“It is easy to argue Australian botanic gardens are imperial remnants full of European plants, an increasingly uncomfortable reminder of British colonisation. (sic)”
Winter must be coming in Oz; the snowflakes haven’t melted yet.
”“It is easy to argue Australian botanic gardens are imperial remnants full of European plants, an increasingly uncomfortable reminder of British colonisation”
Ok, let’s remove carrots, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, all beans, rice, wheat, barley, beef, lamb, chicken, and every other imperial remnant you stuff into your gob three times a day. You don’t need it. There are plenty of native lizards, insects and nocturnal creatures to feast on.
Strike me pink!
Remove all humans from around the globe and return them to the Olduvai Gorge in Africa. That means all the Australian Aboriginals as well, and the native Americans too. In fact we must return to being Lemurs.
And there is a wealth of traditional recipes for cooking this abundant native food, so international visitors will flock here.
Chunks of wallaby leg cooked in the fur, burned black outside, coldish near-raw in the middle, no salt or pepper. I occasionally was invited to gala bush banquets like that. Most memorable was a cut-down metal fuel drum over a wood fire, heating some mix simply described by the cook as “dog stew”, elegantly served by the hand dipped a couple of times in the tub to serve onto a metal plate. Of course, refusal to dine would be seen as an offence. The blowies did not decline.
And from this our government seeks to alter the Constitution to take heed of “advice” from traditional owners.
We live in surreal times. Geoff S
Even worse the gardens are named the ROYAL Botanic Gardens. Old mate Suzzy K Martin, (K is for Knucklehead) she’s a professor in English?
With respect to this — “Australian botanic gardens are imperial remnants full of European plants.” She’s clearly not the sharpest pair of secateurs in the shed. Is she not aware of Cranbourne Gardens? Honestly you just shake your head at the stupidity of it all.
——————————-
Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne is made up of the Australian Garden, an award-winning, contemporary botanic garden surrounded by over 300 hectares of remnant native bushland.
Cranbourne Gardens is recognised as a site of State significance for plant and wildlife conservation, home to over 25 endangered or rare and threatened species.
Completed in October 2012, the Australian Garden was transformed from a sand mine and scrub to a botanic garden of international standing. Designed by Victorian landscape architects, T.C.L. the Australian Garden aims to show visitors the diversity, beauty and functionality of Australian native plants.
A decrepit English professor is an expert on climate and water supply issues. Oh, and she throws in colonialism for good measure.
So a true expert in nothing then?
An expert in Leftist mindless academic groupthink and Marxist narrative regurgitation developed in an environment of no consequences.
Well rooted in her comfy professorship, encrusted in a desiccated university office, a billion kilometers from reality.
Spewing mindless gibberish.
The best kind of spokesperson for the Party.
Going by her photo Susan herself could be described by some as an “uncomfortable reminder of British colonization”, what does she propose be done about that?
Self-identify as an Indigenous Australian with a cervix?
brilliant – very good..lol!!! –
Sorry, I didn’t catch the pronouns. Her?
Can we justify maintaining water-hungry botanic gardens in an age of climate change and rising water prices?
Yes we can. There’s plenty of water. The Melbourne BGs are on board with all the woke climate change narrative ”planting trees for the drier future ” (which is complete crap based on modeling of course) but I would love to see their reaction if their water was cut off.
The entire continent’s an island. Have greens never heard of desalination? There’s no reason to be short of water.
What’s next?
Rewilding everyone’s gardens…
“”Rewilding is not just about vast estates. You can – and should – apply its nature-friendly principles to your own garden””
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/29/seven-steps-to-rewilding-your-garden
”Rewilding is not just about vast estates. You can – and should”
I moved into a few acres of horse paddock. No trees no nuth’n. Now I have countless frogs, lizards, over 20 species of bird, native bog rats, micro bats all kinds of insects which have moved in permanently. 85% of my plantings are exotic. So much for that argument.
Yep the eco-climate zealots have been after the humble lawn for some time. Beautiful soft swarths of turf in the domestic landscape are hated with a passion.
When you live in the desert of your own mind, you can’t but want everything around you to reflect that.
Susan K Martin,
You are an uncivilised Philistine.
If you hate culture, leave it alone for others to enjoy.
Geoff S
Wife Colleen added a slogan “What about the bats?”
(A flying fox colony established itself in the Palm Valley of the Melbourne Royal Botanic Garden, with associated noise and smell and droppings and leaf denudation. They were finally encouraged to migrate by the loud banging of sticks on metal drums.
We take this silly proposal by Ms Martin as a serious and personal attack. We donated some of the plants now grown in these magnificent gardens. We have personal experience of the pros and cons of such gardens and we have visited about 20 of the best global examples. Geoff S
haha, the joyless and vindictive old bag was caught stealing cuttings wasn’t she…..
That would be funny. Sadly no record of anything like that AFAIK.
Pity beneath such a ‘nice’ exterior lurks a barbarian.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a campaign to remove the magnificent elm trees on Melbourne’s St Kida Rd, in the Fitzroy Gardens and other streets and parks and replace them with trees indigenous to the district luckily it was soon forgotten.
As a result of the spread of Dutch elm disease in the NH “the mature trees in Australia’s parks and gardens are now regarded as amongst the most significant in the world” (Wiki).
The Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne as set out by William Guilfoyle in 1873 are magnificent.
I understood that was one of the reasons for botanic gardens.
By our retired English lecturer’s reasoning, we should also dispense with the breeding populations of endangered African animals in Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo.
Or with breeding endangered professors of English.
Those seem more of a pest species. They must reproduce by binary fission.
They’re beautiful!
” “Can we justify … botanic gardens in an age of climate change … ?” ”
NO! NOT because of Climate Change TM!
Botanical gardens should be dismantled to protect the rights of the poor enslaved plants to not being imprisoned and dragged to places outside their natural habitat! And the current sequestered plants should be freed and transferred to their places of origin!
“The funny part of this climate rant is you could make a similar argument about universities.”
Yes, because Universities teach Diversity which is not only at odds with the very name of these institutes but is an ideology within the trio of DEI, or DIE. University ‘education’ has become elevated so that it trumps human experience even while the lion’s share of human knowledge was not acquired academically. Universities need to return to first principles and become places of learning, and not places of teaching.
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…”
Jacob Bronowski
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.”
Buckminster Fuller
Two stories, vaguely on topic to with Gardens, Australia and linking to Climate
1/ Quote:“Gardeners have been warned against planting too early amid the coldest spring in six years.
Experts have said unsettled conditions continue to threaten flora growth.
Horticulture enthusiasts have been told to wait until the end of May before sowing their seeds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/30/gardening-tips-2023-cold-spring/
Nicely coincides with what farmers I’ve met/chatted with recently both in North Notts and South Norfolk
The Notts guy is beyond depressed – he’s blaming ‘poor quality soil‘ in that part of the world, He sees No Future for Livestock Farming esp with the way Gov is behaving towards farmers.
He may be right, having known his farm far longer than me but, I blame the generous use of Roundup for what he’s talking about.
Monsanto lied. There again, who doesn’t, this world is full of shit
2/ Quote:“In 2008, the Brown family watched on helplessly as destructive bushfires ripped through the Victorian countryside. For them, it was a wakeup call.
(Oh diddums dear deary me, La Famille Brown are wine growers in Australia. Or should that be pathetic & childish buck-passing whine – one inevitably brings on the other)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-62489056
6 decades ago, at 55° North my grandfather grew heirloom varieties of oats, wheat and barley.
Those crops were planted (effectively) by hand and using horses.
They reliably produced good harvests (they HAD to and did) without tonnes of Nitrogen, gallons of pesticide, without Glyphosate desiccants and without Propane driers
At a gentle ‘sans panic’ leisurely pace
10 years ago at the same latitude, myself and many of my neighbours gave up planting/growing Spring Barley.
Despite it being a dwarf variety, despite having the shortest growing season of those arable crops and despite the big machines we had which could plough, till, plant and fertilise 10 acres per day. My grandfather covered one acre per day. Planting. (and harvesting until a horse-drawn McCormick Reaper came along)
Here in Norfolk I’m presently watching machines covering 10 acres per hour – from rough-ploughed field to manicured, planted and fertilised seed bed.
The reason we packed up growing barley was that the growing season had closed in from both ends.
i.e if you waited for nice warm spring weather to plant, you were caught by cold wet autumn that wrecked the harvest.
Put all that together to meet: Thermodynamics 101
i.e A warming atmosphere is a cooling Earth
Ignore what you think you know about The Science, The Computers, The Dancing Angels and The Magical Invisible Phlogiston and then coherently explain:
How could it possibly not…….
Given that a warmer climate produces more humidity and precipitation (it’s physics!), then why the concern over water use in botanic gardens?
I think the world would be vastly better off if all the climatistas simply offed themselves, and end all the wasteful fake science, political yakking, and end the waste of natural resources by feeding, housing, and transporting the climatistas to climate conferences.
This is one of the paradoxes of climate science. Precipitation cannot increase significantly without robbing another form of energy, because no matter how much global warming occurs, the total work the atmosphere can do is limited by the rate of energy flow from sun to Earth, and from Earth to space.
So what gives way if precipitation increases? Do we end up with less wind? The same precipitation but in stronger, less frequent bursts? Perhaps the entire world gets a mild, steady drizzle? Nobody really knows.
When the witch reads her tea leaves, does she give the cup a stir or is the motion just from pouring and convection of the hot water?
Yep … the thing with global warming, such as it is, is that the poles will warm but the tropics won’t, with the mid lats being somewhere in between no change and a warming. So the effects on humidity and precipitation will also vary across the planet. The end result of warming is more atmospheric energy at the poles, reducing the driver of the heat transfer mechanisms that distribute heat energy from the tropics to the poles. So what is the effect on weather in the mid lats and the poles? More storms, or less storms? Possibly more thunderstorms in the mid lats due to higher humidity, but probably less active hurricanes and other cyclones that principally function to transfer heat energy around the planet.
So many variables, and the models are not very adept at predicting what will happen, should warming continue on its present not very radical path.
“It is easy to argue Australian botanic gardens are imperial remnants full of European plants, an increasingly uncomfortable reminder of British colonisation. ”
Just curious about that statement- without British colonisation there would be no Australia, right? Why would anyone other than the indigenous people regret British colonization? I’ve never studied the history of that nation so I have no idea- just asking.
Just for interest, contemplate Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller. A highly-respected expert on international plants, he was for some years the Director of the then Melbourne Botanic Garden
He is also identified as the importer to Australia of that horrible weed plant, the blackberry. Ever tried to grub one out? Without Roundup too, Peta?
Life is full of contradictions that often displace the generalities.
The blackberries were a food source for early starving settlers.
Geoff S
and the drop-bears couldn’t have survived without their daily feed of blackberries either.
In 1994, completely legally and with the famous Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, China, I imported at high private expense a newly-reported plant named Camellia tunghinensis. It was novel because of the bright yellow colour of its blooms. It was rare, with only a couple of hundred plants known in the World in total. It was threatened by grazing buffalo and survival among people more concerned with their own existence than that of a flowering plant.
Later, after we established it in Australia and showed it thrives, we offered material to the Royal Melbourne Botanic Garden. They had just acquired some cuttings from another adventurer, but we had already given these beautiful gardens other rare plant material. It is a nice co-existence.
Why would any angry academic even think that we were doing bad? What mental illness lurks there, along with folk at The Conversation? BTW, I am the first scientists to be permanently banned by The Conversation, so maybe I am the weird one.
Geoff S
Here is the yellow Camellia.
Indeed. And not a peep from her about Patterson’s Curse, or the Cane Toad or Camels or Rabbits. Eradicating or controlling any or all of these would be a much better thing to focus on.
Geoff, I hope you wear your exile from The Conversation as a prominent badge of honour.
More evidence the Left is against whatever currently exists.
I work in higher education and have long thought that brick and mortar campuses will be a relic of the past within a few years. Except for hands-on teaching/training labs, there would be no need for campuses. That is partly why there is such a rush by universities to become research institutions, to justify their existence. In an economic collapse, however, even research funding will be on the chopping block, and the bigger they are, the harder they will fall. I will be retired well before the collapse.
Oh well, we could repurpose university campuses as prisons and homeless shelters.
It is unfair that only Professors in English are allowed to lead us. Where are Professors in French, in Mandarin, in Psychology, in Political Science, in Gender Studies?
They worked in *colonialism* and *imperialism.* The authors will probably get a genius grant.
I’m waiting for the NCAA to vote itself out of existence to fight global warming. All the CO2 generated by those hard-working athletes and the busses and aircraft they use to travel to away games must be adding to the global warming already baked into the climate by our profligate culture.
No! More! Sports!
No! More! Beer!
Study! Study! Study!