Cultivating News
From "Maple Street Co-op News", Apr/May 2007
Peter Andrews on Restoring Australian Landscapes
By Ruth Parnell
A couple of hundred locals from the Blackall Range to the Mary River
Valley turned out on 8 March to hear ‘national treasure’
Peter Andrews speak about how to rescue Australia’s landscapes
from the degradation caused by two centuries of European occupation.
The event, held at the Maleny Showground pavilion, was organised by
Steven and Chris Lang and staff of Rosetta Books, with the support of
Barung Landcare (and Maleny Cheese folk who supplied the cheesy comestibles).
Peter Andrews, farmer and racehorse breeder, came to prominence as a
result of a two-part ABC TV Australian Story documentary Of
Drought and Flooding Rain, broadcast on 6 and 13 June 2005
and repeated several times. His revolution-in-a-book, Back from
the Brink: How Australia’s landscape can be saved,
was published by ABC Books last October.
Peter explained to the Maleny audience that the old European practices
of landscape management do not work because conditions here are very
different from those overseas where there are low evaporation levels
and continual rainfall. During several decades of field research, Peter
developed an holistic technique that he calls Natural Sequence Farming,
which re-establishes the hydrology of the land while restoring and maintaining
wetlands and vegetation biodiversity. It’s a technique that contributes
not just to the health of the environment but to the health of the people
and animals who inhabit it.
He used the example of his upper Hunter Valley, NSW, horse stud which
he restored from its degraded state after incorrect land use practices,
like draining the river system and wetland floodplains, had been implemented
from as far back as the 1820s. He also referred to the lesson of long-term
deleterious results from unsustainable irrigation practices in the Tigris-Euphrates
river system, and warned that fragile environments such as the Kimberley
in WA are being destroyed by erosion and overgrazing by cattle.
However, he stressed that environmental destruction can be averted and
reversed – at minimal cost and with increases in productivity
and profitability. It’s a matter of educating landowners, scientists
and political decision-makers that there is a better way to go to reconnect
with the land – and that it is actually achievable.
Addressing our growing climate crisis, Peter said “there’s
no doubt that there’s sufficient scientific information and evidence
today to prove that plants and water in the landscape are the most influential
things in climate conditions”. Australian landscapes have to have
“back-up mechanisms” because “invariably some unusual
set of climatic conditions will produce weather conditions that trigger
dramatic changes in a very short time”. If we observe the landscape,
its water flows on and beneath the soil surface, as well as how the
vegetation adapts and grows, we can not only learn to work with these
natural back-up mechanisms but survive the droughts and flooding rains.
We have to understand how water moves like an arterial flow through
and within the landscape, as well as the daily water cycle with its
heating and cooling effects. We also need to adopt practices like recycling
weeds rather than poisoning or burning them: not only is the carbon
residue transferred to the earth, but mulching a weed and digging in
the residue up above an outbreak can help control it. Indeed, as Peter
says, the land is “the most efficient recycling system”.
However, if we chop down trees in the mountains we create bare patches
and deep channels that stop the normal water cycle: trees at the top
form “a great big battering ram” in a big rain and go right
through a river system, taking out everything in their path. All this
can be avoided with more enlightened practices that use the vegetation
to strengthen natural systems on macro as well as a micro scales, down
to the roots.
The Q&A session covered the disastrous consequences of denuding
Tasmania’s old-growth forests, changing the course of rivers and
adopting monocultural practices as well as the benefits of planting
a variety of vegetation and working in co-operation to educate representatives
of government departments. Peter stressed that the power is with enlightened
land-carers to get the word out and influence the decision-makers. Many
believe this growing grassroots movement is the only hope for our future
– and the future of the landscape in all its diversity.
• More details on Peter Andrews’s Natural
Sequence Farming technique are set out in his book as well as on the
websites www.nsfarming.com.au
and www.naturalsequencefarming.com.
[From "Maple Street Co-op News", Apr/May 2007; published by
The Maple Street Co-operative Society Ltd, 37 Maple Street, Maleny,
Qld 4552, Australia, tel (07) 5494 2088, email maplest.co-op@serv.net.au,
website http://www.maplestreetco-op.com.au]