Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece:

Solstice Ritual

In making Melliodora home, we had transformed the land, hopefully for the better, but one corner was little changed. It had sheltered, fed and watered William Pinner and family for ten years in the 1860s, four decades before the land titles were created. We believe the hut burnt down in the 1906 bushfire that destroyed half the buildings in Hepburn. However the pear tree they planted, the largest I have seen in Victoria, was our emotional reason for buying the property in 1985. 

We have planted many more trees that may sustain future generations through tougher times, including over the boundary on the road reserves and on the common land ‘down the gully’. Each year we hold our summer solstice party in the shelter of the old pear tree’s boughs that currently host the second iteration of a tree house platform, and we cook food on the stone and brick heath of the Pinner dwelling that we unearthed in the spring of 1985. 

We are not a family much accustomed to ritual, but celebrating Summer Solstice under the pear tree, with the first flush of real abundance after the long hungry gap of cool climate spring and early summer, is one we have maintained for nearly four decades. And the grass is generally still green with the threat of bushfire still ahead. 

Summer solstice is our rejection of Christmas, not just because of its commercial contamination, but also because of the climatic absurdity of celebrating the Celtic pre-Christian winter solstice aspects of Christmas in midsummer or doing the same with the Middle Eastern birth of Christ story, when the three wise men travelled from the east (through desert) to honour the baby Jesus. Mid-winter in the arid Middle East is a benign time when water and grass for animals, and less than lethal weather, allow trade, marriages, pilgrimages and the like. This unacknowledged aspect of the Christmas story is something that Australians should understand, even if most of us are huddled around the coast in a handful of metropolitan cities. 

Reflection

While the intellectual recognition of Australian Indigenous stories of the seasons is beginning to make a dent in inappropriately transplanted seasonal traditions from the northern hemisphere, I see most white Australians yet to make the equally necessary translation of their own indigenous lineage. As pioneer permaculture teacher Robyn Francis discovered in her engagement with her local Bundjalung mob many decades ago, she needed to reconnect with her own Dreaming stories. For many of us whitey Australians in the cool temperate south of the continent, and many ‘Wog’ Australians in its vast Mediterranean climate belt, making sense of that ancestry is much easier than on the subtropical east coast where Robyn and others have crafted a fusion of European, Asian and Indigenous connection to Country and climate. 

With my diverse heritage of Scandinavian, Irish/English and Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe via a temporary transplant to Palestine, my gradual acknowledgement of these lineages has been as slow a process as my connection to Indigenous understandings of Country and climate, but one that grows stronger as I reach the later years of this mortal body. 

Millennial Drought oak dreaming

In the 2000s our direct exposure to lengthening drought and bushfire risk were issues every summer, and combined with large scale global issues, opinions and data points, I was responding on the ground as well as conceptually. At Melliodora, we saw the willows and poplars we had planted as fire-retardant trees to shade out blackberries, gorse and other fire-carrying pioneer plants, lose their leaves and even die. In 2008 I dug up and transplanted the first elm suckers, a tougher, more drought hardy fire-retardant tree that had the potential to shade out the pioneers and rehydrate the water courses, albeit at a slower pace than the willows and poplars. At the same time, Su’s herding and tethering the goats to consume and convert shrub and grass fuels in the gully intensified. This became a dance between ‘her goats’ and ‘my trees’, which were all palatable to goats and protected by an assortment of guards and strategies. 

Perhaps the most encouraging sign was that the direct sowings of acorns we had undertaken in the optimism of the early ’90s wet seasons started to show the promise of bearing fruit. While they had mostly sat sulking for 15 years in the long grass and blackberries, or beneath the few now-huge eucalypts we planted, they never showed any sign of drought stress. Miraculously, in 2008 as the drought became more intense, lots of the oaks sent out terminal shoots up to half a metre long. My hypothesis was that the slow, undisturbed taproot extension from the acorn had followed the cracks through the fractured and rotten basalt regolith to find the same water courses that the gold miners had sought 150 years earlier. While the gold had mostly gone to the treasury coffers in London, the oaks had started to turn the seasonally recharged ground water into golden leaves and acorns. We started pruning up the stunted shrub oaks, feeding our goats in the process.  Last year they were so strong we fenced the goats in to reduce the grass, blackberry and legumes while we lopped oak, cherry plum and wild apple branches for them to eat. 

Engaging with oaks has been a significant part of my journey with trees since the early days of permaculture. Tree crop species that feed animals, (and if necessary, people), which are drought hardy and tough in a range of soils are worth the effort to establish, even if that establishment is harder than for eucalypts and pines that don’t provide food or fodder. The fact that oaks are fire-retardant rather than fire-enhancing was important in the current climate, let alone predicted future ones. That there are around 500 species of oak worldwide, and nearly 100 have been planted in Australia, gives lots of potential for oaks to be a big part of silvopastoral systems that not only survive, but thrive, in a drying climate (or any other climatic shift) is a big plus.

There are both evergreen and deciduous oaks, but it’s not simple. Some notionally deciduous species such as Quercus canariensis are well adapted to our Mediterranean climates in being semi-evergreen; not so good for winter solar gain to gardens but very useful in the broader landscape. More frustrating are the ‘deciduous’ species that tend to hold their dead leaves until pushed off by the sprouting new growth. While unwanted winter shade might be a problem for passive solar houses, PV panels and gardens, the implications in the larger landscape was something that I considered worthy of focus if we were serious about making our rural landscapes resilient in the face of increasingly intense drought and, especially, fire. While oak leaves are much less flammable than gum leaves, they are relatively slow to decompose compared with other deciduous tree species, so trees shedding dry leaves in spring is not desirable.

More problematic is that this characteristic of holding leaves is not restricted to pin oaks and other more ornamental species, but is widely seen in seed collected from older plantings dominated by the ubiquitous English oak (Q. rober). Inspection of nursery rows of one year old trees from the same seed batch in winter shows some individuals bare, others with retained dead leaves and still others exhibiting the semi-evergreen form. At Melliodora and down the gully we are now in the process of marking the ‘leaf retainers’ for future lopping to keep them smaller as fodder pollards while allowing the autumn leaf shedders and semi-evergreen individuals to grow out and so dominate the mature forest thus maximising fuel reduction by winter decomposition.

Reflection

While these research and development findings from our work might seem of marginal import in the large climate story, they illustrate the way adaptation is built into permaculture from first principles but without the huge moral hazards associated with the endless debate about mitigation vs adaptation that has characterised the climate change story. 

Wind in the willows 

The waning of the salinity story in this region, combined with disappointing growth rates and returns from plantations, has reduced the motivation and incentives to accelerate tree planting in central Victoria since the 1980s. Perversely, nativism ideology coming out of universities and government agencies has rallied some semblance of community acceptance, if not wholehearted support, for using heavy machinery and herbicide to destroy fire-retardant tree corridors along our waterways. In our communities and further afield, most of the folk in wholehearted support of these stream makeovers are the same people most concerned about the unfolding climate emergency. 

Beyond defending Spring Creek Community Forest from this vandalism, I did my bit towards engaging in a more holistic discourse around managing our rural landscape for current and future values with an eye to drier and more fire-prone landscapes (whether that resulted from anthropogenic carbon emissions, sun cycle activity or simply a collapse in publicly funded and volunteer bushfire control due to any number of threats to current systems we take for granted). 

Submissions to regional Catchment Plans, presentations, tours, essays, press releases, web publications and even TV appearances were all part of my advocacy for learning from, rather than destroying, nature’s best moderators of streamflow and riparian microclimates. Peter Andrews is perhaps the best known advocate of willows and other so called ‘weeds’ in rehabilitation of our damaged streamcourses, but many other dissidents have been quietly working away to ameliorate the botanical cleansing of our waterways. Beginning with research for his PhD in Spring Creek in the late 1990s (Organic matter dynamics in willow and eucalypt lined central Victorian streams), colleague Michael Wilson’s quiet methodical science has been ongoing. He has worked at the Murray Darling Basin Commission in Canberra, and supervised half a dozen more PhDs on willow ecology, mostly in central Victoria. This work has probably contributed to moderating the war on weeds as much or more than the strident critiques and radical defence of willows by other dissidents. 

While the potentially wrong science of salinity in central Victoria had few bad consequences, I regard the war on willows as the greatest act of environmental vandalism done in the name of the environment. However I have long since learnt not to expect any acknowledgement, let alone apology, from the authorities that have used scarce taxpayer environmental dollars to destroy nature’s healing of the damage we have done to our waterways over the previous two centuries.

Back in the late 1990s when I thought the climate change and oil peak drivers of energy descent would sweep away botanical nativism, I underestimated the conceptual and institutional disconnect that could allow contradictory public policies to flourish under the same regime. Within the larger climate debate, it has been common for environmental commentators and activists to point to the disconnects between policies that seek to mitigate CO2 emissions and those that support further large-scale exploitation of new CO2 sources, with their even worse associated methane emissions. More rarely do those critiques include the obvious contradictions inherent in green growth on a finite planet. It is easy to point the finger at society at large for its inability to resolve these conflicting objectives. 

However few mainstream environmentalists have acknowledged, let alone critiqued, the closer-to-home contractions in the much smaller field of catchment and environmental management, where current policies pursued by Landcare facilitators and conservation land managers are in direct contradiction to the climate story that they all profess to believe. Apart from the no-brainer of valuing rather than destroying fire-retardant corridors through our rural and urban landscapes for our current climate, let alone projected futures, there is an even stronger climate change case for protecting willows. All the models, and for quite a long time the evidence, including our own experience, suggest an increasing incidence of extreme rainfall and runoff events. 

While the east coast Australian riparian vegetation includes tree and shrub species well adapted to armouring stream courses for extreme flood regimes, the southern Australian riparian systems do not, reflecting the more gentle rainfall regimes. However we have the temperate world’s best riparian tree for dissipating destructive flood water as our main coloniser of our bare and degraded rural and urban waterways. The willow should thus be celebrated as a gift from Mother Nature and our forebears rather than being poisoned and bulldozed. That my long-standing personal perception became backed by science made little dent in the nativists’ belief that their expenditure of taxpayers’ money on diesel and herbicide is somehow an appropriate expression of both climate mitigation and adaptation.

When the willow destruction came to our local community in the peak of the millennial drought we reacted strongly, but it was the destruction of heritage listed rock walls from the gold era that stopped excavators. Heritage Victoria threatened the North Central Catchment Management Authority with court if they didn’t stop. We protested at a Landcare facilitators conference being organised at a local venue by the very same people responsible for the environmental vandalism. It was fascinating to observe well-meaning greenies arriving at the event and seeing their Landcare work being challenged as ‘Land Abuse’. As the event proceeded, Rob Youl, one of the pioneers of Landcare in Victoria came out of the venue with sandwiches for us protesters and declared that I should have been invited inside giving the other side of what he thought should be a respectful debate about willows. 

Very rarely over those years, or since, did I have any committed nativist admit to me that there might be a conflict between trying (but mostly failing) to restore indigenous vegetation regimes maladapted to emerging conditions, and allowing wild nature (in the form of willows) to show us pathways of no, and low, cost adaptation to climate change. Such an admission of conflict of interests in the tiny home territory of stream management by environmentalists, might at least lead to some humility and acceptance of society at large stumbling along trying to resolve different values, interests and perspectives about how we should live and govern ourselves for positive futures. Instead, we mostly saw barefaced denial that there is any conflict between the climate mitigation and adaptation agendas and the radical pursuit of eucalypt dominated revegetation projects. 

While this deep psychosocial dysfunction within mainstream environmentalism was not in itself a reason for me to discard my strengthening belief in a more rapid onset of climate change to a drier climate, it did increase the sense that my celebration of nature’s restorative abundances was out of kilter with the environmental orthodoxy and perhaps even a sizable section of the permaculture movement. This was, perhaps, a foretaste of what would later occur with Covid (see my essays around this theme, for instance ‘Pandemic Brooding: Can the Permaculture movement survive the first severe test of the energy descent future?’)  

Wind in the Eucalypts

During the Millennial Drought we experienced the results of localised bands of intense damaging cold winds rather than the firestorms we had planned for. While the sheltered nature of Melliodora, our well-designed and constructed buildings, and our care in planting very large and fast-growing trees gave us good reason to feel secure, a windstorm that ripped through nearby Eganstown and a similar storm that cut a swath through parts of Fryers Forest gave us cause to rethink. In the case of Fryers Forest, I spent time chainsawing debris from fire trails and remember seeing how the wind had screwed the tops off solid Red Box trees, which have one of the most high strength engineering grade woods anywhere in the world. At Eganstown, the much larger but less strong gum, messmate and peppermint eucalypts were felled and twisted like broken fiddle sticks. 

Having recently invested a lot of effort and love in building the Teahouse, Su began rethinking the merit in leaving the street edge Blue Gum shelter trees that towered over the Teahouse. These were planted decades before to block the cold SW winds across the whole site. I explained why and how the trees were not in danger of blowing down and that I believed the roof structure of the Teahouse was strong enough to deflect a blow from one of the large limbs should one fall. Our careful management, including thinning and tree surgery, had maintained the trees in great condition but my assurances were also countered by the incredible noise of the huge leathery blue gum leaves in strong wind. While the trees won out over prudence and fear, we always discussed the issue with successive occupants of that beautiful space, and in the case of unusually strong SW or SE wind we offer a night at the main house as an option. 

Rationalising the Blue Gums

I suppose I should backtrack a little to explain how I came to plant such large fire-enhancing evergreen trees in what is essentially a residential street in the first place.

Early on in our connection with neighbours, I occasionally gave some help to an older Hungarian woman who lived alone in the house overlooking Melliodora. She would often summon my help. I think, in her understanding, we must have been Aussie peasants because we lived in a mudbrick house. She owned a half-acre block with eucalypt trees opposite our driveway that provided great shelter to Melliodora from cold SW winds, but complying with the council fire clean up notices was problematic because none of the local contractors were prepared to slash the block with so many cut off stumps and rocks. I tried to explain the problem, but she was convinced she needed to cut down all the trees and before long a contractor was at work clearing the block of a beautiful stand of Yellow Box and Peppermint. In my frustration I destroyed my relationship with my devout Catholic neighbour by declaring what she was doing was sinful. I did gain some satisfaction that the local contractor had thought the trees were all Peppermints, an easy pushover with his tractor/backhoe but the defiant Yellow Box with their deep and strong roots turned the job from profit to loss.

With our shelter gone, I did a rethink about our extensive orchard needing fast-growing shelter along our side of the street. Given the water, gas, sewer and, most importantly, overhead power and telephone lines were on the other side of the street, and there were no houses at that time that would be shaded by evergreen trees, no matter how tall, I felt I had free reign to plant fast growing and tall shelter trees on our side. My small tree nursery included some Blue Gums that I had been given as leftover donations from a tree planting project at the Commonground community in Seymour. The trees were originally surplus stock from the then Australian Pulp Paper Mill specifically selected for vigorous growth and density of fibre for paper production. I had potted the Speedling tubestock into milk cartons the previous year and they were now a half a metre tall. I had no intention of planting such large, water hungry, fire prone trees within our (private) property, and our other main tree planting area to the north, down the gully on public land, was also not so wise a location being in our fire sector. I instead figured they might be good to pass on to someone for farm shelter planting. I imagined this genetic stock was probably capable of matching the record for growth rate of Australian grown plantation wood at 45 cubic metres per hectare per annum, a mind-boggling amount of biomass, but still well exceeded by eucalypts in Brazil where short rotation pulpwood plantations yield 70 cubic metres per hectare per annum.

I looked at the Blue Gums that needed to go in the ground before they outgrew the milk cartons and figured they would be perfect for sheltering the whole property from the SW winds. But planting them would break all my own rules (and rage) against large fast grown eucalypts in residential areas due to their winter shade, less than adequate summer shade, fire hazard and competition with other plants.

I reasoned that although the SW was a secondary bushfire sector through wind change in bushfire, any fire would be downslope and have to cross the whole town. Further, if I planted them at high density, thinned and pruned then, being free of lower branches would allow all the fire-prone ribbon bark to fall to the ground to compost rather than hanging in the trees. Consequently, the trees would one day provide good structural timber if they were straight and well-formed without branching. I worked out what I reasoned was a workable logging plan to fell the trees diagonally up the street so as to avoid the need to climb and block down the canopies.

Further, because the road verge was an embankment filled across a gully when the street was built, I figured the roots of the trees would be plunging down through that fill to the moist clays of the gully and thus would be far less likely to damage the pavement or to blow out of the ground in wet windy conditions. 

Beyond all these rationalisations for planting, I thought the Blue Gums might have some impact in blocking the downslope flow of cold air creating frosts, that had proved to be the greatest downside in Melliodora’s location. Beyond this aspect of microclimate design from Permaculture One, I figured the Blue Gums, along with other trees on the Olver St road reserve, including a large mature Yellow Box, would form a north facing arc of shiny leaves reflecting sunlight into our fruit and nut groves as Mollison suggested in Permaculture Two.

Although my optimism about the degree to which it might be possible to modify climate through planting design had been moderated by observation and experience over the preceding decade, I thought it would be good to give it a go. Maybe I was also influenced by an element of sunk cost fallacy, having potted up the trees and having nowhere for them to go. 

A decade after we planted them, we had a visit from a local tree surgeon who was very knowledgeable and also keen to tell others his views. Standing on the site of the current Melliodora studio looking south, the Blue Gums were already dominating the view. ‘Who planted those bloody trees? I spent half my career cutting them out of Melbourne backyards planted by stupid people who didn’t know any better. Grow like the hammers of hell and then die after 35 years’. 

I replied that I knew lots of Blue Gums around central Victoria that were over a century old but admitted that I had planted them. After a pause I added that ‘I was worse than all those ignorant folk because I understood how they would grow, and I still did it. But I had worked out the logging plan before I planted the trees.” 

“Oh yeah, what is it?” he replied. 

I explained my plan, to which he pointed out the upper horizontal limbs on the trees would be up to half a metre diameter and that they would punch massive holes in the bitumen pavement.

Responding to past and current climate change 

At Melliodora we are primarily horticulturists managing irrigated gardens and fruit and nut orchards. While we are moderately well set up, the infrastructure for, and the practicalities of, irrigation are my main summer occupation. Those greener and fire-retardant vegetation systems are of course an integral part of our facing the fire threat every summer, with or without climate change. The driest month of the year for us is March, but when we came to central Victoria I assumed January and February would be the driest months. Sometimes we found the dry autumn extended to April, which was good for our efforts in growing marginal tree crops like figs that need a long dry ripening season without rain, which causes the fruit to ferment. So you might say our figs planted in the late 1980s were a hedge for a drier hotter climate. 

But those dry sunny autumns were not good for pastoral farming, the dominant land use of southern Australian where the ‘autumn break’ (of the summer drought) germinated and grew an annual grass/clover stand adequate to sustain stock through the colder winter period without the need for feeding hay. Instead, in central Victoria since the 1980s, a green drought of short winter grass was the normal pattern, with perhaps three or four classic autumn breaks over those decades. Something that important to the dominant land use that it had a name was obviously once more common. However that change in the climate was before we got here and so is unlikely to be caused by GHG emissions (according to the models). 

Well what does the data say? The average rainfall in Victoria is so variable that it is hard to eyeball the very slight downward trend data since 1900. Even the autumn rainfall is so variable that without the data trend line it’s only those more connected to nature through necessity, like sheep farmers or tree crop enthusiasts growing marginal crops out of some scientific curiosity and climate change hedging, who might notice. Confirmation between personal experience and data does help but we should always remember how we are subject to confirmation bias. Apart from individual confirmation bias, what about whole of society confirmation bias? Supposedly, science uncorrupted by money and power in pursuit of pure truth protects us from such hazards. I’m not so sure that has ever been the case, but let’s not go there just yet.

Growing up in the suburbs of Western Australia (WA) I was insulated from the substantial climate change that happened across the wheatbelt, those desolate landscapes we travelled through to arrive at relatively green and verdant Denmark for our summer holidays. From the great clearing of trees for grain production after World War II until the 1970s, the rainfall across the WA wheatbelt decreased around 20% and the waterflows to reservoirs that sustained Perth and its metropolitan area fell 50% as a result. The growth of Perth since then has been sustained by groundwater aquifers and energy intensive seawater desalination (since there were virtually no more suitable dam sites in the south west of the continent). Many of the aquifers are being depleted just like our oil and gas wells and, like many places, the water is fossil water that accumulated in past climates.

Water Wars 

During the millennial drought, the water wars around the Murray Darling Basin intensified. Locally, some large potato farmers being squeezed by contracts with global processors were irrigating 24/7 out of bores with meters running backwards and inspectors, who went to school with those same farmers, were turning a blind eye. Our local golf course ‘cleaned out’ their storage dams and in the process, total storage quadrupled. We got no water from that part of the catchment for several years as their big pumps pushed the water around their expanded network of dams. No problem for us because the hard surface runoff from the residential area was more than enough to always fill and overflow our 1 megalitre irrigation dam many times over, and generally before midwinter, even in the driest years. 

On the larger scale, the billions of dollars spent on the national Murray Darling Basin Plan involved stealing water across catchments to sustain regional towns such as Bendigo and Ballarat, and efficiency upgrades from earth channels that justified such action (ignoring the fact that we were losing all the environmental values from wetlands created by those leaking channels). Worse than that, CSIRO climate scientists were commissioned to say exactly how much the flows in the Basin would reduce (or increase) using their models. They were honest enough to say they couldn’t give a reliable estimate, so the state and federal planners decided to assume the 120 year flow rate records from the past would be the basis of the plan, despite the consensus of the scientists being for a drying climate with substantially reduced flows. 

Locally, fringe hydrologists calculated that like in WA, reduction in flow rates would be many times any reduction in rainfall. In fact, for the Eppalock storage dam on the Campaspe River their modelling suggested a 10% reduction in catchment rainfall leads to a 90% reduction in inflows, creating a ‘stranded asset’ from a structure built by previous generations to drought-proof the country. 

In the Goldfields region on small bush properties not too different to that one I looked at in Maryborough decades previously (see ‘This tired brown land’ in the first essay in this series), lots of people gave up on their gardens, saving what water their dams held, if any, for livestock and firefighting. Many bought trucked town water to replenish their tanks. But ironically I saw evidence that well-designed farm dams could prove more reliable than the big public reservoirs if rainfall stayed down, especially if there was any increase in storm intensity which, on the hard setting and sometimes water repellent goldfields soil, could see flows to dams well before soils saturated or even become moist below the surface. 

On the other hand, in huge reservoirs like Eppalock on the Campaspe River and Cairn Curran on the Loddon River, dry creek beds of sand and gravel, alluvial floodplains and water-slowing vegetation could see the lower flatter catchment areas using all the water before it reached the reservoir. Even at Fryers Forest we noticed how our smaller, header hillside dams received flows from relatively small catchments while the 300 hectare catchment of the Lake could absorb many Megalitres of runoff if all the sand and gravel filled waterholes were bone dry, leaving nothing to reach the Lake (see Part 5 in this essay series). 

Despite the Fryers Lake failing to fully refill after the flood repairs before the drought intensified, and the leakage problems due to the highly dispersible soils in two of the water supply dams, the systems we established at Fryers Forest certainly helped the new mostly ex-urban residents survive and dig in for better times. The Fryers Lake was a mecca for friends and family struggling to not feel the need to migrate to somewhere better. In 2007 when teaching in New Zealand I was asked when I was moving to the Land of the Long White Cloud from that desiccating and burning continent. I said that although I appreciated NZ as paradise on Earth I asserted that I was committed to our little corner of the world for better and worse. In any case, I suggested NZ would, in all likelihood, be overrun by the western world’s elites who would become their local feudal lords while in central Victoria we might have to put up with just our own narcissistic elites running local fiefdoms. 

Assisting indigenous nature to adapt

Beyond the cell of common-sense land management we had established at Fryers Forest, I was finding I had strong differences with environmental orthodoxies that seemed to be immune not only to reasoned argument, but simple common-sense informed by direct experience. 

If we were serious about adaptation to presumed climate change, then thinning trees is one of the simplest, most effective and ‘no regrets’ strategies we could be applying in our dense regrowth forests that burn so hot in intense crown fires. Why not just make efforts to nudge those forests towards maturity with fewer, wide-spaced trees? I hoped it might be a possible trigger to more grassy herbaceous groundcover and less in the way of eucalypt coppice and dense understory shrubs and so recover some version of the indigenous landscape structure that we had all but lost. Even if this later goal was beyond us thinning dense regrowth forests, it at least gives the retained trees much greater chances of surviving drought stress in a drying climate and delaying the need for colonisation by species from further north.

The fact that we could create livelihoods from thinning the forest, using the wood to provide much needed dispatchable power for the planned renewable energy grid, only seemed to shift scepticism to alarm because of the fear by most environmentalists that we will flip and feed our forests into the furnace to ‘keep the lights on’, with it all branded ‘green power’. So instead of modest dispatchable power from small, localised wood powerplants helping keep our forests safe and feeding the grid, just when the price was high, most environmentalists seemed to prefer that we buy more and more solar panels made by global corporations from resources extracted out of the Earth elsewhere. 

Reflection

This thinking was before many understood that a majority renewable grid would require 

• dispatchable power back up (such as gas or wood), 
• massive storage in pumped hydro or hoped for giant batteries (that have the downside of catching fire) and/or 
• a huge expansion in grid interconnection, possibly across the continent.

Currently, there is a scramble to do all three, but wood is still off the agenda and increasingly demonised not just by radical greenies, but also by the globalist health and climate elites. Perhaps it is true that without a cultural transformation, corporate capitalism will do exactly what environmentalists fear and so the rational place for wood is not as a ‘climate solution’ but as part of the resistance in our rural hinterlands to the globalist technologic all-electric enclosure sold as ‘the climate solution’. 

The strong belief by most environmentalists, and even ecologists, on ‘lock-up and leave’ policies for our forests, while putting all resources into the renewable energy transition, seemed absurd and ceded the territory of solving climate change to technologists and their corporate masters. While some ecologists recognised the need for species to be able to move with climate change, the idea of actually assisting that process was seen as a radical and risky intervention in nature, at risk of creating new environmental weeds, a concept I had long critiqued as having no scientific basis, just like the agricultural weed concept it builds on. 

People are always planting and some of those plantations have definitely conserved species that in projected climate change would be in trouble. For example the ornamental and widely planted Red Flowering Gum from the extreme south west cool heathy forests of WA had a very small natural range, and thus was vulnerable in a drier and hotter climate. Cootamundra Wattle (Acacia baileyana), on the other hand, is well-adapted to a wide range of environments close to its three tiny origin sites near Cootamundra. It is now widely naturalised around nearby Canberra and right through the Box Ironbark biome and beyond where it is widely demonised as an environmental weed. 

In trying to talk about these issues on Permaculture Design Courses, both our own and others where I was a regular guest, I would ask what could and would people do if they really believed responding to the climate predictions was important? Part of the problem is the mindset shift from a dogged, and I would say myopic, focus on ‘mitigation’ followed by a floundering trying to understand let alone implement ‘adaptation’ and further, the sense that somehow adaptation undermined mitigation. I saw it more in terms of modest ‘minimal regrets’ insurance strategies. 

For example at Melliodora where E. melliodora (Australia’s most important honey tree) grows as a tall forest tree at the cool, wet end of its thousand kilometre range, I had observed the only seed regeneration occurs in wet summers, a rare event in its southern range, but not a problem for a tree than can live for many hundreds of years and coppice repeatedly from the stump. Nevertheless, if climate change to drier hotter climates, but with increased but erratic and unreliable summer rain, was even a low chance, wouldn’t conservation policies and funding be better focused on establishing cells of Box Ironbark flora in the cooler, wetter Gum Messmate forests of the Great Divide before those forests are hit by repeated cycles of climate change driven bushfires that will inevitably degrade them back to shrublands of pioneer species?

At Fryers Forest, despite many of my visions not being realised, I felt positive that in a community of mostly ex-urban greenies, we were greenies with chainsaws. Although forestry at Fryers has not been managed in a way to create livelihoods, or necessarily been a paragon of ecological forestry, at least there is common agreement that cutting down trees is necessary to ‘bring on the forest’, reduce fire hazard, provide sustainable sources of fuel and structural materials, and nudge nature closer to the state of balance that existed under Indigenous management.

Bushfire Redux

The 2008/2009 summer culminated in Black Saturday and although we had no fires in our region, I had never experienced weather like that, especially because I missed the Ash Wednesday fires in Victoria. Our weather station was showing 8% humidity and 42oC with wind gusts at our very sheltered site over 40km/hr. On rotation outside, I felt exhilarated and alert but on returning to the house at a comfortable 26 degrees I realised how much moisture I had been losing to keep cool outside once the massive sweating was no longer evaporating. I began implementing aspects of our fire plan that I had never tested in such conditions including blocking the gutters and running our fire pumps at full pressure in strong wind. Later I was amazed to know how many friends were sleeping that day or watching films, ignoring the weather event. 

Elsewhere, just like after Ash Wednesday, I knew people whose places were destroyed and their lives transformed. I saw the aftermath and became educated by community activist and permie colleague Daryl Taylor about how surviving the fire was one thing, but surviving the recovery run by a myriad of government departments was another. I wrote my ‘Bushfire Resilient Landscapes and Communities’ paper focusing on our own fire vulnerable towns of Daylesford and Hepburn as a case study and travelled to the fire affected communities as an invited speaker including sharing a platform with the inimitable Joan Webster. Daryl’s experience, and its corroboration by survivors and researchers of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in the US, suggested to me that the bureaucratic dysfunction and disaster capitalism that springs up following disasters is mostly inherent to these events, rather than stemming from the actions of people with bad intent. This was suggested in Rebecca Solnit’s historical review of natural disaster responses in America over the previous century, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009).

Reflection

A decade later, fires and floods along the East Coast gave more stories of this process, and I came to realise that beyond my longstanding focus on the extremes in weather and climate as being way more important than averages, the impact of any weather event is about a lot more than weather and climate. The psychosocial, economic and geopolitical dimensions of these crises could be far more significant than the meteorological or even ecological effects.

How do we measure natural disasters? 

I had long argued that there is considerable difference between increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and increasing adverse impacts on nature and humanity.

There is a diversity of complex meteorological parameters that can be used to assess the severity of drought, including rainfall deficit, wind, temperature, frost and evaporation rates that all affect plant growth, water supply, livestock and people. But land management stress going into and during a drought, due to economic and societal factors, are far more powerful in determining how severe the consequences of the meteorological stresses are.

For example, the Millennial Drought in southern Australia was arguably at least as severe as and longer-lasting than the 1982/83 drought, but the bare country was not as extensive nor were there the great dust storms of that earlier drought, at least in our region. Stubble mulch cropping, and better grazing management to destock before animals die eating nothing but dirt, are just two of the factors that powerfully shape the experience and real on-ground effects of drought. The ability to move or sell livestock to distant countries not so affected and import feed supplies from groundwater-irrigated pastures that didn’t exist in the past has radically reduced the severe impacts seen in earlier droughts.

On a smaller scale, our own experience of feeding dairy goats through drought without resorting to purchased feed was possible in part because the ‘living haystack’ function of our tree fodder, a small-scale example of silvopastural systems that have huge potential worldwide to reduce vulnerability to drought and adapt to climate change. But unlike the fossil fuel and fossil water dependent strategies, silvopasture is one of the most powerful strategies globally for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Similar dynamics apply to all other forms of natural disaster, but just as modern transport, communications and technology have served to reduce the impact of natural disasters, population growth and development can radically increase the impact. A commonly cited example is poor people moving into more mountainous regions to live and grow crops, increasing exposure to landslips or active volcanos. Similarly, development, including whole towns and cities on floodplains, makes for future disasters with or without climate change. Lismore in northern NSW is a classic example of a town that local Indigenous people have always recognised as not a place for settlement and that insurers are now refusing to cover.

The severity of the impact can be directly related to the level of development. The clearing of mangrove systems has taken out one of the best buffers against the severe impact of undersea earthquake driven tsunamis. Another common traditional pattern of land use in the equatorial tropics is coconut palms as the main and sometimes only vegetation on low-lying sandy beaches. A few palm-thatch shelters and fishing boats were the only infrastructure, while villages were always further back on better soil. A tsunami can sweep through such coastal commons doing minimal damage, and even have people survive clinging to the palm trees. In contrast, coastal development for tourism has created hard infrastructure of concrete, brick and steel, as well as lots of vehicles, which when hit by the force of a powerful tsunami cause immense damage and death. A particularly dramatic example of how vegetation change and development increased the damage was the massive tsunami in 2004 that affected Indonesia and other countries around the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 230,000 people. Likewise, in 2009 two friends of ours were holidaying in Samoa when the tsunami hit. One died in the beachfront cabin while the other was severely injured. 

A more banal example of how financial impacts of natural disasters can be quite unrelated to the severity of the event, was seeing a list of Australia’s worst natural disasters that included a hailstorm that hit the affluent northern suburbs of Sydney in 1999. It made the list because it was the largest financial loss, at $2.3 billion. Quite a lot of the damage was to expensive imported cars, which were written off due being dented, when in fact many of those cars were perfectly driveable and were sold on. That disaster was trivial compared with many others, but it shows that the huge book value of assets, especially coastal real estate, leads to massive financial disasters, and potentially the failure of the global reinsurance system, without any measurable change in meteorological or other natural factors.

Reflection

I never saw this aspect of natural disasters fleshed out in public discourse as the climate change story gathered speed, but it was always a moderator on how I interpreted the early suggestions that climate change was beginning to make natural disasters more frequent and severe. 

Friends recently returned from Northern India and other parts of the Himalayas report that the massive expansion of road construction is associated with huge increases in rocky debris being pushed into fast-flowing mountain rivers, followed by regular landslips after heavy rain in the geologically young and unstable mountains. In the past, small trails for mules and other animals, or single lane roads for buses, were the only traffic and the rate of landslips and debris flows into rivers was more modest. 

Locals attribute the noticeable increase in flooding downstream to this debris burden that spews out onto adjacent alluvial fields and settlements, while the outside university-trained NGO staff typically attribute the floodings to climate change driven changes in weather. One interpretation is informed by grounded observation and multi-generational knowledge, while the other is informed by theory detached from any reading of the landscape. One sees the problem as a direct consequence of the drive by central governments and corporations to put in place the highway infrastructure to exploit the mountain region resources while the other points to abstract global problems mired in a tragedy of the commons and seeks funding to support the victims of climate change. 

It’s fairly clear to me how the solution of climate change aware development is gradually and more rapidly becoming the problem it seeks to solve.