This Friday the 27th of June, David Eastburn (Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU) will be leading a discussion on ‘The Price of Pre-ecological Policy Inertia: 10 000 hectares of dead Red gums?’ David will be taking us deep into the conundrums around how the socio-ecological/economic systems of the Lowbidgee have operated historically and of today, and as drawing from what he has learnt in both employment and study in and around the Lowbidgee.

“A need to protect water supply ‘life lines’ as well as ‘sites’”

Current drought conditions have graphically revealed, in the form of thousands of hectares of dead and dying red gums and other flood-dependent vegetation, the inadequacies of current pre-ecological policies, structures and institutions, to achieve an ecologically sustainable future for the lower Murrumbidgee floodplain. The massive destruction of natural capital, on behalf of Australian society, is attributable in a large way to maintaining processes informed by the knowledge and values of the first half of the twentieth century, when catchment conditions and scientific understanding were very different from today i.e. protecting ‘sites’ rather than whole ‘systems’ and water regimes. Kingsford and Thomas (2001: 74)* provide the following illustration:

The Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrates a problem for protection of wetland areas under [current] conservation legislation and policy. Conservation legislation is primarily designed to protect areas of significance as reserves (e.g. National Parks and Nature Reserves). Two examples from the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrate how this can fail. Yanga Nature Reserve lies in the
Fiddlers-Uara stratum and was primarily conserved for its Black Box woodland vegetation community. Similarly 23,800 ha of the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain was protected in the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain from clearing by legislation … Legislation and policy measures usually protect actual sites of wetlands from development but do not control threatening processes upstream … To protect wetland areas, policies and legislation for wetland conservation need to be applied to flow regimes. This necessitates the interaction of policies applied to the floodplain with legislation that governs the management of water. Until there is protection of the flow regimes that define wetlands and their biota, their long-term future, even if they have reserve status, cannot be guaranteed.

Approximately 65 000 hectares of historically inundated flood-dependent land on the floodplain has become ‘stranded’. A considerable part of the stranded landscapes now receives water only during rare major flood events (the last being in the mid-1970s). In a country with notoriously poor soils, a relatively large area of rich alluvial soils has virtually been taken out of ecological and agricultural production.

Floodplain-saltbush-red gum resilience cycle

A feature of traditional European land-use and natural resources management in the lower Murrumbidgee landscape was that landholders did not confine themselves to one ecosystem. They practiced annual stock movement between floodplain and saltbush ecosystems (similar to Swiss transhumance). Stock was moved to graze on the saltbush plains in winter and back to the floodplain vegetation in summer, after flooding had receded, so that both ecosystems could be ‘rested’. Many properties still retain frontage (floodplain) and back (saltbush) blocks in their ecosystem mix. This is a vestige of the pastoral era that dominated land-use in the region until the early 1980s and is being revisited in the light of climate change and a decline in the availability of oil.

During periods of difficult economic conditions, such as droughts or economic depressions, community members can, to this day, make a living from red gum forest products. This means that they do not have to leave their community to find work and the local economy is sustained during ‘hard times’. The red gum forests are looked upon as a source ‘exceptional circumstance’ community income. While there is a small amount of continuous forest product extraction in the district, red gum generally provides a major input to the local economy approximately once in a generation (25 years).

* Kingsford, R.T. & Thomas, R.F. 2001. Changing Water Regimes and
Wetland Habitat on the Lower Murrumbidgee Floodplain of the Murrumbidgee
River. NSW NPWS, Hurstville.