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By Root 2005 0

’s instituting a new tax (thereby breaking an election promise) to raise $300 million to undo damage to the Murray River; the Western Australian state government’s proceeding with the phasing-out of old-growth logging; the New South Wales state government and its farmers’ reaching agreement on a $406 million plan to streamline resource management and end large-scale land clearing; and the state government in Queensland, historically the most conservative Australian state, announcing a joint proposal with the national (Commonwealth) government to end large-scale clearing of mature bushland by the year 2006. All of these measures were unimaginable 40 years ago.

These signs of hope include changed attitudes of the voting public as a whole, resulting in changed governmental policies. Another sign of hope involves changed attitudes of farmers in particular, who are increasingly realizing that the farming methods of the past cannot be sustained and wouldn’t permit them to pass on their farms in good condition to their children. That prospect hurts Australian farmers, because (like the Montana farmers whom I interviewed for Chapter 1) it’s love for the farming lifestyle, rather than farming’s meager financial rewards, that motivates them to carry on with the hard work of being farmers. Symbolic of those changed attitudes was a conversation that I had with sheep farmer Bill McIntosh, the one whom I mentioned as having mapped, bulldozed, and dynamited the rabbit warrens on his farm, which had belonged to his family since 1879. He showed me photos of the same hill, taken in 1937 and in 1999, and illustrating dramatically the sparse vegetation in 1937 due to sheep overstocking and the vegetation’s subsequent recovery. Among his own measures to keep his farm sustainable, he is stocking sheep at levels below those considered as an acceptable maximum by the government, and is thinking about switching to wool-less sheep kept just for meat production (because they require less attention and less land). As one method of coping with the weed problem and preventing less palatable plant species from taking over pasture, he has adopted a practice termed “cell grazing,” under which sheep are not permitted to eat just the most palatable plants and then moved to the next pasture, but are instead left in the same pasture until they have been forced to consume its less palatable as well as its more palatable plants. Astonishingly to me, he keeps costs down and manages the entire farm without any full-time employee besides himself, by herding his several thousand sheep while riding on his motorbike, carrying binoculars and a radio and accompanied by his dog. Simultaneously, he somehow makes time for trying to develop other sources of business income, such as bed-and-breakfast tourism, because he recognizes that his farm alone would be marginal in the long run.

Farmer peer pressure, in combination with recently changed government policies, is reducing stocking rates and improving pasture conditions. In inland parts of South Australia where the government owns land fit for pastoralism and leases it to farmers on 42-year leases, an agency called the Pastoral Board assesses the land’s condition every 14 years, reduces the permissible stocking rate if the vegetation’s condition is not improving, and revokes the lease if it decides that the farmer/tenant was managing the property unsatisfactorily. Closer to the coast, land tends to be owned outright (as freehold) or under perpetual lease, so that such direct governmental control is not possible, but there is still indirect control enforced in two ways. By law, landowners or leaseholders still bear a “duty-of-care” obligation to prevent land degradation. The first stage of enforcement involves local farmer boards that monitor degradation and apply peer pressure to try to achieve compliance. The second stage depends on soil conservators who can intervene if the local board is not effective. Bill McIntosh related to me four cases in which local boards or soil conservators in his area ordered farmers to reduce