Reasons to be cheerful 1 - 2 - 3

I speak to the first session of the Direct and Digital Creative School each year, a rambling dissertation about life as a creative communications professional. I received this email from one of the class the next day. The questions it posed deserve blogging:

Hi Michael,
I just wanted to thank you last night for talking to us/me, I found it really interesting and inspiring. Honestly.
It was some good advice and for me it was some good solid ground to know that you can pursue the career without loosing your soul and spirit - I think that you may have alleviated me of the only doubt that I think that I held (that I would have to be a mindless and ruthless show pony and suck-up).
From one Aries (dreamer) to another ... I wanted to have a chat with you last night about some crazy ideas that I have had for years ... in short (you will probably think that I am stupid now but you seem like a good person to talk to about this) ... For ages I have thought that the middle of Australia is a wasteland with not much happening ... is this true ? Is the soil just sand with nothing happening beneath the surface ?
Years ago I had an idea that the best thing that Australia could do (apart from adopting different farming techniques, especially by getting rid of the hooved animals that we have brought here as they destroy our soil and there are no native animals with hooves ... coincidently I am of the generation that saw aerial photographs of the Eastern Seaboard which showed the vegetation band running down the entire length when I was about 8 or so and I distinctly remember being about 15 and seeing more recent aerial photos that showed a HUGE decrease in vegetation !!! ... I digress, but I am just saying that I see the problems and I know that its the high yield crop rotation stuff that is doing it along with hooved animals and a transposition of European farming onto our country and maybe a general lack of understanding for our land and environment) .... but the idea that I had ages ago wasn't so much to do with this ... the idea that I had was that a channel should be dug from the base of Australia right up to the centre to fill up our inland sea ... with time (evaporation and precipitation along with life (and death/decomposition)) would this promote environmental growth and eventually would soil replace the sand ??
Quite an abstract email I know, but as I say ... you seem to be a good person to ask. Sorry if I ramble.
Thanks,
Chris

MY REPLY:

Chris,
There are many misconceptions about Australia’s soils and many misguided theories held by many people. There is a superstition that if we returned the landscape back to the way it was before 1770, it would be OK. But read the Future Eaters by Tim Flannery. There was a time before the Aboriginal people arrived when the fossil record tells us the vegetation was very different to what it was when Captain Cook and botanist Joseph Banks arrived. The Aborigines brought with them ‘firestick farming’, controlled burning to make green shoots appear in grassland to attract kangaroos for hunting. Fire was also used to hunt small marsupials. This constant burning led to the extinction of plant and tree species that couldn’t handle the heat, which also led to the extinction of a collection of plant eating animals. As well, like the Maoris in NZ, the Aborigines hunted the giant (megafauna) roos, wombats, emus, etc. to extinction. Firestick farming led to the dominance of acacias and gum trees which need periodic burning to flourish. They used fire to keep gum trees from choking their grassy woodlands that they used for grazing their roos. White man also changed the land management regime and caused extinctions and changes in plant species.
Which “original condition of Nature” should we return to? Pre 1770? Or Pre 40,000 years ago? Or should we ‘listen’ to mother nature and seek to work with her? Natural Agriculture seeks to mimic mother nature. But it’s still agriculture.
Some people believe we can do without agriculture. Read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. Societies that distanced themselves from their soils tend to disintegrate.
Your inland sea idea was a good one half a million years ago.
It’s hard not to feel distressed about the environment. But you need to be sure you know enough about it so that you are being stressed about real things and not fantasms. For instance, I believe droughts are the land’s way of having a holiday every 7 or so years. The rest of us get a break. Why shouldn’t the land? Australia was deep in a drought cycle when white man arrived. So we didn’t cause them.
Ignorance led to 200 years of unsympathetic land management. But now there is a new generation of farmers who feel like they are stewards of the soil. They read Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold and Allan Savory. It’s the dawn of a new age of humanity’s relationship with earth. There are reasons to be cheerful!!

Thanks for your email.

Michael