[Peakoil] Water retention may solve drought

[Alex P]

This is a little off-topic, but it's a very interesting piece on the 
potential for changed farming practices to retain water in the landscape 
and moderate the climate. I think this was the subject of a two-part 
Australian Story on the ABC.

Alex
O4O4873828

ACT Peak Oil discussion list
http://www.act-peakoil.org

------------- Forwarded message follows -------------

Continent at risk of a dry tsunami
January 10, 2005

Ours may be remembered as the generation that allowed Australia to
die, writes Paul Sheehan.

Gerry Harvey wears woollen socks. I know this because he is given to
taking his shoes off and putting his feet on the table. Billionaire's
prerogative. At this particular meeting, commerce was not uppermost on
his mind. The survival of Australia was the subject. Basically, how
long have we got?

Based on the consensus at that table, the $1 billion generously set
aside last week by the Australian Government for the tsunami disaster,
mostly for Indonesia, will be a tiny fraction of the cost of stopping
the dry tsunami sweeping over this country.

The meeting, held several months ago in Harvey's Flemington office,
was set up by a magnificent eccentric, a battered, craggy-faced
contrarian, Peter Andrews, the salt messiah. He's a bushman, farmer
and horse trainer who has made and lost millions on the land. He has
been told for 20 years that he's wrong and dangerous, especially by
bureaucrats.

Around the table were a group of landscape scientists who don't think
Andrews is wrong: Dr Wilhelm Ripl of the Berlin Technical University,
Dr David Mitchell of Charles Sturt University, now an environment
consultant, Dr Jan Pokorny of the Czech Academy of Sciences, several
young researchers from Southern Cross University who are studying
Andrews's work and Harvey. Harvey has employed Andrews to improve and
drought-proof his horse stud, Baramul, near Denman, and in the process
become interested in the wider implications of Andrews's ideas.
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This is a brutally condensed version of his brutal vision.

Before the arrival of humans this continent with unreliable rainfall
had evolved, over millions of years, an immensely efficient system for
trapping and storing water, a vast mosaic of self-sustaining wetlands
and grasslands which kept water on the landscape in a system of
perched wetlands and billabongs, with ground water trapped in a lens
of clay just beneath the surface. Basically grass-covered dams. This
lens kept salination at bay indefinitely.

Because there was much more vegetation, the landscape kept the
temperature within a more temperate range than today, making the
climate milder. Wetlands served as natural fire retardants. The
landscape retained less heat. The fire-loving eucalypt was not dominant.

The first human colonists, the Aborigines or their ancestors, were an
ecological disaster. By introducing fire-farming they eliminated about
two-thirds of the biodiversity on the landscape and began the process
of desertification. (So let's not get too cloying about indigenous
land management just because the Europeans turned out to be much
worse.) After the Europeans arrived, the introduction of hard-footed
animals and the re-engineering of the highly evolved water management
system caused an exponential increase in erosion and salination. The
landscape is now set up to drain very quickly, the opposite of how it
had evolved before human intervention.

We continue the long-term exhaustion of the soil with artificial
fertilisers. "We've been putting stimulants into the system and now
the system is dying," Andrews says. "We have taken the country to a
threshold where it is now completely dependent on weather factors." An
exceptional period of wet weather will flush a huge amount of salt
built up in the landscape, creating saline conditions in freshwater
catchments. A prolonged drought will accelerate the already
self-evident desertification.

We destroy or dismiss the greatest repairers of the landscape - weeds.
"In just one cycle, weeds can be a thousand times more efficient than
an adjacent plant," Andrews says. If the top ground layer is disturbed
and laid bare, the light will trigger weed growth. Weeds will dominate
temporarily, but, over time, grasses will always out-compete weeds
because their seeds can thrive in the mulch of dead weeds. We remain
ignorant of weeds' crucial restorative role. (Andrews loves weeds, and
probably identifies with them.)

We sustain the destructive fantasy that only "native" plants should be
encouraged, even though the entire continent has been irreversibly
changed by the introduction of more then 200 animals and hundreds of
species of plants. Nativist ideology is a pedantic luxury in the face
of disaster.

We waste enormous energy pushing sewage into the sea instead of
recycling it inland, fertilising the landscape and lowering its fire
potential. While this would be costly, it is even more costly fighting
fires, losing viable landscape and wasting vast amounts of energy
going up in useless smoke.

We draw down water tables at unsustainable levels, increasing
salination. "My first battle, the first 20 years of the battle, was
saying to people that every time you drain the natural water out of
the landscape it will turn to salt. And no one would believe me, but
now it's happening everywhere," Andrews says.

Conclusion: we have become acutely vulnerable. What we call drought is
actually climate change. "We are now at the mercy of the weather. A
prolonged period of extreme weather, wet or dry, will lead to a
natural disaster for this country," warns Andrews.

On Australia Day 2002, the Wentworth Group - 11 senior environmental
scientists advising the Federal Government - published a call to arms,
Blueprint for a Living Continent. It warned: "Our continent is falling
apart and it is not caused by drought, it is caused by poor policies
... Our land management practices over the past 200 years have left a
landscape in which freshwater rivers are choking with sand, topsoil is
being blown into the Tasman Sea, where salt is destroying rivers and
land like a cancer and where many of our native plants and animals are
heading for extinction."

One member of the Wentworth Group, Dr John Williams, head of the
CSIRO's land and water section, had examined Andrews's work and told
me at the time: "What Peter is showing is that when you make incisions
in a landscape you are changing the landscape. The CSIRO has had a
look at his work and it makes sense. We don't know if his theory works
everywhere, but we've got to have a proper look at it."

In 2002, CSIRO experts examined Andrews's 30-year "Natural Farming
Sequence" project at Tarwyn Park in the upper Hunter. The panel
concluded his process was "an effective and sustainable farming
system" with, in principle, "widespread applicability".

The chilling question is, if Peter Andrews is right about his own part
of the country, what if he is right about the big picture? We've
basically got one generation to stabilise the dry tsunami or we may be
remembered as the wealthiest generation that ever lived here, and the
idiot-consumers who fiddled while Australia burned.