‘Property poetry’?
"Real estate is another way to say Australia."
"Kate Holden connects Turnbull’s persistence in illegally clearing vast tracts of koala habitat, and his murder of Turner, to British Enlightenment theories of property. The English philosopher John Locke, she observes, “placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it. Holden traces associations between Locke’s ideas, the history of terra nullius and the “strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land.”
"[b]y the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights […] Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, man was only an object."
Private landholders control 60% of the Australian continent.
Many of Australia’s ecosystems are severely degraded.
Only 22% of Australia’s landmass is currently protected.
"About 60% of the continent is owned or managed privately – and 70% to 90% of inadequately protected wildlife is found mostly on such land, which includes farms, pastoral leases and mines."
"Through what legal mechanism can private landholders be engaged in biodiversity conservation? A conservation covenant is a legally binding commitment landholders make to restrict how their property is used."
Despite $246.9 million in taxpayer money, Forestry Corporation still lost $28 million
"The Nature Conservation Council of NSW has today released a new report from Frontier Economics which reveals for the first time that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been gifted to the taxpayer owned logging business Forestry Corporation NSW over the past five years."
"The NSW Government needs to come to terms with the fact that native forest logging is a dying industry and make a plan for a transition. How much more taxpayer money has to be wasted and endangered animals killed before this reality sinks in?" Statements attributable to NCC Chief Executive Officer Jacqui Mumford
>> https://www.miragenews.com/forestry-corp-loses-28m-despite-246-9m-taxpayer-1120847/
Silencing biodiversity
Biophony is the collective sound produced by all living organisms that reside in a particular biome. It is not about a 'decontextualized single-species recording model'. Bernie Krause is recording "the “Great Animal Orchestra,” a constantly shapeshifting constellation of individual voices in motion, and he termed their symphonic soundscape a ‘biophony’ — all of the “sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources.”
In 1988 he recorded the so-called selective logging of a timber company:
"The outcome was a spectrogram with a remarkable density throughout all frequency bands, as could be expected for a habitat replete with the most diverse animal life. In 1989, he returned to the meadow after the operation had been completed for a second session under the exact same conditions and at the exact same time. In keeping with what had been promised by the logging company, the place still looked as though it was teeming with life — “I was delighted to see that little seemed to have changed,” as Krause remarked. Back in the studio and after a look at his spectrogram, he had to revise that impression: “Gone was the thriving density and diversity of birds. Gone, too, was the overall richness that had been present the year before. The only prominent sounds were the stream and hammering of a Williamson’s sapsucker.” The ear, then, turned out to be capable of detecting the true state of the habitat much more precisely and truthfully than the eye ever could."
"Australia now has about 100 ecological communities at risk."
"Australia is an enormous contributor to global biodiversity loss. A recent study found 97 species in Australia have now gone extinct since British colonisation in 1788, with roughly 10% of all native mammal species gone forever. The numbers would be higher if invertebrate losses were included."
"What happened here? These forests have been subject to decades of intensive clearfell logging, as well extensive cutting dating back to the late 1920s."
"Our analysis found nearly 70% of these forest communities are already either severely disturbed by fire and logging or exist within 70 metres of severely disturbed areas."