The stopping of land clearing in Queensland:

an ecologist’s perspective

Rod Fensham

The Ecology Centre, School of Biological Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072 Qld .

Rod in the field (photo: David Akers)

Having come from the wild and beautiful country of the Top End my first field trip into the cattle country of Queensland was confronting. The dry scrubs that were the focus of my new job, as well as the poplar box, brigalow, ironbark, and gidgee were being levered from the ground by a ‘ball-and-chain’ straddled between two bulldozers. The flattened trees were pushed into great heaps and incinerated to make way for vast landscapes of buffel grass. Land-clearing in Queensland was the pointy-end of conservation during the 1990s but there were not many ecologists compelled to work amidst the devastation. There was no spectacular scenery to grasp the public attention and the issue would only ever attract a ripple of awareness amongst urban green voters.

The first imprecise estimates of clearing suggested rates of 500,000 ha per year and rang the alarm bells loud enough to trigger the new Queensland Government to put a toe in the water and assess their powers on state-controlled lands. Naturally there was intransigence towards any attempt to regulate a practice that until recently had been encouraged and heavily subsidised by government. Amidst the heated debates of those early regional workshops, the concept of ecosystem classification emerged to underpin the process. They related to the ‘land-types’ familiar to the pastoralists such as ‘brigalow country on the alluvial flats’, and everyone had to concede that you were flat-out finding decent stands of the sweetest country in most districts.

Unlikely alliances and unholy animosities developed between farmers, bureaucrats, scientists and environmentalists during rounds of workshops spanning more than a decade. In the background the word had spread through the bush about the impending tough laws and there was plenty of work for bulldozer drivers as the bush came down at an accelerating rate. This was a time of great anxiety, as our best efforts seemed counter-productive, amidst an evaporating political commitment. All seemed lost when there was a change of government in the middle of the proceedings!

The defenders of clearing presented a seemingly logical ecological hypothesis to support their case. Aboriginal people burnt a grassy landscape, which suppressed trees, creating a park-like environment. With European herbivores, the same burning regimes are no longer possible, and trees and shrubs have responded by growing up thicker than ever before. To confront this invasion the bulldozer is the new age fire-stick and rather than a force of destruction it is restoring the ecological balance. Another incarnation of the story presupposes that CO2 fertilisation has exacerbated this process and further advantaged trees over the grass. The story was so logically compelling that it was accepted by almost everyone from Queensland graziers to the eminent scientists in Canberra. I felt obliged to maintain an open mind and to treat the story as a hypothesis that required testing, and not by models or physiological predictions, but through the record of history and the evidence I encountered in the bush.

My first forays in Queensland rangelands coincided with the beginning of a drought. As it intensified in 1996 trees became sick and died. Acres and acres of dead trees was not part of the familiar script and this seemingly rare and profound event had to be documented. The questions led us into regional survey, long-term monitoring, decoding the records of the explorers and surveyors, deciphering the archive of aerial photography and beyond. The further I got into it the more I became convinced that the real force driving these landscapes was not humans, herbivore or fire but the notorious ‘droughts and flooding rains’ of the Australian climate.

This year we have the flooding rains, and for the first time I have seen eucalypt seedlings in the inland woodlands. These trees will grow slowly and their death in 100 years or so will be sudden. For people who were born before the Second World War, the landscapes of their youth actually were more open, but the growth through their memories was recovery from earlier droughts and had been spurred on by the wet 1950s and 1970s.

After a long struggle and a painfully protracted process, clearing is now strongly regulated in Queensland, and in remnant vegetation is mostly confined to fodder harvesting in mulga, some selective clearing, areas included under a pre-existing urban plan and operations running the gauntlet of the laws. The overdue laws have been effective (even if they still need tightening) and have been set in place long before the horse has bolted. If nothing had been done clearing would still be in full swing in Queensland, and would continue for many decades until  subtropical and tropical eucalypt woodlands had become as fragmented as the brigalow and temperate woodlands in southern states), with the last remnants standing in reserves, on roadsides and on the properties of a few maverick landholders.

Central to the positive outcome in Queensland was a coordinated and focussed environmental lobby, and the political will of the government including Minister Rod Welford who was prepared to crash through boldly for reform. Some landholders have been aggrieved, but the pastoralists were central to the process and no one in the end was surprised by the outcome. In Queensland, ecological science was integrated into the development of policy. The substantial challenges that still confront other states have largely been resolved by the ecosystem mapping which precisely demarcates legal and illegal clearing, and avoids a cumbersome and corruptible assessment process. Our assessment of the evidence on tree dynamics provided an alternative to the idea of invading trees, and the notion that bulldozing the bush was an innocent form of restoration was trashed.

It is not easy for ecologists to contribute to real environmental outcomes. We have to be prepared to engage in the processes of government, but get cunning about the critical meetings, as there much time to be wasted in workshops and committees. To be most effective we need to gaze into the crystal ball and envisage the imperatives of the future and then get busy garnering the information required.

Broadscale clearing of Queensland mulga vegetation in 2006; trees felled by chaining are piled and burnt (photo: Teresa Eyre)