Diary of a Carbon Farmer

This is the diary of an Australian family who escaped from the city, joined a farming community, and learned to love soil. Carbon Farming is about growing soil carbon - the first link in our food chain. The topsoil is where God's creation is taking place, at every moment. Carbon is the building block of life. By growing it we can restore ecosystems to health. At the same time we can remove Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and store it as Carbon in the soil.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Did Man or Climate kill off the Megafauna?

Tim Flannery's revelation that aboriginal peoples drove the megafauna to extinction has been challenged in a book called The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilisation, by Brian Fagan.

"Within five centuries [of 11,000BC], the last of the Ice Age megafauna had vanished, killed off by rapidly soaring temperatures and aridity in previously well-watered environments. Although the paleo-Indians may have accelerated the die-out of slow-breeding animals, human predation was at most a secondary cause of extinction."

At the same time, Fagan agrees with Flannery about the impact of man on the landscape: "The firestick was a powerful instrument of environmental change."