Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Local cartographer Mal ‘Jase’ Haysom has just released the latest in his series of excellent maps, this one being of the Muckleford Forest.

The map can be found at the website of Cartography Community Services, along with others in the series, which includes Kalimna Park, several maps of Castlemaine Diggings NHP, Campbells Creek walking track, Rise and Shine, Post Office Hill and Mount Alexander.

Muckleford forest: it can be a bit of a maze, but help is at hand in the form of the latest CCM map.

The CCM maps can also be bought at the tourist info centre at the Castlemaine Market building. They’re ridiculously cheap.

You might also want to brood on this quote from Joseph Conrad, which heads CCM’s website: ‘It is safe to say that for the majority of mankind the superiority of geography over geometry lies in the appeal of its figures.  It may be an effect of the incorrigible frivolity inherent in human nature, but most of us will agree that a map is more fascinating to look at than a figure in a treatise on conic sections – at any rate, for the simple minds which are the equipment of the majority of the dwellers on this earth.’

Think about that.

Victoria has a new biodiversity plan. Protecting Victoria’s Environment—Biodiversity 2037 was launched last week by the State Government. It can be found here. Readers may remember that FOBIF made a brief submission to the process of developing this paper last year.

A selection from FOBIF’s library: there are stacks of strategies, but the actions are what count.

The first thing to say about it is that it’s part of a long running, perhaps never ending series of such documents, all adding up to an indictment of governments which seem to go on churning out policies never to be implemented. Remember 2005’s White Paper on biodiversity? Or the 2010 National Biodiversity Strategy? Or the dozen or so other papers by different government agencies? Of course you don’t. The current paper repeats a lot of the ideas of those two, but claims to be more strategic than its predecessors. On first reading, this is not at all clear.

For example, here are three targets:

Protecting Victoria’s environment 2016: ‘ All Victorians connecting with nature [by 2037]’.

National Biodiversity Strategy 2010: ‘Priority for action 1: engaging all Australians.’

Victorian Biodiversity White Paper 2005: ‘Goal: to encourage all Victorians to work together as effective stewards of our land, water and biodiversity.’

Worthwhile objectives, all of them. How successful have the earlier strategies been in achieving them? We don’t find out from this one. It’s pretty clear that you can’t have a healthy environment without people’s support: without that, governments will never have the nerve to act appropriately. This documents admits, remarkably,  that we actually don’t know what people think.   One of its aims is to ‘Undertake research to understand the community’s level of awareness of biodiversity and its relevance to them.’ In other words, we’re starting all over again.

Having registered this depressing fact, we need to look at the current document, and ask: what does it add up to?

It adds up to money. Here’s a key passage:

‘The degraded health of Victoria’s biodiversity is the result of many individual decisions and actions, or inactions, over two centuries. Under-investment in planning, management, protection, evaluation and reporting for biodiversity and the natural environment has been conspicuous. Even today, decision makers in government, business and land management too often fail to fully consider the impacts of their actions on biodiversity – and are not routinely required to do so.

‘There has been persistent under-investment in programs and measures to address the legacy of biodiversity loss (particularly for terrestrial biodiversity) and to counter-balance the ongoing losses that occur due to decisions and activities today…’

Unfortunately the document doesn’t follow up statements like this by guaranteeing appropriate funding for the environment. Instead, it gestures at new efficiencies, strategic approaches, and ‘Victorian Government-backed funding model that leverages government investment to create more significant investment in biodiversity conservation across Victoria.’ The 64 dollar question is, by whom? This could be a creative approach to engaging private commitment to conservation. It could also be a slide into the kind of sinister proposals we’ve been offered lately which amount to privatising parts of our National Parks [see our Parkwatch post below].

In any case, the success or otherwise of biodiversity conservation won’t depend on brilliant short term ideas. It will hang on the long term proper resourcing of those departments responsible for managing our public land: that’s the real implication of the above passages, and it’s to be hoped the treasurer, Tim Pallas, takes them seriously.

The document is full of praiseworthy but often vague aspirations, but on occasions it does get specific, as in this:

‘Estimate of relative area required to deliver statewide targets [by 2037]:

St John’s Wort infestation on Mount Alexander: successive biodiversity strategies have recommended tackling pest species, but action has been inadequate for lack of resources.

• 4 million hectares of control of pest herbivores (e.g. deer, rabbits, goats, feral horses) in priority locations.
• 1.5 million hectares of control of pest predators (e.g. foxes, feral cats) in priority locations.
• 1.5 million hectares of weed control in priority locations.
• 200,000 hectares of revegetation in priority areas for connectivity between habitats.
• 200,000 hectares of new permanently protected areas on private land.’

These figures are a standing indictment of neglect on the part of past governments, and of the failure of past Biodiversity strategies. Feral animals like horses and deer, for example, continue to wreak spectacular havoc in the Alps while governments nervously consider targets over the next 20 years; overstressed land managers confess that feral plants are more or less out of control; and the state is proposing to open logging in our vulnerable western forests. Will this document make a difference? We’ll see.