As BP Solar announced this week it was packing up the picnic and emigrating, we were reminded how much fun it is going to be now that we are alone with Nat King Coal. Not only does the coal industry pollute the atmosphere, it has a few good rivers on its conscience as well. Caroline Graham takes up the story. Caroline is a retired lecturer from the UTS Humanities Faculty. In 1998 she was involved in taking BHP Billiton to court after they damaged the Cataract River in the NSW Southern Highlands. She was a founder of the Nepean Action Group, formed to stop BHP mining under the Nepean, near its junction with the Cataract.

On the radio the other day I heard a bloke say that watching his cherished patch of forest being cleared for development was like losing a child. He was having trouble trying to express the heartbreak. Now more than ever we need a word to describe the pangs of grief and loss felt when witnessing a loved environment being destroyed. [Read more →]

There’s news and there’s shipping news. The shipping news is the local stuff - strange comings and goings, unusual cargo and celebrities in odd places. Today Real Dirt, Fast begins with such a story.

We have a lot of echidnas down here at Cudbugga Forest but normally they are on their way across the paddocks, heading directly to the bush and nothing seems to be able to distract them from the task at hand. Just before sunset on Sunday evening I saw an echidna on the lawn. At first, when I approached, he hunkered down. I sat on the grass and watched. He lifted his head and, for the first time, I looked into the beady eyes of a venerable monotreme. Did I get any great insight out of it? Not really, however, for a few minutes all the other bad environment news didn’t seem to matter so much. And that’s what’s great about shipping news stories.

So to the news. What a shocker this story is. You know when you’re at a party and you’re talking to a group of people and someone who you really like leaves and you’re stuck with the guy that supports old growth logging in Organg-utan habitat? [Read more →]

Story and Pictures by James Woodford

See Stuart Cohen’s Flickr site - a fantastic collection of Brush Island photos from this week’s expedition

After a night trying to sleep amidst thousands of feathered revellers, seabird scientist, Nicholas Carlile, says it is as if Brush Island has just survived a huge, impromptu party.
Uninhabited by humans, the thickly-vegetated, 47-hectare nature reserve a few hundred metres off the NSW south coast village of Bawley Point is a lot noisier at night than it was a few years ago.
“In the morning it feels like the island has a hangover,” says Carlile, a seabird project officer with the National Parks and Wildlife Service (pictured above).

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Jeff Angel is the Director of the Total Environment Centre, a legend of the Australian conservation movement and author of Green is Good. We are at a crossroads, he writes:
 

In the next month Australia will take some steps forwards on the journey to a low carbon economy or falter to a deadstop. In December the Rudd government will release its white paper on the emissions trading scheme (now called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) setting out timing, targets, free permits for polluters and carbon prices; and we will be present at Poznan in Poland participating in the international climate talks. Will we support a soft 2020 target or something more ambitious in line with the climate scientists’ dire warnings?
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I bet you never thought of it like this…Dr Charlotte de Fraiture is based at the International Water Management Institute, a non-profit research institute with its headquarters in Sri Lanka…She wrote this small but important opinion while visiting the Institute for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University.

It is estimated that around 40% of all food produced in farmers’ fields globally does not end up in our stomachs. In US households, for instance, as much as 30 percent of food, worth some USD 48.3 billion, is thrown away. In Australia 3.3 million tons of food is thrown by households and industries, close to 200 kilos per household each year. This wasted food is also wasted water.

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Living with climate change is nothing new for Indigenous Australians, who survived tens of thousands of years in this continent with wild swings of dry, wet and sea levels many tens of metres lower than today. Clearly current fire management regimes are inadequate. But is there an alternative, asks ranger and landcare officer, Greg Watts?

 The ground rules for fire management are already changing. The Australian Greenhouse Office tells us that by 2050 SE NSW will become hotter, drier, windier, and stormier. Periods of drought will be more frequent. Days of Very High and Extreme Fire Danger will become more frequent. As a result there will be increased bushfire frequency, a significant decrease in inter-fire period, increased fire intensity, reduced fire extinguishments, longer fire-fighting campaigns (picture, above, courtesy Departmentof Environment and Climate Change)  and significant increases in annual burnt area.

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Picture and story by James Woodford

The pumping of water from the Shoalhaven River to top up Sydney’s supply is to be stopped for at least three years, signalling a further easing of the city’s water crisis.
The NSW Water Minister, Phillip Costa, will announce today a moratorium on the massive transfers of water from the Shoalhaven to Sydney’s Metropolitan dams and will also put measures in place to ensure Southern Highland platypus populations have enough water to breed.

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They say people often look like their pets and that scientists sometimes look like the creatures they study. Overlooking his unruly beard, Dr Duck, more formally known as Professor Richard Kingsford from the University of NSW, is no exception.
Right now he is even behaving like a bird. Dr Duck is on a mass migration around the continent – flying around Australia like a magpie goose whose electromagnetic GPS has gone awry.

For the past month Kingsford has been e-mailing in reports to Real Dirt about his progress – from the Northern Territory, Cape York and other far flung waterbird outposts. He and his colleagues are conducting a national stocktake from a Cessna of the continent’s bird populations and therefore they are effectively taking the ecological pulse of the nation..His website is well worth a look.

And as the Age reported this week:

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