• Breadcrumb navigation uses Javascript

---

Money growing on trees is a salty tale:

Farmers and the environment

by Simon Longstaff

Imagine being confronted with irrefutable evidence of a factory discharging its effluence into the river from which your drinking water is drawn. Imagine the factory owner acknowledges he is slowly poisoning the river, but says he and his shareholders cannot afford the cost of operating a 'green' factory.

Would you be prepared to pay a subsidy, in return for clean water – even if you never bought a single item from the output of that factory? Or would you expect the owners to pay directly or to pass the cost on to those buying the factory's products?

Now, let us alter the scenario. Imagine the factory owner is, instead, a farmer. Let us suppose he and his family before him have cleared a huge area of land to graze sheep and grow crops.

Finally, imagine the land is now irreparably damaged, having been extensively cleared over many generations and a rising water table has brought killer salts from their subterranean strata to the surface. Slowly, but surely, the land is being poisoned and there is a real and present danger that it may be rendered unusable by future generations.

This is not an imaginary situation – it is happening in significant areas of the Australian interior today, affecting land and rivers. Rural towns that have been abandoned or forgotten by many face the prospect of their older stone buildings crumbling to dust as the salt eats into their old bones. What an image for our times in the bush!

Living as we do on an ancient continent, our fragile soils cannot resist such an assault. Yet large scale land clearance is continuing throughout the country, as people struggle to make a decent living and preserve their way of life.

Some resent any interference in what they do on their land. Others plead that they cannot afford to change their practices. The trouble is we cannot afford for them to continue.

We need to own up to the fact that we have reached a point where some of the land has probably been lost to salt forever. However, we do have the chance to halt the decline in the viability of our arable lands. And the solution is deceptively simple – just plant trees – in their millions, if not billions. But who is to pay?

If our farmers were to ask the Australian community to pay the cost of rehabilitating their land, would we do so? Or would we reject their request on the grounds that public money should not be paid in order to further the cause of private enrichment? After all, salt-free land is of economic value to its owner. Given this, it might be asked why the community as a whole should bear the cost of fixing up the mess caused by others who have profited from their unsustainable farming practices.

On the other hand, we need to accept that farmers never deliberately set out to cause the destruction of the land. If anything, they have a natural tendency to want to maintain and improve their acreage, and to see their sons and daughters carry on in their footsteps.

Unfortunately, far too few thought seriously about the possible consequences of radical land clearing, in general, or how it would affect their particular holding.

Instead, there was an 'accepted' way of doing things that people uncritically applied. In short, the farming community did (like all of us do) “what seemed to be right at the time”. As is so often the case, it is unreflective custom and practice that causes the greatest of our ills.

Second, it would be wrong to say the rural communities are the only beneficiaries of land clearing. The whole community has shared in the short-term benefits of this practice – in the form of food and export income, and the like. It's true Australia was “built on the sheep's back” – grazing on land that has been cleared to make progress possible.

Finally, any failure to address the urgent problem of stemming the rising tide of salt will affect everybody now and in future generations.

There is nothing more important for subsistence than that the land be fertile and the water potable. If we do not address this issue, if we turn a blind eye in the hope that it might go away, then our generation will justifiably be held morally culpable for all that follows.

Having identified the problem and knowing the means are available to begin to resolve it, we are surely obliged to act. If this means that we all pay a 'tree subsidy' to help fund improvements on our rural land, then perhaps this is the price that our generation must pay as a debt to the past and as an investment in our future.

discuss this article

---