Feral Cats And The Trickle Down Effect

If Tasmanians were really serious about sustainable environmental management the might consider tackling the 'feral cat' problem. With trees dying at various times and in various bio-regions it is very clear that something is out of kilter in the natural environment. And most of all the 'problem' will ultimately come back in large measure to humanity's impact upon the current and evolving ecosystem.

Given that the 'blame game' has to begin somewhere and typically as far away from 'human impacts' as possible, one can pick almost any point in the spectrum to start  doing some research.  The fashionable thing to do these days is to call out 'climate change'. Usefully it comes with a convenient amount of 'political cargo' that all too often can be claimed to originate 'somewhere else' and/or with 'someone else'.

Speculatively, let's throw the feral cat issue into the ring in regard to the current tree decline events being experienced in Tasmania. It's unlikely to be the whole problem but its equally unlikely that feral cats are playing no part at all.

There has been speculation that insect predation on 'White Gums (E. viminalus)' and feasibly that could be a factor. Indeed it was in the Tasmanian Midlands but there possums were also predating the trees and the trees were under drought stress. However, after a somewhat wet winter it's feasible to exclude insects and drought working together. Nonetheless. the consequent flourishes of new growth plus a relatively warm summer might turn out to be good for the insects but in ecosystems there is always something waiting opportunistically in the wings. Here that might well be 'the birds'  and it has been noted by some that the numbers are down.

So which birds are missing? How many compared to some known number in the past? What factors are impacting upon what populations? What are the knock-on effects of any perceived change? What landscapes are the birds being lost from? And there will be even more questions arising from these.

If feral cats are thrown into the equation, what do we know, that's actually know, about their population level? Is there a correlation between 'cat numbers' and 'bird numbers'?  If so why so? If so what action to be taken if any?

Indeed, who is asking such questions and in  what context? It is speculated upon, based upon anecdotal evidence, that feral cats are having an enormously negative impact upon 'cultural landscapes'. Just what are the impacts and on what evidence?

The research task here is non-trivial and 'citizen scientists'  with a modicum of literacy and numeracy might well play a role IF they weren't sidelined by 'the professionals'. The Southern Indian State of Kerela is an exemplar where 'citizen science' was employed for such a purpose. In fact Kerela can lay claim to being the home of LANDliteracy and mainly so because of the region's very high literacy levels that has facilitated the region's high levels of 'social activism'.

All that aside it is well known that if there is a lot of something in a cultural landscape it is possible to remove it, often extinguish it, via the mechanism of 'unsustainable harvesting/exploitation'. It's a tried and proven methodology and should feral cats be implicated in 'TREE DECINE' harvesting them for a profit is a potential way forward.

 

Forget any notion of a subsidised eradication program and especially so in Tasmania. It was tried with foxes in Tasmania and not a fox was found until the program looked like it might be abandoned. More to the point there was a parallel refusal to address the feral cat issue as, according to some, "that'd kick-in when the fox thing is over". That's possibly a bit cynical but there may be some truth in it?

REFERENCES: 

• Literacy Campaign, Land Literacy and Watershed Development
Subrata Sinha and Arun Ghosh Economic and Political Weekly

Vol. 32, No. 6 (Feb. 8-14, 1997), pp. 280-288 ... https://www.jstor.org/stable/4405071?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

• LANDliteracy Links ... http://raynorman7250.blogspot.com.au/p/landliteracy-links.html

Stormwater Management Needs A Serious Rethink

Currently in Australia there has been more rainfall than for a decade or so and consequently waterways near urban areas are experiencing unacceptable  levels of water contamination as a consequence of storm water runoff and its mismanagement. 

The inescapable factor being that urban spaces by their very nature are covered by hard surfaces – roofs, roads, footpaths etc. – which inhibits water being able to soak into the landscape in the way it would pre-urbanization.  To compound the problem the hard surfaces are contaminated by all manner of pollutants – chemical deposits, animal fascias etc. 

All this finds its way into water ways and typically very quickly unlike in pre-urban landscapes where water finds its way to rivers steams etc. much more slowly and typically filtered into and/or by the landscape. 

As a matter of principle stormwater's progress to water ways needs to be a slow as possible. However in urban spaces planning tends to put strategies in place that speeds the water up towards it being deposited into natural waterways – typically loaded with contaminants of all kinds.

CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE

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Taking Plastics OUT Of The Waste Stream To Build Communities

CLICK HERE TO WATCH

NB Launceston Council – Sewerage Can be Managed better!!!

The Living Machine: an ecological approach to poo

Tafline Laylin

8th June, 2010

By mimicking the purifying behaviour of wetland ecosystems we can deal with our sewage using one quarter of the energy, and a fraction of the smell...

Most wastewater treatment plants squat on the seedy outskirts of towns. Drab, energy intensive and fetid, they can use harsh chemicals and are often ineffective against certain pathogens.

For decades scientists have been investigating healthier and smarter alternatives to conventional treatment systems. In the 1940s and 50s, despite the belief then that higher plants can’t withstand polluted waters, Dr Käthe Seidel from The Max Planck Society discovered that bulrushes don’t just survive polluted conditions, they restore them. This earned her the mocking moniker ‘Bulrush Kate’, but did not prevent Seidel from developing a system of basins containing plants that transformed polluted water into a cleaner end product. In time, though, it became clear that microorganisms, not plants, are the heavyweight cleaners.

Following in Seidel’s footsteps, the ecologist H.T. Odum created guiding principles for the emergent fields of ecological design and ecological engineering. These principles were based on his conviction that a sustainable future depends on our ability to incorporate nature’s closed-loop, systemic design into our own. Dr John Todd picked up the baton in the early 1970s. After experimenting with ecologically engineered solutions to various other applications, including architecture, aquaculture, and food production, the Canadian biologist developed what he called the ‘Living Machine’. This is a biologically sophisticated, low energy wastewater treatment system that mimics natural purifying mechanisms such as marshes and wetlands. The machine is also beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that black and grey water could be treated under our noses and we would bend down for a whiff.

A first at Findhorn .... CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Bill Mollison – Let's Not Forget

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Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison (4 May 1928 – 24 September 2016) was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. He is referred to as the "father of permaculture."^{[2][n 1]} Permaculture (a portmanteau of "permanent agriculture")^[3] is an integrated system of ecological and environmental design which Mollison co-developed with David Holmgren, and which they together envisioned as a perennial and sustainable form of agriculture. In 1974, Mollison began his collaboration with Holmgren, and in 1978 they published their book Permaculture One, which introduced this design system to the general public. Mollison founded The Permaculture Institute in Tasmania, and created the education system to train others under the umbrella of permaculture.^{[4][n 2]} This education system of "train the trainer", utilized through a formal Permaculture Design Course and Certification (PDC), has taught thousands of people throughout the world how to grow food and be sustainable using permaculture design principles.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison

Copy of archived feature article from theage.com.au:

Making a mess of his life

February 12, 2004

Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture, believes there should be awards for untidy towns, writes Glenn Mulcaster.

After 25 years wandering the world exhorting people to live close to the food that they grow, Bill Mollison has come home. The founder of the permaculture movement, Mollison was born in Stanley, in Tasmania's north-west, and returned about three years ago after 15 years based in northern New South Wales. He has recently settled on a seven-hectare farm at Sisters Creek between Stanley and Wynyard - both recipients of tidy town awards - and, in characteristic fashion, has set about making a mess.

Amid the neat rows of potatoes, onions and beans of the neighbouring farms, Mollison is creating his own jungle, planting rainforest species and "production trees" to provide food and shelter for grazing animals, as well as feeding his household.

Visitors must dodge geese, ducks and rabbits to get to his door.

Mollison does not believe in tidy farming - nor in chemicals nor soil tilling. Instead, he encourages communities to plant low-maintenance, high-yielding food gardens, using pigs and poultry to fertilise and condition the soil.

"As for tidy towns," he says, "Shit. There should be awards for untidy towns."

At 75, however, Mollison remains as hard to pigeonhole as his famously imprecise system of sustainable living and gardening. ("I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is," he once told a United States magazine. "That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic.") Mollison believes in walking gently on the earth - he goes barefoot or thonged - but loves to use a bulldozer when redesigning a farm.

Critics have labelled him a conservationist, yet, he says, "I'm right in the middle, between the conservationists and the extirpationists. I hate extremists."

Which is not to say that he is not forceful in his opinions.

The Macquarie Dictionary defines permaculture as "a system of agriculture that does not involve yearly crops but crops which are self-sustaining". Mollison insists that permaculture was never just about agriculture.

Instead, he says, it is a way of designing systems to support human existence without mucking up the earth - except that Mollison uses a stronger verb than muck.

It is 25 years since Mollison finalised a curriculum for teaching permaculture, later published as the Permaculture Designers Manual. In 1978, he co-wrote Permaculture One with David Holmgren (who now teaches permaculture at Hepburn in central Victoria, and has recently published another book on the subject). Between them, they spawned a movement that now has tens of thousands of members worldwide and many devotees in Australia. Mollison estimates he has visited 160 countries as a lecturer.

Mollison's life has been as unruly and abundant as his gardens. By the time he came to formulate the principles of permaculture, he had already spent nearly half a century fishing, farming, pub brawling, tree-felling, timber milling, hunting, snaring, bushwalking, beachcombing, glassblowing, manufacturing scientific equipment, working as a clerk in a steel factory and working as as a bouncer.

As a teenager in the 1940s, he flew Tiger Moths in the air training corps (his father, Rowland, had been one of the gunners who shot at Baron von Richtofen the day a single bullet killed the German flying ace of the Great War). When his father died, Bill at 15, was put to work in the family bakery by his mother (whom he has described as a bully). He later ran away to sea, working on couta boats in his late teens.

By the '60s, he was a pipe-smoking radical in a polo-necked jumper wearing a bushman's beard. In the '70s, he marched against the Vietnam War. As a CSIRO researcher, he proved that foresters did not need to lay 1080 poison to stop wallabies grazing regrowth forest. He also helped fund Aboriginal scholarships by selling wallaby skins. He has milked snake venom for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and handcrafted geiger counters for Antarctic researchers.

A trained psychologist, he graduated from university in his mid-40s and was a foundation member of the Organic Farming and Gardening Society in Tasmania with Cundall in 1972.

He ran for Parliament alongside Bob Brown in the 1970s in a party regarded as a forerunner to the Greens. But Mollison says he never wanted to lead the country. "I got out of politics because all I want to do is green the earth and I've chosen to do that in different ways."

Mollison moved to NSW in 1986 to try farming in a tropical environment, but tired of the weather - hot, humid summers and frosts that froze citrus fruit in winter. He and his fifth wife, Lisa, a Californian, have turned down seven offers for the land at Tyalgum, because they don't want farmers to graze cattle there.

Mollison still has the bushman's beard, but it is snowy. He serves me tea and water in cups and glasses the size of buckets. He talks commonsense with a bit of exaggeration and a dose of humour and finishes anecdotes about 60 years of troublemaking with a hearty laugh that crackles and rasps at the end - the legacy of former heavy smoking.

Here on his seven hectares in Tasmania, Mollison is probably as close to retirement as he will get. He is working on four books and has been invited to set up a permaculture school in South Africa later this year. He wasn't able to harvest the herbs in his garden in spring because he was overseas, working.

Although the years of lecturing about energy conservation have had some impact, Mollison's home at Sisters Creek is surrounded by farms sprayed with chemicals that he says make them unfit for human consumption. But Mollison says he has no plans to try to convince his neighbours to change their farming practices.

"I'm not in the convincing business," he says. "Instead, it is best to concentrate on the doors that are open."

Bill Mollison features on Australian Biography, SBS, on February 18.