Seeing the good for the trees
“It’s an absolute crisis…a source of national shame!” Professor Chris Dickman says in frustration as he leans across his desk at one of Australia’s oldest scientific institutions, the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Sydney University.
Chris is an old-school academic – highly esteemed, with a worldwide reputation in his area of expertise built during a career that’s spanned more than three decades. He’s very much a man of science who prefers to air his opinions via peer-reviewed research published in highbrow journals.
But the softly spoken, usually mild-mannered, world-leading ecological scientist is angry and, in fact, deeply saddened that parts of Australia have been losing native forests and woodlands at extraordinary rates. Clearly, Chris says, we haven’t learnt from past failures to protect our forests, and the potential consequences for Australia are huge.
IT’S NOT AS IF MODERN Australia ever had a lot of trees to lose in the first place. The continent was once covered with forests but that was in the distant geological past. Tree coverage has slowly been receding naturally during the past 5 million years as the climate in this part of the world has dried. By the time of the first European colonisation here, little more than two centuries ago, mainland Australia was mostly desert and arid habitats with only an estimated 30 per cent covered by forests and woodlands.
Today, that’s been almost halved, due to the broadscale clearing of trees partly to make way for urban and industrial development, but mostly for agriculture. That we’ve lost almost half our forest and woodlands in just two centuries is a confronting statistic, but it’s largely a historic legacy. Much
