To begin with it's encouraging to see a Queenslander who's interested in environmental matters such as yourself. You're a rare breed as Queenslanders go. So great stuff!
Now I would have replied last night, but I was watching the State of Origin where the Blues won. Needless to say I was overjoyed & too busy drinking in celebration
Yes, the Australian Alps had a glaciation, like Tasmania did. Which means that parts of Victoria and all of Tasmania are the only areas in Australia with a soil comparable with Eurasia's agricultural zones. The Glasshouse mountains were active volcanoes in the distant past, but too long ago. The problem with Australian soil (excepting portions of Victoria and Tasmania) is that soil nutrients have not been renewed within "recent" geological times, except for dust coming from Asia and some volcanic ashes from eruptions in Indonesia.
The "lush forests" were there (and in part - small part
- they still are), but were cleared to get agriculturally useful land (which was one of the worst mistakes made during the colonisation of Australia: the obsession with land clearing has been the source of huge ecological disasters). Now the problems with cultivated land are substantially of three types: soil nutrients are leached away, top-soil is not protected by vegetation all the year round (which causes erosion and topsoil blown away by winds) and need to artificially irrigate (lowering the water table, destroying wetlands and rivers ecologies, resulting into salinity issues, very bad ones). You can go on, and ponder the havoc produced by artificial nutrients and pesticides being dispersed in the environment and so on. I'm not a rabid ecological freak, but there is a limit (a sustenaible limit) to each and every ecology.
Now onto the serious stuff... The problem with the analysis of Australian soils & conditions is that, & it's just not you (so don't take it personally) but many experts as well (especially overseas ones), & that is people look at Australian conditions through European/North American eyes - especially in relation to traditional crops transplaneted from Europe & North America. Naturally, Australia being on the other side of the planet, whilst also being a unique continent in its own right, there are going to be fundamental difficulties in any such analysis. But that doesn't make Australian soil infertile as they may suggest. Afterall, & even though I may disagree about the what you may call the "resent" volcanic stuff (considering volcanic activity in Australia did take place whilst Aboriginals lived in isolation here - so we're talking we'll within 40 000 years), you must realise that unlike Europe, which has undergone thousands of years of intensive cultivation, Australia has only know such practices for one to two hundred years. Consequentially the Australian soil hasn't been been exhausted anywhere akin to other regions where European farm practices have been introduce which has been environmentally destructive over a long term.
But leaving even aside what I've just said above, the quintessental problem, that's been ignored until the last 30 odd years in Australian farming, in regards to soil, & this is where the European farming analysis gets it wrong, is not that Australian soil is unferile, but that we have low amounts of Phosphorus in our soils. Now the native plants, including the eatable crop producing ones, love our soils, because they've evolved to deal with Australia's uniqueness come soil. Most cash crops from Europe & North America, however, demand high Phosphorus in the soil & hence our dilema. The problem is, alas, farmers & producers then run around claiming Australia soil is no good, dump vast amounts of fertiliser everywhere that's counterproductive to the overall environment, when they should be planting crops, or varities of traditional cash crops, which can cope with low Phosphorus soils.
Now in the past they have stumbled across some such crops. Rice, for example, loves the soil in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area as I believe they produce more per hectare than anywhere else. All the farmers had to do was add water - which was the fundamental point I was making before: that it's a lack of water, not soil quality, that's Australia's real problem. And again cotton loves Australian soil & wherever it's planted it grows extremely well. But real success story is the Shiraz grape. Grown everywhere else, it's a minor red wine grape considered averag - transplant it to Australia (eg Hunter Valley & South Australia) & its completely tranformed into a world renown wine (Penfolds Grange, Hill of Grace, Wolf Blass, Brokenwood, just to name a few). And that's all thanks to the soil. Needless to say, the CSIRO & various universities have been developing cash crop varities to deal with Australian conditions, but it doesn't help when farmers practice extremely bad land management like complete land clearing & the like which Queensland still does at record speed!
Arggggghhhhhh! Ever heard of the "black lands of kazakhstan"? It still is one of the worst ecological disasters in the world: Krutschev approved in the late 1950s a project to divert a couple of major Siberian rivers which were flowing into the Arctic sea, and use their water to irrigate the "black lands of kazakhstan". To make it short: the Kazakh lands produced well for 10 years or so, then salinity problems and loss of nutrients destroyed any residual economic value. The Aral sea was affected by these huge changes, and its surface is nowadays less than 30% of what it was in the 1950s (not 20,000 years ago, 50 years ago
). I could go on, but the message is clear: it is madness to think to move huge quantities of water thousands of kilometers away, and believe that nothing bad will happen. I'll fight with all my forces against that Qld and WA projects: I repeat, madness.
Well this comparison of the USSR & Australia is unfair in many respects, as you could site these environmental disasters in the USSR & win any discussion on such matters. Afterall the USSR had a dreadful record on just about everything. You just have to point towards their nuclear industry & go no further. Nevertheless, they do make for excllent case studies in how not to manage an industry in the face of environmental disaster - so they shouldn't be ignored but studied. Australia, though, has never been that bad. Having said that, it's not that we haven't made mistakes as well. Salination has become a problem for some parts of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, over the last 70 or so years, but they have learnt from those mistakes by limiting further water wastage & stopping the water table from raising significantly. Consequentially I do believe that the Kimberley region, which came much later, doesn't suffer the same problems. Likewise the Snowy Mountains Scheme has been a great success, even though it took them 30 odd years to realise that they have to let some water flow back down the Snowy River to save its environment. Yet fundamentially, in Australia, to ignore the economic benefits, which come from water diversion, is ensuring disaster. Not only do these irrigation areas feed our own population, but they also ensure vast amounts of export dollars which helps in keeping Australians living a high standard of life. Otherwise we'd end up as somewhere like those poor third-world countries where millions of their people live & die in poverty & starvation.
We did manage the environment very poorly. In a way Australia was saved by its own size, and the difficulty of developing inland areas. If you can believe that higher numbers of immigrants would also bring a better or wiser environmental management (which was not even a word until a couple of generations ago), I've a few real estate opportunities I would LOOOOVE discussing with you
No arguements from me about the poor management of our environoment over the years. It's only been recently that things have changed. Furthermore we should be looking towards traditional Aboriginal land management methods considering they did very well for 40 000 years without any so-called civilised help from Europeans. I will pass on the real estate opportunities, though, as I have a lovely place already in the Hunter Valley amongst the vineyards, not to mention its a golden rule where I come from that you don't do any land deals with a Queenslander
and the Chinese, the Vietnamites, the Philipinos. Australia has resources and spaces which are truly coveted by all our neighbours.
Well I hope they're all good swimmers
I'll drink to that. But don't tear up the joint defense agreement, PLEAAAAASE
Talking about real estate - I wouldn't want to own any nearby property around Pine Gap as that place would be the first location on anyone's nuclear hit-list.
