Citizens ask the expert in climate physics

24 11 2020

In the first of two consecutive interviews with climate-change experts, authors, editors and readers of the Spanish magazine Quercus have a chat with Ken Caldeira, a global-ecology researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science (Washington, USA). His responses attest that the climate system is complex, and that we need to be practical in dealing with the planet’s ongoing climate emergency.

PhD in atmospheric sciences and professor at Stanford University (USA), Ken Caldeira has pioneered the study of ocean acidification and its impact on coral reefs (1) and geoengineering solutions to mitigate anthropogenic climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere and reflecting solar radiation (2, 3). He has also been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) and assessed zero-emissions scenarios (4, 5). To the right, Ken manoeuvers a drone while collecting aerial data from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (6). Source.

SARS-Covid-19 is impacting the world. In our home country, Spain, scientists argue that (i) previous budget cuts in public health have weakened our capacity to tackle the pandemic (7), and (ii) the expert panels providing advice to our government should be independent of political agendas in their membership and decisions (8). Nevertheless, the Spanish national and regional governments’ data lack the periodicity, coherence, and detail to harness an effective medical response (9). Sometimes it feels as if politics partly operate by neglecting the science needed to tackle challenges such as the covid pandemic or climate change.

Having said that, even if a country has cultivated and invested in the best science possible, people have difficulties coming to terms with the idea that scientists work with probabilities of alternative scenarios. As much as there are different ways of managing a pandemic, scientists differ about how to mitigate the ecological, economic, and health impacts of a high-carbon society.

Thus, a more and more common approach is to make collective assessments (elicitations) by weighing different points of view across experts — for instance, to establish links between climate change and armed conflict (10) or to evaluate the role of nuclear energy as we transition to a low-carbon energy-production model (11). The overarching goal is to quantify consensus based on different (evidence-based) opinions.

The questions we here ask Ken Caldeira could well have different answers if asked of other experts. Still, as Ken points out, it is urgent that (of the many options available) we use the immense and certainty-proof knowledge we have already about climate change to take actions that work.

Interview done 23 January 2020 

We italicise each question and the name of the person asking the question and cite one to three relevant publications per question. For expanding on Ken Caldeira’s views on climate change, see a sample of his public talks here and here and newspaper articles here and here.

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Categories : acidification, agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, coral reefs, economics, environmental policy, Europe, extinction, ocean, research, science

Collect and analyse your Altmetric data

17 11 2020

Last week I reported that I had finally delved into the world of R Shiny to create an app that calculates relative citation-based ranks for researchers.

I’m almost slightly embarrassed to say that Shiny was so addictive that I ended up making another app.

This new app takes any list of user-supplied digital object identifiers (doi) and fetches their Altmetric data for you.

Why might you be interested in a paper’s Altmetric data? Citations are only one measure of an article’s impact on the research community, whereas Altmetrics tend to indicate the penetration of the article’s findings to a much broader audience.

Altmetric is probably the leading way to gauge the ‘impact’ (attention) an article has commanded across all online sources, including news articles, tweets, Facebook entries, blogs, Wikipedia mentions and others.

And for those of us interested in influencing policy with our work, Altmetrics also collate citations arising from policy documents.

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Categories : impact, mathematics, media, scientific publishing

The ε-index app: a fairer way to rank researchers with citation data

9 11 2020

Back in April I blogged about an idea I had to provide a more discipline-, gender-, and career stage-balanced way of ranking researchers using citation data.

Most of you are of course aware of the ubiquitous h-index, and its experience-corrected variant, the m-quotient (h-index ÷ years publishing), but I expect that you haven’t heard of the battery of other citation-based indices on offer that attempt to correct various flaws in the h-index. While many of them are major improvements, almost no one uses them.

Why aren’t they used? Most likely because they aren’t easy to calculate, or require trawling through both open-access and/or subscription-based databases to get the information necessary to calculate them.

Hence, the h-index still rules, despite its many flaws, like under-emphasising a researcher’s entire body of work, gender biases, and weighting towards people who have been at it longer. The h-index is also provided free of charge by Google Scholar, so it’s the easiest metric to default to.

So, how does one correct for at least some of these biases while still being able to calculate an index quickly? I think we have the answer.

Since that blog post back in April, a team of seven scientists and I from eight different science disciplines (archaeology, chemistry, ecology, evolution & development, geology, microbiology, ophthalmology, and palaeontology) refined the technique I reported back then, and have submitted a paper describing how what we call the ‘ε-index’ (epsilon index) performs.

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Categories : gender, mathematics, scientific publishing

Giving the perfect seminar at a job interview

2 11 2020

Have a job interview coming up and have been invited to give a seminar to the committee/school/department/institute?

Here are some handy tips for giving the best interview-tailored seminar (modified excerpt from The Effective Scientist)

If you have not yet had the opportunity to be grilled (interviewed) for a new job, you might not appreciate the importance of giving the best seminar of your life to increase your chances of getting the job you want. Normally in most academic settings, a group of the most qualified candidates for an advertised position will be invited to give a seminar to the main group (department, school, or centre) for whom they could be eventually working if successful.

While all of the standard advice applies to this type of seminar too, there are some specific issues that the candidate must also ideally take into consideration. Unfortunately, many of these seminars are just awful, serving only to bathe the aspirants in an unflattering spotlight of incompetence.

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Categories : jobs

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LXIII

26 10 2020

The sixth set of biodiversity cartoons for 2020. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.

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Categories : biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, decline, human overpopulation, sustainability

Spread of harmful species despite early warnings

12 10 2020

The goal of developing an alien-species warning system is to remove the species locally and to allow others enough time to take actions that prevent further spread.

For the green iguana (Iguana iguana) however, its > 50-year spread around the globe continues as we show in our latest study by using citizen-science data. We demonstrate how pet owners and recreational parks have facilitated the green iguana’s spread to mainland Asia, and project its potential future Asian range in the absence of immediate actions.

Do you know how best to deal with an invasive species? Avoid them in the first place.

There is broad agreement among scientists and conservation practitioners that the first line of defense against invasive species is prevention. Once established, invasive species can cause agricultural damage, compete with native species for space, become predators, or carry with them and introduce new diseases. We’ve seen this time and again, with some infamous examples including zebra mussels in the Great Lakes of North America (1), cane toads in Australia (2), and Asian tiger mosquitoes around the world (3). 

To stop the list of invasive species from growing, it is important to detect spreading and newly arriving species early, ideally before they become established. Early detection is especially evident for green iguanas, given their high rates of population growth (females can lay up to 70 eggs), although detectability can be particularly challenging in forested spaces.

Two green iguanas reported on iNaturalist in Jurong Bird Park, Singapore. Free-roaming green iguanas could escape the limits of parks and become a source of new populations throughout Asia. Picture Credit: user pseudomonasry. Used under a Creative Commons licence.

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Categories : alien species, Asia, conservation, environmental policy, invasive species, management

Grand Challenges in Global Biodiversity Threats

8 10 2020

Last week I mentioned that the new journal Frontiers in Conservation Science is now open for business. As promised, I wrote a short article outlining our vision for the Global Biodiversity Threats section of the journal. It’s open-access, of course, so I’m also copying here on ConservationBytes.com.

Most conservation research and its applications tend to happen most frequently at reasonably fine spatial and temporal scales — for example, mesocosm experiments, single-species population viability analyses, recovery plans, patch-level restoration approaches, site-specific biodiversity surveys, et cetera. Yet, at the other end of the scale spectrum, there have been many overviews of biodiversity loss and degradation, accompanied by the development of multinational policy recommendations to encourage more sustainable decision making at lower levels of sovereign governance (e.g., national, subnational).

Yet truly global research in conservation science is fact comparatively rare, as poignantly demonstrated by the debates surrounding the evidence for and measurement of planetary tipping points (Barnosky et al., 2012; Brook et al., 2013; Lenton, 2013). Apart from the planetary scale of human-driven disruption to Earth’s climate system (Lenton, 2011), both scientific evidence and policy levers tend to be applied most often at finer, more tractable research and administrative scales. But as the massive ecological footprint of humanity has grown exponentially over the last century (footprintnetwork.org), robust, truly global-scale evidence of our damage to the biosphere is now starting to emerge (Díaz et al., 2019). Consequently, our responses to these planet-wide phenomena must also become more global in scope.

Conservation scientists are adept at chronicling patterns and trends — from the thousands of vertebrate surveys indicating an average reduction of 68% in the numbers of individuals in populations since the 1970s (WWF, 2020), to global estimates of modern extinction rates (Ceballos and Ehrlich, 2002; Pimm et al., 2014; Ceballos et al., 2015; Ceballos et al., 2017), future models of co-extinction cascades (Strona and Bradshaw, 2018), the negative consequences of invasive species across the planet (Simberloff et al., 2013; Diagne et al., 2020), discussions surrounding the evidence for the collapse of insect populations (Goulson, 2019; Komonen et al., 2019; Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019; Cardoso et al., 2020; Crossley et al., 2020), the threats to soil biodiversity (Orgiazzi et al., 2016), and the ubiquity of plastic pollution (Beaumont et al., 2019) and other toxic substances (Cribb, 2014), to name only some of the major themes in global conservation. 

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Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, disease, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, investment, modelling, science, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, threatened species

New journal: Frontiers in Conservation Science

29 09 2020

Several months ago, Daniel Blumstein of UCLA approached me with an offer — fancy leading a Special Section in a new Frontiers journal dedicated to conservation science?

I admit that my gut reaction was a visceral ‘no’, both in terms of the extra time it would require, as well as my autonomous reflex of ‘not another journal, please‘.

I had, for example, spent a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears helping to launch Conservation Letters when I acted as Senior Editor for the first 3.5 years of its existence (I can’t believe that it has been nearly a decade since I left the journal). While certainly an educational and reputational boost, I can’t claim that the experience was always a pleasant one — as has been said many times before, the fastest way to make enemies is to become an editor.

But then Dan explained what he had in mind for Frontiers in Conservation Science, and the more I spoke with him, the more I started to think that it wasn’t a bad idea after all for me to join.

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Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, development, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, habitat loss, human overpopulation, human-wildlife conflict, impact, implementation, invasive species, investment, management, population viability analysis, poverty, prioritisation, research, restoration, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, threatened species, translocation

Climate explained: humans have dealt with plenty of climate variability

23 09 2020
© Professor John Long, Flinders University, Author provided

(originally published on The Conversation)

 

How much climate variability have humans dealt with since we evolved and since we started settling (Neolithic times)? How important was migration to human survival during these periods?

 

The climate always fluctuates as variation in the Sun’s heat reaching Earth drives glacial-interglacial cycles. Over the past 420,000 years there have been at least four major transitions between ice ages and relatively warmer interglacial periods.

Modern humans emigrated from Africa to populate the rest of the globe between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago, which means our species has had to adapt to many massive climate transitions.

 

Warming and cooling

The Last Interglacial 129,000–116,000 years ago was a period of intense global warming (from around 2 ℃ higher than today to as much as 11 ℃ higher in the Arctic), leading to a large reduction of the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and a 6–9 m rise in sea level.

The front of a glacier breaking away and falling into the sea.
Arctic glaciers have melted before. Flickr/Kimberly Vardeman, CC BY

The Last Glacial Maximum from 26,500–19,000 years ago coincided with a large drop in atmospheric CO₂ and a 4.3 ℃ cooling globally.

Read more: Climate explained: will the tropics eventually become uninhabitable?

 

Low temperatures turned much of the world’s water into ice and expanded glaciers.

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Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, Arctic, Australia, climate change, climate shift, conservation, New Zealand, societies

Australia: the world’s unsustainable ‘mine’

16 09 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has finally woken a few people up in this country. The closure of our automotive industry, the volatility of the mining sector, the deteriorating relations with our largest trading partner (China) — all these have seem to have acted like smelling salts for our semi-conscious leaders.

Australia has an abysmal manufacturing capacity, and I know that trying to fix this is very much on the table now at the highest levels. Australia is for the most part a 7.7 million km2 ‘mine’ to the world — we of course dig up our minerals and ship them overseas, and we export shit-tonnes of coal.

But much of our agricultural produce goes overseas too, including the very poorly valued live-export industry that takes the little water and minerals already in Australian soils and turns them inefficiently into livestock that is then sold overseas whole and living. Even putting aside the woeful animal-welfare issues this entails, it’s not much of a value-add and really a poor business model.

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Categories : agriculture, aquaculture, Australia, biodiversity, deforestation, food

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LXII

2 09 2020

The fifth set of biodiversity cartoons for 2020. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.

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Categories : conservation

How much is that iguana in the window?

25 08 2020

In our latest study, we examine the downstream effects of publicising an elevated species description for a reptile that is highly prized in the international commercial wildlife trade.

We describe how iguanas from an insular population of the common green iguana (Iguana iguana) entered commercial trade shortly after an announcement was made indicating that the population would be described as a new species.

The international commercial wildlife trade presents a known risk factor for wild populations of threatened species. One organisation in particular regulates the international trade in species — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Although most people probably know about the illegal practices involving iconic elephants and rhinos, reptiles are also targeted and traded. For example, after its discovery and description in 2016, and even though locality data were safeguarded, China’s endemic Mountain spiny crocodile newt (Echinotriton maxiquadratus) quickly entered the trade. This put conservation pressure on this small-range species (1, 2). Therefore, CITES signatory countries placed this species on its Appendix II in 2019, which lists animals and plants in need of protection.  

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Categories : alien species, captive breeding, conservation, conservation biology, environmental policy, exploitation, tropical

Error-free genetic repositories: case of amphibians

18 08 2020

In our new study, we curated > 39,000 amphibian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from GenBank, identified > 2,000 sequencing and taxonomic errors, and published the quality-checked records as a curated dataset with an automated workflow in R. High-quality genetic data should help quantify and protect the diversity of the most threatened vertebrate group on Earth.

frogs

Upper left: species of Boophis from Andasibe, Madagascar. Upper right: Dendropsophus anceps from State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lower left; Dendropsophus bipunctatus from State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lower right: Bufo bufo from Gelderland, The Netherlands. All images from the author.

Scientists from a broad range of biological disciplines use genetic information like DNA sequences to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. Critically, genetics are today essential for naming species and therefore quantifying biodiversity, as well as determining where species live and how many individuals of a species occur in the wild.

Researchers are routinely asked, and more recently frequently required, by scientific journals to submit their DNA sequences to GenBank (among other public repositories of genetic data) as a requirement for publishing a paper. Although GenBank provides some quality controls (e.g., to filter sequences with bacterial contaminants and those from other kingdoms), authors are responsible for the quality of their genetic data and have full freedom to assign these to species in the taxonomy database of GenBank. Notably, once sequences have been deposited in GenBank, records are rarely updated in light of identified errors often resulting from taxonomic progress.

Two important notions emerge from the former status quo: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : amphibian, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, frog, genetic diversity, genetics

Many animals won’t cope with climate change without access to ample drinking water

12 08 2020

Climate change implies change in temperature and water, and both factors shape species’ tolerances to thermal stress. In our latest article, we show that lack of drinking water maximises differences in tolerance to high temperatures among populations of Iberian lizard species.

drinking

Climate change is a multidimensional phenomenon comprising temporal and spatial shifts in both temperature and precipitation (1). How we perceive climate change depends on whether we measure it as shift in (i) mean conditions (e.g., the mean air temperature or rainfall over a decade within a given territory), (ii) magnitude or frequency of extreme conditions (e.g., the frequency of floods or tornados or the number of days with temperatures or rainfall above or below a given threshold), or (iii) speed at which mean or extreme conditions change in space and/or time.

In aquatic ecosystems, climate change further alters water acidity, oxygen dissolution and melting of ice. However, many people, including some scientists, tend to equate climate change erroneously with increased mean temperatures. Psychologists have made the semantic point that the use of the expressions climate change and global warming as synonyms can give mixed messages to politicians, and society in general, about how serious and complex the climate emergency we are facing really is (2, 3) — see NASA’s simple-worded account on the subject here.

In our latest article (4), we reviewed the ecological literature to determine to what extent ecologists investigating the tolerance of terrestrial animals to high temperatures have looked at thermal effects over water effects. It turns out, they were five times more likely to examine temperature over water.

cb_BAAE_WaterLizardsNetwork

Frequency of correlations between climate (air temperature versus precipitation) and tolerance to high temperature of terrestrial fauna in 64 papers published in the ecological literature (thickest link = 36, thinnest link = 2) following a systematic literature review in Scopus (4).

This is counterintuitive. Just imagine you have been walking under the sun for several hours on one of those dog days of summer, and you are offered to choose between a sunshade or a bottle of water. I’d bet you’d choose the bottle of water.

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Categories : climate change, climate shift, ecology, evolution, research, water

Double standards: climate change vs. COVID-19

3 08 2020

Both anthropogenic climate change and the coronavirus pandemic entail serious health risks. Why then do climatologists lack the public credibility and political repercussions that doctors have? Preventing the aggravation of the climate emergency is possible if we react to it in the same way we are reacting to the pandemic, essentially, following the advice of the scientific community.

 

We have as much uncertainty regarding the coronavirus COVID-19 that causes acute respiratory failure (SARS-CoV-2) as we do about human-made greenhouse gases causing climate change.

Both problems are currently costing (and will cost) trillions to national economies. But the main difference between the two when it comes to public perception is not economic but temporal. The virus has changed our lives in days to months whereas climate change is taking years to decades to do so. This short-termism about how we respond to the pace of an emergency has been sculped in our genes by evolution (1) and contaminates politics.

Early this year, after deriding the onset of the pandemic, many climate change-denialist leaders (the obvious picks are Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson [note that Johnson modified his public views on climate change when becoming UK foreign secretary in 2016]) had to swallow their own words and honour their political profession when human corpses started to pile up in their hospitals. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, climate change, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, sustainability

The only constant is change

27 07 2020

I just wrote a piece for the Flinders University alumnus magazine — Encounter — and I thought I’d share it here.

encounter-2020_Page_01

As an ecologist concerned with how life changes and adapts to the vagaries of climate and pervasive biological shuffling, ‘constant change’ is more than just a mantra — it is, in fact, the mathematical foundation of our entire discipline.

But if change is inevitable, how can we ensure it is in the right direction?

Take climate change for example. Since the Earth first formed it has experienced abrupt climate shifts many times, both to the detriment of most species in existence at any given time, and to the advantage of those species evolving from the ashes.

For more than 3.5 billion years, species have evolved and gone extinct, such that more than 99% of all species that have ever existed are now confined, permanently, to the vaults of the past.

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Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, development, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, education, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, Flinders University, habitat loss, invasive species, recovery, reforestation, reserve, restoration, sustainability

History of species distribution models

21 07 2020

This little historical overview by recently completed undergraduate student, Sofie Costin (soon to join our lab!), nicely summarises the history, strengths, and limitations of species distribution modelling in ecology, conservation and restoration. I thought it would be an excellent resource for those who are just entering the world of species distribution models.

SDM

Of course, there is a strong association between and given species and its environment1. As such, climate and geographical factors have been often used to explain the distribution of plant and animal species around the world.

Predictive ecological models, otherwise known as ‘niche models’ or ‘species distribution models’ have become a widely used tool for the planning of conservation strategies such as pest management and translocations2-5. In short, species distribution models assess the relationship between environmental conditions and species’ occurrences, and then can estimate the spatial distribution of habitats suited to the study species outside of the sampling area3,6.

While the application of species distribution models can reduce the time and cost associated with conservation research, and conservation managers are relying increasingly on them to inform their conservation strategies4, species distribution models are by no means a one-stop solution to all conservation issues. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : bioclimatic envelope, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, ecology, invasive species, management, modelling, niche model, software, species distribution model

I’m nearing the end of my PhD/postdoc … What the hell am I supposed to do now?

13 07 2020

Originally published on the GE.blog.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Elasmotherium

Unicorns, like job security, used to exist (actually, it’s an Elasmotherium)

The term ‘job security’ seems a fanciful idea to budding biologists — you may as well be studying unicorns (and no, narwhal don’t count …)! Now, you’re a fully fledged adult, your thoughts are likely filled with adult questions like ‘where will I live’ and ‘how will I scrape some money together?’. Not knowing where to go next can be very stressful.

A change in profession might help with job security, but if you’ve made it this far in biology, its highly likely that you (like me) have been obsessed with biology since early childhood, and it’s not something you’re willing to give up easily. On top of that, you now have years of research experience and skill development behind you — it would be better if that experience didn’t go to waste. How, then, can we keep funding our biology addiction? I don’t want to sound like a snake-oil salesman here, so let’s be straight-up about this: there are no easy options. But, importantly, there are options — in research, the university sector, and wider afield.

So, down to the serious business. Your options (depending on your personal preferences) are:

1. Research or bust!

In-house postdoctoral fellowships

Research bodies in Australia, including many universities, the CSIRO and the Australian Museum, offer in-house postdoctoral fellowships for early-career researchers. Applying for one of these postdocs usually involves the candidate developing a research proposal and initiating collaboration with researchers in the institute offering the fellowship. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, ecology, education, Flinders University, research, science, science communication, science writing

Journal ranks 2019

8 07 2020

journalstack_16x9

For the last 12 years and running, I’ve been generating journal ranks based on the journal-ranking method we published several years ago. Since the Google journal h-indices were just released, here are the new 2019 ranks for: (i) 99 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, and a subset of (ii) 61 ‘ecology’ journals, (iii) 27 ‘conservation’ journals, (iv) 41 ‘sustainability’ journals (with general and energy-focussed journals included), and (v) 20 ‘marine & freshwater’ journals.

See also the previous years’ rankings (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008).

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Categories : conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, ecology, marine, research, science, scientific publishing, sustainability

A brief history of environmentalism in Australia since European invasion

29 06 2020

A (heavily) modified and updated excerpt from our 2015 book Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie

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The Australian awakening to its environmental dilemmas was a little more sluggish than elsewhere in the New World. Not only did Europeans arrive in Australia en masse only about 250 years ago, they had a more limited view of their new landscape, and were, at least initially, constrained by the harshness of their new home. Those mostly British settlers brought with them the fully formed ideas of development and progress shaped by centuries of land use in the Motherland. That ideal of conquering wilderness and transforming it into the bucolic landscape typical of the English countryside was their driving force.

The early settlers viewed the Australian bush as ugly and monotonous, features that could only be overcome by human occupation and cultivation. This neo-classical view, homesickness and the Romantic desire to transform their homes and farms into an image of those from their homeland, were defining forces in early Australian history. Unlike in Europe, though, where there were cultural taboos associated with forest degradation — bound in mysticism, spirituality, folklore and politics — no such restrictions applied to the unfamiliar Australian bush.

In fact, the Australian government passed the Crown Lands Alienation Act in 1861, which was designed to ‘open up’ the colony to settlement, and penalized landholders for not clearing the land (via a forfeit of the land back to the Crown). That single Act guaranteed the deforestation wave would continue for over a 100 years. That, and the persistent desire to make the new land look as much as possible as the old, has ensured that continuing demise of Australia’s biodiversity.

Figure 3.3-Clearing for Agriculture

Clearing for agriculture in early settlement. Anonymous, Government Farm at Castle Hill, circa 1803. Watercolour, 24×35 cm. Permission to reproduce courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Interestingly, clashes over land use between the settlers and Indigenous peoples were probably some of the first demonstrations of what today we would call ‘environmentalism’ in Australia. Aboriginal nations were intent on preserving their way of life (and indeed, their lives) in the face of the settlers’ onslaught. But this was seen, at most, as a mild inconvenience for the new Australians who in response invoked the idea of terra nullius — that no one owned the land, making it available to anyone (white) who wished to ‘improve’ (clear) it. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, book, conservation, coral reefs, deforestation, development, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, habitat loss, harvest, livestock, logging, planning, preservationist, protected area, reserve, threatened species, University of Chicago Press

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