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.

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Taking Plastics OUT Of The Waste Stream To Build Communities

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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.

Solar switch for one of Australia's biggest companies funded by community

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Mum and dad investors are using their savings to fund a half-a-million-dollar solar energy project at the Wesfarmers-owned Blackwoods distribution depot at Canning Vale in Western Australia. 

Blackwood is the country's largest distributor of industrial and safety supplies and its Canning Vale depot will have 630 solar panels installed on its roof in the New Year.

"Wesfarmers is an enormous company but it is also Australia's largest private employer so there is an enormous connection [with the community] already," said Wesfarmers sustainability lead Patrick Heagney. "We have an internal target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, so this is something we're very proud of." 

The 200-kilowatt system will supply a quarter of the business's electricity needs.

Mr Heagney said it was the biggest single solar installation in the Wesfarmers group, and the first funded by community investors. 

Investors expecting solid returns ....Click here to read more

Brian Arbogast Talks About Shit!

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THINKING ABOUT AND TALKING KRAP!

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MORE TEDtalks on this subject:

• How can we benefit from human waste? | Mari Winkler | TEDxULB ... This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Nitrogen and Phosphore are essential ressources. At TEDxULB, Mari explains how we can transform human waste in those precious ressources and even generate energy.

• Transformation of wastes to resources in Haiti | Sasha Kramer | TEDxTraverseCity ... This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Dr. Sasha Kramer provides the context for conducting waste transformation in Haiti. She shares the life cycle of this transformation process, from food, to waste, and back to food, while describing the important role of microbes and scientific measurement of the quality of the newly-created EcoSan compost. This model of transformation of waste into resources makes a positive impact on ecological nutrient cycles in a truly sustainable way.

Dr. Sasha Kramer is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) www.oursoil.org, an organization that promotes dignity, health and sustainable livelihoods through the transformation of wastes into resources. Sasha is an ecologist and human rights advocate who has been living and working in Haiti since 2004. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from Stanford University in 2006 and co-founded SOIL that same year. Sasha is currently an Adjunct Professor of International Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She is also a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Architect of the Future with the Waldzell Institute and a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year for 2014.... HIGHLY RECOMENDED

• Making a merit of human waste: Virginia Gardiner at TEDxSouthwark ... Virginia is the founder and CEO of Loowatt Ltd, a revolutionary waterless toilet system that creates local economies around waste systems. In this TEDx talk she explains how human waste can be used to generate energy, in toilet systems which can help to solve the sanitation crisis.

• The waterless toilet that turns human waste into energy | Virginia Gardiner | TEDxBrixton ... This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Virginia Gardiner asks us to rethink the toilet.‘There is no such thing as sinkers and floaters’, she says talking us through her amazing innovation in sanitation. The benefits to those living in developing regions, without proper sanitation, are obvious. The benefits to those in the West seemed less so, but Virginia assures us that we'll be seeing Loowatt in music festival fields very soon.

Virginia has worked in design, engineering, management, entrepreneurship, fundraising and journalism. After studying literature and engineering at Stanford  University, and covering design for publications including The New York Times and Metropolis, she began to value the social importance of products and systems we live with, and to recognize certain everyday realities, such as the flush toilet, as wasteful. She founded Loowatt Ltd. in 2009 after developing the toilet and system concept during her masters’ degree at the Royal College of Art in 2008.

• Toilet revolution: Shyama V. Ramani at TEDxMaastricht ... 12' 47" ... There is a bit of a metaphor here maybe??

A COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS NETWORK IN TASMANIA

CLICK HERE TO VISIT

The Community Exchange Network Tasmania (CENTs) is a project initiative of the North West Environment Centre. We are a volunteer run community exchange network operating throughout Tasmania where people trade their goods, services and skills with one another without money. CENTs also operates in the Gift Economy where people give things away to others or they can also swap, barter, loan, hire and share with others.

Community exchanges create a mutually supportive network of people helping each other. You can help other people or they can help you in lots of different ways – such as gardening, home help, baby sitting, office work, providing transport or by teaching someone a new skill. You can buy goods from others in the community to help you meet your day to day needs. You can access services that you may not be able to afford if you had to pay money for it.

After registering for an account each user receives an account number and a password. This gives them access to their account. The Community Exchange System works like an on-line banking service. Participants can view their current balance and can also keep track of the trading position of others so there is full transparency.

SOME WANTS CLICK HERE 

REIMAGINING PLASTICK

This story on the ABC is encouraging in that it is a demonstration of what can be done and locally. The outcomes are visible locally and not on some ambiguous bureaucratic BALANCEsheet where income from the sale of 'recyclable resources' become hidden in impenetrable accounting systems for the benefit of who? It's often said, "for the benefit of the bureaucratic-salaries-with-benefits-churn and of little or no benefit to the resource owners."

Why should they complain, they dumped and abandoned this stuff? Well yes but what options were they offered? Every now and then we hear about recalcitrant 'hoarders' who bring upon themselves the wrath of their local council. Yes these people are the custodians of a 'community hazard' but is it that simple? Might they be telling us something about our society's wastefulness?

Click here to read the ABC's Denmark(WA) Story

You'll see that we've got a way to go yet

Everything is UPcyclable but effort does have to put into establishing the ways tat it can be in a local context. That is ways that do not compound the problem and that does not unlock the carbon dioxide in the material. Near enough is no longer really good enough just as letting this stuff find its way to the ocean or in LANDfill where it'll have an uncertain future and goodness knows when. 

Is the best we can do without really trying good enough! What are you suggestions for a way forward? Actually this is a DESIGNproblem!!

No One Saw This Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming

VIDEO LINK CLICK HERE

In October in the USA Elon Musk showed us the grand unification of Tesla: Fast cars, big batteries, and a stunning solar rooftop.

On a Friday evening as the sun descended over an old Hollywood set of “Desperate Housewives,” Elon Musk took to a stage and fired up his presentation about climate change. It was a strange scene, with hundreds of people crowded into the middle of a subtly artificial suburban neighborhood.

It wasn’t until about a minute into the speech that Musk casually let the crowd in on Tesla’s big secret. “The interesting thing is that the houses you see around you are all solar houses,” Musk said. “Did you notice?”

The answer, in short, was no. Like everyone else, I knew we were there to see Musk’s new “solar roof,” whatever that was supposed to mean. But try as I could as we walked in, I didn’t see anything that looked like it could carry an electric current. If anything, the slate and Spanish clay roofs looked a bit too nice for a television set. This is the future of solar, Musk proclaimed. “You’ll want to call your neighbors over and say ‘check out the sweet roof.’ It’s not a phrase you hear often.”

The roof tiles are actually made of textured glass. From most viewing angles, they look just like ordinary shingles, but they allow light to pass through from above onto a standard flat solar cell. The plan is for Panasonic to produce the solar cells and for Tesla to put together the glass tiles and everything that goes along with them. That’s all predicated on shareholders approving the $2.2 billion acquisition of SolarCity, the biggest U.S. rooftop installer, on Nov. 17 2016. .... Click here to read more

ON BATTERIES

As a result of the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak earlier this year, and the facility’s subsequent closure, the California Public Utilities Commission mandated (in May) an accelerated procurement for energy storage in order to avoid potential electricity shortfall issues and rolling blackouts.

Utility companies, such as Southern California Edison, were thus told to solicit utility-scale energy storage solutions that could be operational by December 31, 2016.

The competitive process that followed has resulted in Tesla being selected “to provide a 20 MW/80 MWh Powerpack system at the Southern California Edison Mira Loma substation,” Tesla has announced. “Tesla was the only bidder awarded a utility-owned storage project out of the solicitation.” Click here to go to source