Australia outdoes Third World in land clearing
Copyright 2001 Deutsche Presse-Agentur
October 15, 2001
Sydney - The Commonwealth's champion tree chopper is an impoverished African nation, Zambia.
The runner-up, though, is one of the four rich countries in the 54-member grouping: Australia.
While Zambia is clearing its forests at a rate of 850,000 hectares a year, Australia comes second with 564,000 hectares a year. Australians, always so ready to advise Third World countries on how to manage their affairs, are turning their land from green to brown at eight times the average Commonwealth rate.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is embarrassed by the figures in the latest Commonwealth environmental report and has called on the government to bring in national laws to slow the shocking pace of land clearing.
The ACF's embarrassment not shared by the federal government in Canberra -- or the Queensland state government in Brisbane.
Of the 564,000 hectares of forest cleared last year, three quarters was in Queensland.
Queensland Environment Minister Rod Welford, who has issued farmers with permits to clear 644,000 hectares this year, denies there's a problem.
"This is just normal clearing," he said. "Some people seem to think we should have zero clearing -- that's not going to happen".
Ian Donges, the president of the National Farmers Federation, also insists there is nothing to worry about in the rate of landclearing.
"I get pretty uptight when I see these suggestions that we are out there raping and pillaging the land," said Donges. "We all want clean water and to keep native plants and animals".
Australians live in a big country with a small population and tend to see trees as a limitless resource.
They share with Americans an unwillingness to give up cheap petrol, big cars, wood stoves and hot tubs.
And, like Americans, they are unworried by their global-vandal tag.
They pump out more of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for global warming than any other country bar the United States and Canada.
Their rate of greenhouse gas emissions, 27.6 tonnes per person per year, is twice the 12.9 tonne average for rich countries.
As in North America, it's households rather than factories that puff out the bulk of ozone-depleting gases -- 56 per cent.
And here's a telling statistic: the ACF estimates that 10 per cent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions this year will come from the exhausts of all those tractors ripping out tree cover.
Yes, that's right
Australia, rather than seeking to ameliorate the world's environmental problems by preserving forests, is busy adding to them by chopping them down.