An emaciated Tiger in a Vietnamese farm cage awaits slaughter for TCM Tiger PartsA mascot of an evil, barbaric and low-life society
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Vietnam is the most backward country for the illegal wildlife trade according to the latest wildlife report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Despite the growing middle class of Vietnam, the cultural practice of wildlife witchcraft quackery persists. It is this new wealth that is enabling more Vietnamese to drive the slaughter of wlidlife such as Rhinos, Elephants and Tigers for their body parts. The worse ‘demand countries’ for wildlife parts according to the WWF are Vietnam, China and Thailand.
The demand in wildlife parts is mainly driven from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which is an ancient backward cult in witchcraft quackery. The TCM witchdoctors prey on superstitious simpletons who think drinking tiger bone wine will cure chronic ailments. The TCM Barbaric Cult is a global chronic ailment in superstitious barbarism that is driving sadistic persecution of precious endangered wildlife. TCM is no different to the Khmer Rouge, except the TCM Barbaric Cult targets wildlife instead of people.
They evangelise TCM cures anything from fatigue, stroke, cancer, back pain, migraine and low libido, which is all misleading lies. It has its own quack terms such as ‘Yin Deficiency’, ‘Yang Deficiency’, ‘Qi Stagnation’. TCM dimwits certainly have ‘deficiency’ alright in the intelligence department. Whatever the hocus-pocus names, TCM is backward, barbaric, sadistic, cruel, illegal, and doesn’t bloody well work anyway. Only sad simpletons would spend a cent on quackery. Those who traffick in wildlife parts deserve the same fate as the wildlife.
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TCM relies on the illegal black market in wildlife parts trafficking. It is overdue for the backward practices of TCM to be outlawed globally.
A TCM practitioner plying her trade in Yin/Yang Bollocks
The following articles highlight the problem of the increasing illegal trade in wildlife parts for Traditional Chinese Medicine. When one visits the cities of these countries and see the every inctreasing shining skyline, one can be mistaken for believing one is entering a modern civilisation.
One the eve of the opening of the latest CITES session the wildlife group WWF has released a report that shows Vietnam is the worse country for the illegal wildlife trade. In the traffic light system used by the WWF to rank countries Vietnam scored a red in trade in rhino and tigers with a yellow card for elephants.
“It is time for Vietnam to face the fact that its illegal consumption of rhino horn is driving the widespread poaching of endangered Rhinos in Africa, and that it must crack down on the illegal rhino horn trade. Viet Nam should review its penalties and immediately curtail retail markets, including Internet advertising for horn,” said Elisabeth McLellan, Global Species Programme manager at WWF.
A number of Vietnamese people have been arrested over recent years in South Africa for being involved in rhino smuggling. Even some Vietnamese diplomats have been caught involved in the trade.
China is given a yellow card for its involvement in the elephant ivory trade. The country has been highlighted as having inadequate management of its legal ivory market and this offers a conduit for illegally poached ivory to find a legitimate market.
Tusks of Elephants savagedly butchered for TCM, their tusks chainsawed off while still alive. This is a TCM stockpile of tusks intercepted in a shipping container in Malaysia
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Skulls of Cambodians savagedly butchered by the Khmer Rouge This is a stockpile of human skulls in the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh
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The WWF reports calls on the Chinese government to dramatically improve its enforcement of the ivory market. It also calls on the government to remind its workers involved in major projects in Africa that anyone caught importing illegal wildlife products into China would be prosecuted, and if convicted, severely penalized.
While China got a yellow card for the ivory trade Thailand scored a red due to a legal loop-hole that makes it easy for illegally poached ivory to enter the luxury goods market.
“In Thailand, illegal African ivory is being openly sold in up-scale boutiques that cater to unsuspecting tourists. Governments will be taking up this troubling issue this week. So far Thailand has not responded adequately to concerns and, with the amount of ivory of uncertain origin in circulation, the only credible option at this stage is a ban on ivory trade,” McLellan said.
There is good news in the report as well. The WWF commends the countries from central Africa who recently signed a multinational agreement to tackle poaching.
“Although most Central African countries receive yellow or red scores for elephants, there are some encouraging signals. Last month Gabon burned its entire ivory stockpile, to ensure that no tusks would leak into illegal trade, and President Ali Bongo committed to both increasing protections in the country’s parks and to ensuring that those committing wildlife crimes are prosecuted and sent to prison.” said WWF Global Species Programme manager Wendy Elliott.
The brightest spot of the report though goes to Nepal which last year, 2011, saw no losses to its rhino population due to improvements to anti-poaching and other law enforcement efforts.
[Source: ‘Vietnam gets failing grade in WWF’s illegal wildlife trade report card’, by Wynne Parry, LiveScienceSun, 20120722, ^http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/vietnam-gets-failing-grade-in-wwfs-illegal-wildlife-trade-report-card]
.Sumatran Rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis)
Members of the species once inhabited rainforests, swamps and cloud forests in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China.
In historical times they lived in southwest China, particularly in Sichuan.
But with TCM barbarism they have become persecuted and are now critically endangered,
with only six substantial populations in the wild: four on Sumatra, one on Borneo, and one in the Malay Peninsula.
(Photo: Bill Konstant/International Rhino Foundation)
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Rhinoceroses are poached for their horns that are then sold on the global black market to collectors and for medicinal purposes.
A conservation group, the World Wildlife Fund, has put together a report card ranking 23 nations’ compliance with an international treaty regulating the trade in wild animals. The report card focuses on three species sought after on the international black market: elephants, tigers and rhinoceroses, and evaluates how well certain countries have held up their commitments as part of the treaty.
“These are just three species, and they are probably the three most talked about, so they are a kind of bellwether for wider problems,” said Colman O Criodain, wildlife trade specialist with the WWF.
The report looks at countries where these animals originate and must travel through, as well as the countries where they arrive for sale. There were some bright spots: India and Nepal received green marks for all three species, showing they had made progress toward complying with the treaty and enforcing policies to prevent the illegal trade.
Many countries, however, received red marks indicating they are failing to uphold their commitments under the treaty.
There have already been consequences for animals. In the last decade, the western black rhino went extinct and the Indochinese Javan rhinoceros was eradicated from Vietnam. Poaching played a crucial role, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Other subspecies of these large, plant-eating creatures are driven by demand for their horns. In Vietnam, demand for rhino horn has boomed thanks to rumors it has healing and aphrodisiac properties, O Criodain said.
For Asians seeking aphrodisiacs?Viagra is proven to work, but TCM is bollocks
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The report calls out Vietnam, which WWF says is the top destination for South African rhino horn, saying Vietnam’s penalties for participating in the illegal trade are weak and legal measures are insufficient to curtail illegal trade on the Internet. “Despite numerous seizures elsewhere implicating (Viet Nam), there has been no recorded seizure of rhino horn in the country since 2008,” reads a statement issued by WWF.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, a treaty signed by 175 nations, makes nearly all commercial trade in rhino horns, elephant ivory, tiger parts and other species threatened with extinction illegal. In addition, signatories committed to regulating trade within their borders.
WWF ranked nations’ compliance with the treaty — evaluating whether or not the nation had adopted policies that supported the treaty — and the nations’ enforcement of those policies.
A nation could have good laws on the books but fail to enforce them. For instance, China has laws tightly controlling the sale of elephant ivory. However, it does not have a strong record of enforcing them, O Criodain said.
The report card is not comprehensive; rather it is a snapshot that focuses on certain countries that face the highest levels of illegal trade in these three species. Countries from which a particular species has been eradicated, such as Central Africa which has lost all of its rhinos, escaped an evaluation, O’Criodain noted.
The evaluation is based on government announcements reported in media, CITES documentation and information collected by Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network that is a joint program of the WWF and IUCN.
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Bile being extracted from a bear’s gall bladder – while it is conscious
(ENV photo)
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In Vietnam, Ha Long Bear Bile Farms continue to flout the law by selling bile to Korean tourists @ $30 per cc.
Vietnam’s bears are being pushed to the edge of extinction according to ENV, primarily due to the illegal hunting and trade to support the demand for bear bile used as a traditional form of medicine (TCM). Hundreds of Asian tourists including many Koreans, visit per week, watch the extraction process, drink bear gall wine and pay $30 per CC for take-away bile. The plight of these bears is truly pitiful.
Most of the approximately 3,500 bears in Vietnamese farms are thought to have been caught as cubs in the wild and then raised for the painful extraction of bile from their gall bladders.
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ENV produced this powerful public service announcement to persuade people not to drink bear bile wine.
‘Vietnam, Laos and Mozambique are the countries that do the least to crack down on an illegal trade in animal parts that is threatening the survival of elephants, rhinos and tigers, the WWF conservation group said on Monday.
In its ‘Wildlife Crime Scorecard’ report, it said 23 countries surveyed mostly in Africa and Asia, the main sources and destinations of animal parts, could all do more to enforce laws banning a trade that WWF said was increasingly run by international crime syndicates.’
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‘Vietnam proposes legalizing use of tiger parts in traditional medicines’
‘Vietnam has proposed a move that activists allege would boost tiger poaching across the world. The country has proposed legalising the use of parts of captive bred tigers that die of natural causes in traditional medicines. If approved, this is likely to spur demand for body parts of the big cat in the international market and hit tiger conservation efforts currently underway. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) of Vietnam sent the proposal to the prime minister of the country in March this year.
The disclosure has taken the international community, which is currently discussing a coordinated strategy for recovering global tiger population in New Delhi, by shock. The proposal was brought to the notice of the tiger range countries by non-profits when they were discussing the measures to eliminate the demand for tiger parts during the 1st Stocktaking Meeting of the Global Tiger Recovery Programme (GTRP) between May 15 and May 17. The conference was organised by National Tiger Conservation Authority of India along with the Global Tiger Forum, Global Tiger Initiative and the World Bank to take stock of the GTRP, which was adopted in 2010 and aims at doubling the global wild tiger population by 2022. Currently, around 3,200 wild tigers thrive in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Vietnam, however, did not mention the MARD proposal in its draft GTRP implementation report, a document each of the tiger range countries submitted to explain the actions taken by their governments for tiger conservation. The proposal is part of an investigation report prepared by the MARD on the wild and captive-bred tigers in Vietnam. Around 112 tigers are kept in breeding farms in Vietnam. “According to Vietnam’s law and International Convention, any activity of trading or using tigers and tiger products is prohibited. Tiger breeding facilities therefore can gain no profit. Moreover, because of the regulations against tiger trading, these facilities don’t have specific breeding purposes,” says the report. It further states that “dead tigers (from captive facilities) can be used to make specimens and traditional medicine on a pilot basis.”
But conservationists are not pleased. “This is in contradiction of the spirit of UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and GTRP. We want to give a clear message to Vietnam that if it goes ahead with the plan, we might have to take action against it in whatever capacity we can,” says Keshav Varma, programme director of the Global Tiger Initiative of the World Bank. The tiger range countries, including Vietnam, are signatories to CITES that prohibits the trade in tiger parts and derivatives, including domestic trade.
When asked, the representative of Vietnam’s ministry of natural resource and environment said the proposal came from a different ministry and he could not say much about it. He, however, hoped that the proposal would not be approved by their prime minister. “We are appalled that a few countries promise something else on international platforms while their domestic policies imply something else. If they allow trade of dead tigers kept in captivity, many tigers will be killed in the wild and their parts will be sold under the wrap of this scheme,” says Debbie Banks of UK-based non-profit, Environmental Investigation Agency.
So when you visit your Ying Yang Traditional Chinese Medicine Quack, remember this tiger suffered for your healing cult.
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Is China above board?
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In the meeting apprehensions were also expressed regarding China’s domestic policies on captive tiger breeding and trade. For long tiger bones have been used in traditional medicines and wines in China. This had made the country principal destination for tiger parts from all over the world. In 1993, China prohibited the use, manufacture, sale, import and export of tiger bone products and products labelled as containing tiger bones.
However, in 2007, the State Forestry Administration (SFA), of China issued guidelines for the registration, labelling and sale of tiger and leopard skins of “legal origin.” “This seems to contradict China’s claim that trade in tiger parts is banned in the country. We have consistently requested clarification from China over just how many skins have been registered, how many have been sold under this policy, how many have come from captive bred sources, how many are reportedly from the wild and how legality has been verified. They have never responded,” says Banks.
China has also failed to meet the CITES resolution that it would take “measures to restrict the captive population to a level supportive only to conserving wild tigers.” The captive tigers in China have reportedly increased from 6,000 in 2010 to 9,000 now. There are allegations that the captive farms stockpiles the tiger bones and other parts of dead tigers. There is no transparency from China on where these stockpiles end up. “The issue of whether stockpiling of tiger bones in the captive farms in China is for research or for commercial use needs further clarification and is a serious cause of concern. We urge that China should follow the CITES resolution of keeping the captive bred tiger population restricted to support wild population in letter and spirit,” says Rajesh Gopal, member secretary of National Tiger Conservation Authority.
Roaring demand for tiger bone tonic wine during the Year of the Tiger has delighted those taking part in the underground industry but sent chills through conservationists.
Despite a national prohibition on dealing in tiger body parts, online trade and tiger farms are flourishing, leading opponents to call for additional protection of the endangered species.
“In Western countries, people believe in Western medicine but there has seldom been as much enthusiasm for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as there is now, especially those made from animals,” said Ge Rui, Asian Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
She said tiger farms are now a major threat to the species. While the farms are tolerated, the State Forest Ministry issued a notice at the end of last year stating that tiger bodies from the farms should be sealed for safekeeping.
“The government has made a great deal of effort to curb the illegal trade in rare and endangered species in recent years,” Ge said. “But their work is mainly focused on cross-border trade. The government allows the operation of tiger farms.”
According to statistics from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, there are now about 3,200 wild tigers worldwide.
In China, only about 20 tigers are thought to be left in the wild.
“The existence of tiger farms and increasing illegal trade in tiger products is seriously threatening this precious species,” she said. “In the Year of the Tiger, we should be doing more.”
Chinese animal rights groups recently launched an online campaign pushing for more protection of wild animals.
Despite the concern, consumers are still eager to get their hands on the illegal tonic wine.
“Tiger bone tonic wine will surely be popular this year,” said a seller from the Beijing Xinghuo Company.
“Nothing could be better than sending it to your relatives or leaders during the Year of the Tiger, both for good wishes and to keep them healthy.”
The company sells a wide range of wines, including a tiger bone tonic wine.
A 500 ml bottle of tiger bone wine, made in Heilongjiang province, sells for 1,380 yuan.
Tiger Wine – extracted from Tigers
It may as well be the cerebral fluid of Cambodians butchered at the hand of the Khmer Rouge
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Human Cerebrospinal fluid
Not as marketable in test tubes, but then TCM Cultists haven’t got around to bottling and branding this yet
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However, a bottle of tiger bone wine, said to be from Tongrentang, the place that supplied medicine to the royal pharmacy during the Qing Dynasty for 188 years, is even more expensive. Such wine, made in 1990s, sells for around 25,000 yuan.
The wine, which is believed to have medicinal properties, should improve with age, so the older the bottle, the higher the price. Those produced in the 1980s can sell for 60,000 yuan for 323 ml.
“Real tiger bone tonic wine is very popular in the market now,” said Sjkexiao, a 20-year old man who was looking to sell two bottles online that he claimed was tiger bone wine made in Tongrentang in 1984.
He said tiger bone tonic wine had been increasing in price in recent years.
Tigers have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. Tiger bone tonic wine is used in the treatment of arthritis and rheumatism.
China joined the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1981. It imposed a ban on the harvesting of tiger bones and outlawed all trade in tiger body parts in 1993.
As a result, tiger bone remedies were removed from TCM dictionaries.
“Medicines with parts from rare animals are not allowed to be sold now,” said a staff member, surnamed Zhang, at a Cachet pharmacy.
She suggested another medicinal wine, named Hongmao Medical Wine, that was priced at 250 yuan and which claimed to contain leopard bones.
“Money cannot buy a genuine bottle of tiger bone wine because of its scarcity,” she said. “You can never find such medicine in the stores now. Wine containing real tiger bones is really more effective than others.”
However, doctors were quick to question the medicinal value of tiger bone tonic.
“It is the same as other medicinal wines,” said Yue Debo, a doctor with more than 20 years’ experience in the department of orthopedics at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital. “It doesn’t have any miraculous effect.”
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Comment: by Willson 20111230:
“This is why I will never allow any of my companies or affiliates to do business with the Chinese. The Chinese are unworthy of respect and therefore unworthy of becoming a trade partner. The trade in tiger bone wine is not an underground industry. It is a mainstream industry condoned by the Chinese government. My companies will never sell technology to the Chinese so long as this and other wildlife is threatened with government sanctioning.”
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Comment: by Dan 2011-12-30 06:37
“China is shameful!“
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‘India lucrative target for illegal wildlife trade’
India remains a “lucrative target” in the USD 20 billion illegal trade of wildlife articles per year, an official document says.
“The most serious and immediate risk to many species is poaching for wildlife trade. …South Asian countries account for 13 to 15 per cent of the world’s biodiversity and so remain a lucrative target of the trade,” says the report prepared by the Environment Ministry.
Wild animals are killed for the flourishing illegal international trade in their skins, bones, flesh, fur, used for decoration, clothing, medicine, and unconventional exotic food, says the Environmental and Social Framework Document for “Strengthening Regional Cooperation in Wildlife Protection in Asia”.
Victims of the trade include the iconic tiger and elephant, the snow leopard, the common leopard, the one-horn rhino, pangolin, brown bear, several species of deer and reptiles, seahorses, star tortoises, butterflies, peacocks, hornbills, parrots, parakeets and birds of prey, and corals, it says.
Pangolines poached for TCM
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“The primary market for many of these products is outside South Asia, often in East Asia for items of presumed pharmacological utility,” says the document is prepared for financial assistance from the World Bank under regional International Development Association (IDA) window.
Noting that the wildlife trade is “big business”, it said due to the clandestine nature of the enterprise, reliable estimates of the composition, volume and value of the trade remain elusive.
“The International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) suggests that the global value of the illegal wildlife related trade exceeds USD 20 billion per year and probably ranks third after narcotics and the illegal weapons trade,” it said.
The report says that poaching techniques are “extremely gruesome”.
“The more egregious methods include skinning or dehorning live animals, and transportation of live creatures in inhuman conditions,” it says.
Particularly damaging is the banned trade in tiger parts much of which is used for its presumed pharmaceutical benefits.
“The World Chinese Medicine Society has declared that tiger parts are not necessary in traditional medicines and that alternatives are available and effective. Yet the illegal trade still flourishes.
Poaching has become so intense that tigers have disappeared from many parks throughout Asia.
“Nowhere has the impact been greater than in India and Nepal which remain the bastions of tiger conservation,” says the document and added that Nepal has emerged as the transit hub for the trade in illegal wildlife commodities destined for consumption in East China.
“Laos is recognized as both a source and transit country while Viet Nam is a transit hub for illegal wildlife trade,” it says.
The economic value of the illegal wildlife trade is determined primarily by cross-border factors. Wildlife are poached in one country, stockpiled in another, and then traded beyond the South Asia region.
“Lack of uniformity in enforcement can result in migration of the trade to other countries with less stringent enforcement. The trade is controlled by criminal organizations which have considerable power over the market and the prices paid to poachers and carriers, making control of the trade even more challenging,” it says.
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‘SA breeders embrace growing Asian demand for lion bones’
Desktop activists have joined conservationists to raise awareness about the growing demand for lion bones from users of traditional Chinese medicine, but breeders have defended the right to hunt lions born in captivity.
Last week, the online activist organisation Avaaz.com launched a petition imploring President Jacob Zuma to ban the trade of lion bones. “As citizens from around the world with great respect for South Africa and its magnificent natural heritage, we appeal to you to ban the cruel and senseless trade in lion bones and organs, which is encouraging an industry that could drive lions to the brink of extinction,” says the petition, which garnered over 630 000 signatures in a week.
Lion bones are a sought-after ingredient used to make lion bone wine, a substitute for the traditional Asian cure-all, tiger bone wine, which fetches up to R250 000 a case at illicit auctions.
Conservationists have warned that captive breeding and canned hunting programmes in South Africa are providing a source for the lion bone trade. Canned lion hunting is legal in South Africa, as is the exporting of lion carcasses. Lion populations across Africa have been reduced by 90% over the past 50 years, but lion breeders say their operations have nothing to do with the continent’s wild populations.
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The price of trophies .
Breeders can benefit financially a number of times from the same lion. Cubs are often rented as tourist attractions and visitors pay to pet and interact with them. The fee paid by visitors is then fed back into captive breeding programmes. As adults, the lions are sold to hunters in canned hunting arrangements.
Farmers and hunting operators charge in the region of about $20 000 (R160 000) as a “trophy price” and hunters can expect to pay around $18 000 (R145 000) for other services, excluding taxidermy.
Bob Parsons – Elephant Killer
But the hunters are only interested in the head and skin of the lion, and often leave the bones with the breeder, who can then sell the bones, with a government permit, to Asian buyers for use in making lion bone wine.
It’s estimated that a complete lion skeleton can sell for as much as R80 000. Last year it emerged that over 1 400 lion and leopard trophies were exported from the country in 2009 and 2010.
According to the environmental affairs minister, in 2010, 153 live lions were exported as well as 46 lion skins, 235 carcasses, 592 trophies, 43 bodies and 41 skulls. It was noted that these figures were incomplete as the provinces had not yet captured all their data. Yet there was a 150% growth in exports of lion products from 2009 and 2010.
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‘Amplifying an illegal industry
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Chris Mercer, director of the Campaign Against Canned Hunting, said hunting captive-bred lions was “hideously damaging” to conservation. “It’s farming with alternative livestock. They’re only doing it because they make more money farming lions than they do sheep or cattle. But they don’t realise they’re harming the wild populations by creating and amplifying an illegal industry and allowing it to prosper,” he said.
Mercer said he believes the export of lion bones and in fact the entire canned hunting industry should be banned. He pointed out that there was a huge overlap between the rhino horn and lion bone trade. “Many of the Asiatic groups dealing with lion bones are the same people dealing with rhino horn,” he said.
He criticised government for taking a simplistic view of the matter and overlooking the dangers the lion bone trade poses. “The very people who are doing our rhino horn [poaching] are making money out of this. You can just imagine how the illegal trade is going to piggy-back itself onto this legal trade,” he warned.
Banning the entire trade will be difficult. There are almost 200 lion breeders in the country, many of whom are part of the powerful Predator Breeders’ lobby group. The breeding of lions for trophy hunting is a lucrative business. In 2009, the economic value of trophy hunting was estimated to be between R153-million and R832-million.
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Rapidly going extinct
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But Pieter Kat, director of the UK-based conservation organisation LionAid, said a lot could be achieved simply by placing a ban on the export of lion bones. Lions are listed on appendix two of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which means that a government permit is needed to export any lion products. “It will take a position of responsibility by South Africa to say, ‘No more, we will not allow this,'” he said.
“South Africa is within its rights [to] say no more export permits,” said Kat.
Kat said that while one could argue about the ethics of breeding lions just to be shot, it was important to bear in mind that whatever South Africa did in terms of its legal trade in lion bones would affect wild lion populations all over the continent.
Kat pointed out that there are only about 20 000 lions left on the entire continent – down from about 200 000 in the 1970s. In the past few years Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville have lost all their lions, while countries like Nigeria, Malawi and Senegal have only a few dozen lions left.
“We’re dealing with a species that is rapidly going extinct but because we are not really focused on lions – we’re talking about elephants and rhinos – it’s a silent extinction,” he said.
He warned that allowing the trade in lion bones to proliferate would stimulate a demand for the product. “Soon someone will [realise] it’s cheaper for to poach than to pay the owner of a captive animal to get the bones,” he said.
But Professor Pieter Potgieter, chairperson of the South African Predator Breeders’ Association, defended the industry saying there is little difference between breeding lions and any other mammal. “Chickens are killed by humans. How are lions different from them?” he asked.
“In principle a lion is not more or less than a crocodile, an ostrich or a butterfly. It’s a form of life. Breeding animals for human exploitation is a natural human process,” he said.
Potgieter said that breeding and hunting lions was only deplorable in the eyes of the public because a “sympathetic myth has been created about the lion as the king of the animals”.
He justified the practice, saying the export of lion bones is a legal trade authorised by the department of environmental affairs and denied that South Africa’s approach to captive breeding and canned lion hunting was feeding into the Asian demand for lion bones. “I don’t think that market is being created by the South African situation. That would happen anyhow and the more the Asian tiger gets extinct, the more people will try to get hold of lion bones as a substitute,” he said.
In 2007 former environmental affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk attempted to put the brakes on canned lion hunting. It was widely reported that the activity had been banned in the country but this is not the case.
Some changes to legislation were made but the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Predator Breeders’ Association and overturned an attempt to enforce a two-year waiting period during which a captive-bred lion would be allowed to roam freely in an extensive wildlife system before being hunted, which conservationists had labeled an attempt to “pretend that the lion is wild”.
The environmental affairs department did not respond to questions by the time of going to print.’
‘Indonesian police seized 14 preserved bodies of critically-endangered Sumatran tigers in a raid on a house near Jakarta, a spokesman said Thursday. A man identified as F.R. was arrested Tuesday in a suburban area of Depok suspected of his involvement in the illegal wildlife trade, national police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar told AFP.
“We confiscated whole preserved bodies of 14 tigers, a lion, three leopards, a clouded leopard, three bears and a tapir and a tiger head,” he said, adding that investigations were ongoing.
The Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa)
Is a felid found from the Himalayan foothills through mainland Southeast Asia into China, and has been classified as vulnerable in 2008 by IUCN.
Poached for barbaric TCM.
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Cruel almost beyond belief, this Chinese farm breeds hundreds of tigers in rows of battery cages … so they can be killed and turned into wine…
King, the Siberian tiger, stares at me through the bars of his cage. His two beautiful, graceful companions pace back and forth across their tiny compound. They look crushingly bored. The most exciting thing they can do is paw mournfully at the dirty pools of rainwater on the floor of their cage.
Although the Xiongsen tiger park, near Guilin in south-east China, appears to be a depressingly typical Third World zoo, with a theme park restaurant and open areas where tigers roam, it actually hides a far more sinister secret: it’s a factory farm breeding tigers to be eaten and to be made into wine.
In row upon row of sheds, hundreds of tigers are incarcerated in battery-like cages which they never leave until they are slaughtered.
Visitors to the park can dine on strips of stir-fried tiger with ginger and Chinese vegetables. Also on the menu are tiger soup and a spicy red curry made with tenderised strips of the big cat. Visitors can wash it all down with a glass or two of wine made from Siberian tiger bones.
A waitress at the farm’s restaurant tells me proudly: ‘The tiger meat is produced here. It’s our business. When Government officials come here, we kill a tiger for them so they have fresh meat. Other visitors are given meat from tigers killed in fights. We now have 140 tigers in the freezer.
“We also sell lion meat, bear’s paw, crocodile and snake. The bear’s paw has to be ordered in advance as it takes a long time to cook.”
Hundreds of tigers are incarcerated in battery-like cages by the Chinese TCM Cultists
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The waitress clearly does not care that she is selling meat and wine from endangered species. She is not worried that selling them is against Chinese and international law, and helps to fuel the poaching that is driving tigers to extinction.
Tigers and other endangered species are being reared on an industrial scale throughout China, despite international treaties forbidding this. The Mail discovered three factory farms breeding tigers in China. The Guilin farm alone has 1,300 tigers, including the incredibly rare and elusive Siberian sub-species.
It rears and slaughters Bengal, South China and White tigers. More than 300 African lions and 400 Asiatic black bears are also reared here for food and traditional Chinese medicines.
The Chinese authorities claim that farms like the one at Guilin are a vital part of the country’s conservation efforts, and that they will one day release these endangered creatures back into the wild.
But my visit to the Xiongsen Bear andTiger Mountain Village shows their real intention could not be more different. For the fact is that these animals could never survive in the wild.
Having spent their lives in tiny, battery-style units, they cannot hunt and would be dead within days of being released. Each shed at the tiger farm – and I saw at least 100 – houses between three and five tigers in a space no larger than a typical family living room. In relative terms, they have about as much space as a battery hen.
The animals have all been bred on the farm. The cubs are taken from their mothers at three months and put in a kindergarten. I saw around 30 tiger cubs in this creche, where they stay until they are old enough to be transferred to the battery units.
Many of the youngsters kept leaping at the fencing. The younger ones simply wanted to play like kittens. The older cubs were already showing signs of stress.
Tigers are naturally solitary creatures that roam over dozens of square miles, so it’s hardly surprising that life in the cages drives them insane. I saw numerous examples of stress-related repetitive behaviour.
The mature animals paced back and forth across their cages for hours on end – three steps forward, three steps back. Some hurled themselves at the bars of their prison cells, while others simply stared into space.
Over-crowding drives the creatures to attack each other, often resulting in death. Officially it is only the tigers killed in such fights that can be eaten or turned into wine. But it is clear that many of them die as a result of a bullet to the head.
They are not the only animals killed. For entertainment, visitors to the animal park can watch the ‘live killing exhibition’, a sick spectacle in which animals are ‘hunted’ and torn to pieces by tigers while onlookers cheer.
I watched in horror as a young cow was stalked and caught by a tiger. Its screams filled the air as it struggled.
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So Visit China – see its wildlife, taste its wildlife, souvenir its wildlife!Not sure what TCM says how Panda Parts heal you or give you a hard on?
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A wild tiger would dispatch its prey within moments, but these tigers’ natural killing skills have been blunted by years of captivity. The tiger tried to kill – tearing, biting at the cow’s body in a pathetic-looking frenzy – but it simply didn’t know how. Eventually, the keepers stepped in and put the cow out of its misery.
Virtually all the tigers from the Guilin farm end up at a winery 100 miles to the north, their carcasses dumped in huge vats of rice wine and left to rot for up to nine years.
The Chinese believe that the tiger’s strength passes into the wine as its body decomposes. They also believe that it is a powerful medicine that wards off arthritis, strengthens bones and acts as a general tonic.
Smelling like a mixture of methylated spirits, antiseptic and congealed meat, it is difficult to believe that anyone would willingly drink it, and yet people pay up to £100 a pint for it.
The Guilin farm also has its own small winery and acts as a distribution centre across China. The distribution manager showed me around with a Chinese tourist.
A small dingy office acts as the nerve centre of the warehouse. On the wall were charts showing that day’s deliveries of tiger wine across China. Six crates were sent to Wuhan and another to Tianjing. Six crates of ‘powdered bear’ were sent to Shanghai. Numerous other cities and countless deliveries were also listed.
We were led into the warehouse, where I was hit with the disgusting and potent aroma of tiger wine. I was led past countless crates containing the foul-smelling brew. In the corner of the warehouse was a huge brown earthenware vat. It must have held at least 50 gallons, and its contents were probably worth around £12,000.
“We have three ages of wine,” said the manager. “Three, six or nine-years old. It helps with arthritis and strengthens old people’s bones.”
She slid aside the lid of the earthenware vat to reveal a reddish-brown liquid with an overpowering smell of meths. A piece of string was pulled out of the vat. Attached to the end was a tiger’s rib cage. Small slivers of dark red flesh could still be seen clinging to the bone, even though it had probably been in the vat for at least three years.
The manager then filled up an old plastic water bottle with a pint of wine and handed it to my fellow tourist. He paid £30 for it.
Whatever westerners think of tiger wine, the Chinese regard it as a potent drink with almost magical qualities. In the past, a Chinese doctor may have prescribed small quantities of wine for a short period of time.
But in recent years, big companies have moved into the market and industrialised all parts of the industry. Now the wine is becoming an essential drink for China’s corrupt bureaucrats and the nation’s nouveaux riches.
Conservationists say tiger farming is not only barbaric, it could lead to the animal’s extinction in the wild.
“It is stimulating demand for meat and wine, and this will inevitably lead to more poaching,” says Grace Gabriel, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
“It costs £5,000 to raise a tiger from a cub to maturity in one of these farms, while it costs no more than £20 in India to poach one. On the market, a dead tiger can fetch £20,000.
“With such a huge margin, it is inevitable that more people will poach wild tigers if demand increases,” she adds. “There are only a few thousand tigers left in the wild, and the last thing they need is increased demand for their body parts.”
If present trends continue, tigers could be extinct in the wild within a decade. Three subspecies have already vanished. Chinese tigers are down to a pitiful 20 animals in the wild and are “functionally extinct”.
There are only about 450 Siberian tigers left in Russia’s Far East. The remaining 3-4,000 are sparsely scattered across India, Nepal and South-East Asia.
The trouble is that, as tigers become rarer in the wild, their ‘street value’ increases, which in turn encourages even more poaching.
Tigers have already become extinct in India’s most famous reserve at Sariska. Numbers have plunged in several other reserves, too.
Most of these tigers will have been sold to traders in China. The Chinese authorities do virtually nothing to clamp down on this illegal trade, and many corrupt bureaucrats and police earn substantial sums from it.
And demand is continuing to increase as ever more bizarre uses for tigers are promoted. Tiger whiskers are used to ‘cure’ laziness and protect against bullets. Their brains, when mixed with oil and rubbed on the skin, are promoted as a cure for acne. Penises are used as aphrodisiacs, while hearts apparently impart courage, cunning and strength.
Tiger farmers also have their eyes on the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They hope that a huge influx of tourists will lead to increased demand for tiger wine.
Although it is illegal to trade internationally in such tiger products as wine, the Chinese are lobbying hard to get the law relaxed. This June, the Chinese Government is expected to press the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to allow the trade in ‘medicines’ such as wine produced from farmed tigers.
If agreed, it will lead to a massive increase in tiger farming and tens of thousands of these noble beasts will spend their lives in battery cages.
If the Chinese get their way, then it will almost certainly drive the tigers over the cliff into extinction.
It is almost too late to save this magnificent creature – but not quite.
Toxic Omelette killing all life in the Georges River The EPA in New South Wales (NSW) is accused of ignoring BHP’s coalmine’s toxic contamination of Georges River for over a decade
[Source: ‘Coalmine discharge fouls Australia’s Georges River’, by ‘Jim’, 20100803, Desdemona Despair .net, ^http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/08/coalmine-discharge-fouls-australias.html]
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Ed: The Political Climate Change Fad has negated funding of the Environment Protection Authority from critical Pollution Control.
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The Upper Georges RiverNear the Dharawal National Park, NSW
[Source: ‘Coalmine discharge fouls Georges River’, ^http://off.oatleypark.com/?p=904]
What is the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) in New South Wales (NSW) doing?
It took an arbitrary bushwalk by a few bushwalkers of the local Macarthur Bushwalkers Club to by chance discover pollution of a remote section of the Georges River down from a coal mine in the Illawarra Region of NSW.
Although they dutifully reported the pollution incident to the NSW EPA, nothing was done, and that was over ten years ago, yet the mine has continued polluting the Georges River.
Labor and Liberal successive NSW Governments have known for more than a decade about this major toxic plume in the Georges River from a coalmine owned by BHP Billiton discharing into the upstream tributary Brennans Creek, but have never pressed the company to stop polluting. Why?
Metals such as zinc, copper, nickel and aluminium, as well as elevated levels of arsenic, are much higher than healthy guidelines, and the contamination has seriously damaged the ecosystem of the river for 15 kilometres downstream from the mine, documents obtained by the Herald show. Environment groups have begun a civil court case against BHP Billiton, which operates the West Cliff coalmine near Campbelltown via a subsidiary company.
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Ed: This is Australia in 2012, not 1912!
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The O’Farrell Government‘s Environment Minister, Robyn Parker, said yesterday:
”The EPA needs to lift their game,” Parker said. ”We’ve put them there, and given them increased powers and increased responsibility, and I need to see some action from them.”
Yet on the same day, Parker has hypocritically announced savage staff cuts to the Environment Department. Internal documents circulated among employees said the Department had committed to cutting costs in kangaroo harvesting programs [Ed: poaching wildlife?] , reducing wilderness and wild river assessments, deregulating wildlife licensing where appropriate, scaling back soil and salinity research and ”reducing effort in our biodiversity programs” i.e. ‘frontline services’.
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Ed: The O’Farrell Government’s Environment Minister, Robyn Parker, has just announced axeing 350 jobs in Environment and Heritage including in the EPA as well as culling many programmes in national parks and animal management, all to save $101 million by 2016. Notably in the O’Farrell Budget 2012-13, the sum of $150,000,000 has been “appropriated to the Treasurer for the recurrent services of the Advance to the Treasurer.” [Clause 18, p16, Budget Paper Appropriation Bill 2012, >Read Bill]
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Jul 2012: Miner BHP Billiton sued for river pollution by its West Cliff Colliery near Appin
Listed Australian Mining Conglomerate, BHP Billiton at its BHP Billiton’s Illawarra Coal subsidiary ‘Endeavour Coal‘, received a court summons yesterday, but did not respond directly to questions. Instead, it publicised a brief PR legal statement stating: ”The company complies with environmental regulations and is reviewing the details of this matter.”
A string of correspondence between the company and the EPA goes back as far as 2002, and shows that the regulator had been aware of discharges from the mine and some of its environmental impacts for most of that time.
The discharges from the mine flow into Brennans Creek, a tributary of the Georges River, and contain pollution from coal washing, water that has been pumped out of the mine tunnels, and stormwater runoff.
But the matter became public only because bushwalkers noticed the pollution and arranged for independent tests by Ian Wright, an environmental scientist at the University of Western Sydney.
About two years ago Dr Wright took a group of students and some rudimentary laboratory equipment to the river and has since returned many times to check and recheck the results.
”I thought ‘it can’t be as bad as it looks’. But I was wrong about that. You could just see the change in the water,” Dr Wright said. ”It was grey coloured. There was a lot of turbidity and coal ash.”
”I thought ‘it can’t be as bad as it looks”
… UWS Environmental Scientist, Dr Ian Wright.
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The scientific results showed startling differences from some of the pristine waterways nearby, on the edge of the Dharawal National Park. The aquatic invertebrates – mainly small insects – that form the basis of the food chain were either very scarce or missing altogether.
”It’s knocking around the food chain and the biology in the Georges River,” Dr Wright said.
”Upstream, we’ve got the full complement of invertebrates that you would expect to find. Downstream, there are groups missing and others at very low abundance. The invertebrate data is consistent with a very polluted or degraded waterway.”
The court case is brought by the National Parks Association of NSW and the Macarthur Bushwalkers Club.
Ed: Natural Justice defended not by the EPA, but by the Macarthur Bushwalkers Club (commercial income zero) versus BHP Billiton (commercial income US$37.5 Billion)
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‘Contaminated water from a coalmine [BHP Billiton’s Endeavour Coal] is flowing into the Georges River, south of Sydney, at levels that are toxic to aquatic life, an independent water quality report has shown.
A plume of saline water stretched along the river for 15 kilometres from the discharge point of an underground mine operated by Endeavour Coal, a subsidiary of BHP Billiton’s Illawarra Coal.
Discharges from Endeavour Coal’s West Cliff Colliery near Appin are ”causing serious water pollution that is very likely to be damaging in-stream ecosystems,” says the report, which was completed on a voluntary basis by researchers from the University of Western Sydney.
But the environmental protection licence for the mine’s wastewater discharge does not limit the amount of saline water that can be flushed into the river.
”I can’t believe that we have put out something called an environment protection licence without any provision to protect the environment,” one of the authors, Dr Ian Wright, a freshwater ecologist at UWS, said. ”Salt at these levels is huge in the context of a river … If you sprayed it on your tomatoes they would wilt.”
The NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water said it was evaluating salt discharge levels that had already been measured by BHP Billiton at the site.
”There is currently no limit for salinity,” a spokesman for the department said. ”However, salinity discharges to Brennans Creek are currently regulated by a staged pollution reduction program under the current environment protection licence.”
When tested last month, the water discharged from the mine was five times more saline than the safe level recommended by the Australian and New Zealand Environment Conservation Council, a standard used by governments to determine water quality for aquatic life. It was nearly 10 times more saline than water in surrounding creeks.
The researchers tested upstream and downstream from the discharge pipe and also the water flowing directly from it.
They concluded that the environmental protection licence ”provides little effective protection to the Georges River” and said it was likely to damage the river’s ecosystems, meaning small invertebrates, fish and related denizens of the local food chain.
The colliery forms part of the company’s proposal to extend a series of coalmines around the township of Appin, so as to be able to extract $2 billion worth of coal a year for 30 years..
‘Thousands of hectares of pristine wilderness near Appin, fought over by mining and environment interests for decades, will be saved and opened to the public as a national park if the NSW Coalition wins government in March.
But the announcement, to be made today by Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell, sets up a potential conflict with BHP Billiton, which still holds the right to mine the billions of dollars worth of coal in the area.
The park, based on the Dharawal State Conservation Area, would add about 6200ha of bushland to the public estate, and provide one of the final pieces to the jigsaw of protected wilderness areas around Sydney.
It is one of the last remaining areas of intact natural bushland near the city, and sits between the Royal National Park and the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
Mr O’Farrell said “no deal has been done” with the mining company, which revised plans to mine under the conservation area in October but retains the right to apply again over the 30-year life of its lease.
Mr O’Farrell, who hiked in the area yesterday with environment groups, acknowledged the Coalition would need to enter into discussions about potential compensation.
“We will be having sensible discussion with the relevant stakeholder to get the best outcome for the community,” he said.
“It’s an area that has significant Aboriginal history, it has significant environmental history. It’s accessible, which means … people could go and visit and have access to our great natural environment.”
A peak environment body, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, and the National Parks Association welcomed the plan.
“We see the Dharawal National Park proposal as an important step towards better conservation in Sydney’s drinking water catchment and beyond,” the council’s director Pepe Clarke said.
Head of the Total Environment Centre Jeff Angel said: “We look forward to more enlightened environment policies from the Coalition and note the new park should be gazetted without a depth restriction in order to protect it from mining.”
A BHP Billiton subsidiary, Illawarra Coal, had planned to dig up $60 billion worth of coal over the next 30 years, much of it from under Dharawal.
The area became the centre of a bitter campaign over reconciling coal mining and clean drinking water catchments. It contains 632 Aboriginal sites, as well as 226 upland swamps filtering water into the Georges River through 46 streams. More than 200 native animal and plant species are found there, including the vulnerable powerful owl, yellow-bellied glider and eastern pygmy possum.
The mining plan was revised in October, after the NSW Planning Assessment Commission released a scathing report into the proposed mine, which was expected to crack the surface of the conservation area and drain some of its water-filtering swamps.
In a landmark review, the commission cited the threat to water catchments and concluded that society would be better off if the coal was left in the ground.
A new plan excluding coal mining under Dharawal and other vulnerable areas is being considered by the Government.
Premier Barry O’Farrell and his Environment Minister Robyn Parker opening Dharawal National Park.
Illegal dumping in The Gully, Katoomba, Blue Mountains
Reported to local council and promptly removed by local council.
(Photo by Editor 20060702, image free in public domain, click to enlarge)
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Illegal dumping is not unique to the Blue Mountains, but it continues to be an ongoing problem in this populated area that is situated upstream of the internationally valued Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
Whereas litter is generally individual items of waste products improperly disposed of in the environment, illegal dumping is generally of a larger scale and premeditated. Both are illegal.
Both are selfish, lazy and disrespectful to society and the environment. The larger problem of illegal dumping involves the deliberate or unauthorised dumping, tipping or burying of waste on land that is not licensed or fit to accept that waste. People illegally dump bags of household rubbish, electronic equipment, furniture, mattresses, industrial wastes, construction and demolition materials, garden waste, packaging, tyres, old cars and soil.
It is bad enough that an increasingly populating society that is also increasingly consuming resources is also increasingly contributing to landfill for its waste. Worse is when that waste is illegally dumped and far worse when it is dumped in places that harm native ecology.
Lawn Clippings dumped at remote Hargreaves Lookout Road, west of Blackheath in protected bushland, Blue Mountains, New South Wales
(Photo by Editor 20080405, image free in public domain, click to enlarge)
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Illegal dumping is more than just unsightly waste in an inappropriate location. It not only reduces property values and costs rate payers a substantial amount of money each year to clean up. Illegal dumping is inherently unnatural which means when dumped in a natural environment, the composition of the waste will have an adverse impact upon the natural ecology – it degrades and spoils local ecology. The waste does not have to be deemed ‘hazardous’ such as toxic chemicals, paints, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or asbestos for instance.
Lawn clippings and woodchips will cause a moist environment for bacteria and flies to breed and after rain the nutrients will flow and contaminate surrounding soils, vegetation and watercourses. This can be lethal to vulnerable and fragile flora and fauna, especially in Australia which naturally has low nutrient soils.
Illegally dumped waste can poison the soil and kill vegetation. The introduced nutrients such as acids will prevent the vegetation from regenerating and dependent wildlife from returning. Illegal dumping leads to long-term contamination of land, waterways, natural springs and groundwater, particularly when the waste is from an industrial source or contaminated soil.
Subsoil and rubble (left) dumped in The Gully (Katoomba), alongside the old race track
(Photo by Editor 20070310, free in public domain, click to enlarge)
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Illegal dumping can be dangerous to people (broken glass, syringes, nappies and medical waste, and carcinogenic substances like asbestos) but also it can attract rodents, insects and other vermin. It can provide an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes and maggots. It can block waterways and stormwater drains, increasing the potential for flooding and erosion, and it can be a potential fire hazard.
The most common cause of illegal dumping in the Blue Mountains is typically on the side of a road where a motorist has carted the waste by trailer.
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Perhaps it is time to outlaw trailers and to replace them with waste collection services only provided by local council.
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After all, if there is no means available to cart waste except by hand, the volume of illegal dumping will be reduced and the ability of illegal dumping to be away from residential areas and in natural areas will also be reduced.
Of course trucks can cart larger quantities of waste, but fewer people have access to trucks. This does not mean that greater regulation cannot be imposed on truck drivers. Perhaps every truck load needs to be registered and inspected by local council authorities, or an effective penalty imposed – say $5000 or a custodial sentence.
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Whatever an effective mix of solutions, unless governments are serious about addressing the problem, illegal dumping shall continue unabated.
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Lenient law enforcement or the absence thereof, contribute to illegal dumping behaviour – and be clear, we are dealing with a human behavioural issue here.
In 2001, hundreds of tonnes of sand and rubble from the Soldiers Pinch upgrade to the Great Western Highway (Mount Victoria) was dumped by the RTA in The Gully over the top of an Upland Swamp. Permission was given by the Blue Mountains City Council, but without any community consultation. Subsequent actions by the Council involved planting on top of the compressed rubble, instead of properly removing it.
(Photo by Editor 20060702, 5 years on from the 2001 dumping little had grown.
Image free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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Shaping correct responsible behaviour requires a combination of a ‘carrot’ incentive and ‘stick’ deterrent approach. If waste is collected from households like weekly garbage, then the incentive for illegal dumping is reduced. Why go to the trouble of driving somewhere to dump when it can be collected from your residence? Similarly, if the cost of collection is low, the incentive to utilise the collection service is stronger.
As the cost of landfill fees is rising due to reducing number of suitable tip sites, some people in order to avoid disposal fees at landfills will choose to illegally dump to save money. the risk of getting caught is low and this is the core problem in trying to change this bad behaviour.
Over 20 tonnes of rubble dumped in The Gully by Sydney Water as part of its Sewerage Amplification Project in 2005
(Photo by Editor 20120624, free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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Penalties for illegal dumping vary around the country. For instance, in Queensland under its Waste Reduction and Recycling Act 2011, there are a range of offences for litter and illegal dumping from $200 on the spot fine for littering through to $16,500 for illegal dumping of large domestic items such as fridges, garden refuse and construction material.
But most offenders do not get caught because the scale of monitoring is unwieldy and practically ubiquitous.
In Victoria , a landfill levy on all households has helped to fund a dedicated Illegal Dumping Strike Force team as part of the Environment Protection Authority in that State. It’s tasks are to support businesses to understand their legal requirements for managing waste and recyclable material, work with its council partners and other government agencies to share intelligence about dumping offences and hotspots, and to investigate and enforce against incidents of large-scale industrial waste dumping.
Household garbage illegally dumped in The Gully near the South Katoomba Rural Fire Brigade, July 2012
(Photo by Editor, 20120703, free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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In the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Environmental Management Strategy (HCCREMS) in its Illegal Dumping project is seeking to address illegal dumping in the region through a range of new initiatives.
Designing and trialing a number of enforcement campaigns to gain further data on illegal dumping ‘hot spots’ and determine effective campaign styles
Trialing different illegal dumping deterrence methods (barriers, cameras, gates, etc) to determine their effectiveness at stopping illegal dumping
Collating illegal dumping data, take photographs and coordinate media and community awareness activities.
Establishing an Illegal Dumping Regional Database using Microsoft Access database software to collate and analyse data collected by councils, from dumping sites. All incidents are entered into the database, which is linked to GIS and is able to produce maps of the locations in each council area.
Allowing Councils to use the intelligence generated from the database to determine appropriate and effective inspection patrol regimes and where access control measures can be installed.
Encouraging all councils to record incidents of illegal dumping on the incident forms developed by the Hunter Regional Illegal Dumping Group and forward these into HCCREMS for entry into the database.
Sample Record of Illegal Dumping reported to Blue Mountains Council by residents
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Jan 2008: Dumped Garden Refuse opposite 16 Garden St, Katoomba
To The General Manager, BMCCEmailed to council@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
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‘Sir,
I request for the removal of dumped garden refuse within a bushland adjacent Carlton Street, Katoomba, opposite 16 Garden Street (located at the corner of Garden St and Carlton St). The garden refuse contains weeds and is near a large rock.
Dumped building waste (opposite a recently built house at 20 Carlton St) and cut down trees are also present within the bushland.
Please see attached photographs.
Also, I recommend that Council arrange for its ranger to inform nearby local residents that it is illegal to dump garden refuse and building waste under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act and cut down trees under the Tree Preservation Order. Garden refuse smothers native vegetation, spreads weeds and increases bush fire danger.
As you will be aware, the cutting down of native trees for firewood reduces habitat and creates wood smoke pollution.’
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Apr 2007: Opposite Megalong Lodge, 40 Acacia Street Katoomba
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To The General Manager, BMCCEmailed to council@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
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‘Sir,
I request Council removes a very large amount of dumped garden refuse within escarpment bushland, located adjacent Cliff Drive and across the road from Megalong Lodge, 40 Acacia St, Katoomba.
The dumped refuse is believed to have come from Megalong Lodge, as it is made up of white driveway pebbles, pine needles, Agapanthus and Rhododendron cuttings found on this property. A bush trail in direct line to the property also contains the cuttings. Grass clippings have also been dumped.
Urgent removal of the garden refuse is recommended, since exotic grass is beginning to grow within the escarpment bushland. The dumping was discovered in April 2007. Please see attached photographs.
Also request the ranger to inform nearby local residents that it is illegal to dump garden refuse under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act. Garden refuse is pollution and smothers native vegetation, spreads weeds and increases bush fire danger.‘
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Dec 2007: Outside Katoomba Golf Club
To The General Manager, BMCCEmailed to council@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
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‘Sir,
I request for the removal of dumped grass clippings within bushland at Katoomba Golf Course, opposite 165 Narrow Neck Road, Katoomba. Dumped clippings are located next to the golf course entrance turnstile. The front lawn of 161 Narrow Neck Road had just been mown at the time of discovery of the still green clippings.Please see the attached photograph.
Also, I request a Council ranger to inform nearby local residents that it is illegal to dump grass cuttings under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act. Grass cuttings smother native vegetation, spread weeds and increase bush fire danger.’
The Human Pathogen is now at 7 Billion. By 2050, due to be 10 billion if fertility in all countries converges to ‘Replacement Level’[Source: ^United Nations (May 2011), >Read PDF]
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“The high projection variant, whose fertility is just half a child above that in the medium variant, produces a world population of 10.6 billion in 2050 and 15.8 billion in 2100.”
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Australia’s Prime Minister Gillard’s Labor-Greens Coalition is facilitating an open drawbridge working to irresponsibly encourage free-flow illegal immigration.
But Australia’s real big picture on overpopulation is through Sydney and Melbourne International Airports, where Labor’s 200,000 annual immigration intake policy adds 5.6 million tonnes of CO2 per annum to Australia’s global contribution.
THE CALCULATION:
The average Australian on a per capita basis is said to emit about 28 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually, based on the accredited Garnaut Review.
Labor-Greens Coalition current national immigration policy of 190,000 per year, plus allowing for The Greens Party’s encouraged 7,000 boat illegals p.a. at the current rate (2883 arrivals for 2012 to May) , plus allowing for visa overstays, so say Australia’s net immigration is 200,000 per year.
This translates to Labor-Greens Coalition immigration policy adds 5.6 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 emissions per year (200,000 x 28 tonnes each).
“In the twelve months to June 2009, Australia’s emissions were an estimated 544 Mt CO2-e (million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent).”
So roughly, the Labor-Greens Coalition Immigration Policy systemically adds 1% of CO2 emissions per year (CALC: 5.6Mt/544Mt).
Labor-Greens Coalition’s long-winded and over-promising Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency hyping: “The Australian Government is strongly committed to reducing Australia’s carbon pollution… The plan to move to a Clean Energy Future will cut pollution by at least 5% compared with 2000 levels by 2020”
But Labor-Greens Coalition’s blind immigration policy adds 5.6Mt (1%) per year to 2020, which becomes a total of 20% by 2020. So Labor-Greens Coalition’s hype of 5% reduction is counteracted by 20% more from immigration. So by 2020, Australia will have an extra 15% CO2 emissions! And that doesn’t factor in all the breeding over the next 20 years.
CONCLUSION: The Carbon Tax and CO2 reduction efforts and costs are wasteful and futile, while immigration remains as it is.
On Climate Change, the Australian Labor Party has been hoodwinked into extreme groupthink, akin to naive teenagers being lured to join the Church of Scientology under clever false pretenses.
In Australia, jobs are being lost, pollution continues and no-one is benefiting from Labor’s idealistic and unpragmatic Climate Change policy, all the while the Australian Labor Party maximises export of its greenhouse gas emitting coal to China, Japan, India and Europe. It’s like trying to export coal and pretend it is exempt from the Climate Change KPIs.
Labor is politically playing at crusading feudalism – taxing local peasants to fund costly mis-adventures abroad.
Gillard yesterday gifted $1, 000, 000,000 of struggling Australian taxpayers to Afghanistan. This woman is dangerous with Australia’s national overdraft account!
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‘Labor’s Carbon Tax is tokenistic, futile and domestically corrosive, so long as Australia exports coal’.
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Pollution is a human manifestation without debate.
Globally it has worsened since the environmental alarm about it in the 1960s.
But since ‘pollution’ has been hijacked and re-branded by the Climate Change lobby, the clear and simple pollution message has been complicated, distorted, expanded, and re-theorised.
What was a simple visual problem to many, is now politicised with doubt.
The Climate Change dogma has undermined what was just a very clear, simple and unequivocal environmental problem of human pollution.
‘Pollution’ remains still the big problem, whether the political fad is to label it ‘climate change’ or not.
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Pollution is still caused by heavy industry, road transport and by high per-capita consumption. Combined they contribute to wildlife extinctions – but try finding a PhD funded by NPWS on this? Where is our Pollution Policy? Where is our Population Policy?
The fire tragedy afflicted Australia’s legendary ‘Conservation Cradle’
A scorched Grose Valley from Evan’s Lookout, looking north up Govett’s Gorge
(Photo by Editor taken 20061209, free in public domain. Free Large Image)
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A heritage tragedy unfolds
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A simple lighting stike ignited remote bushland in rugged terrain within the Blue Mountains National Park, over 5km north of the township of Blackheath on 20061113.
Innocuously, the ignition started off on hilly Burra Korain Ridge,It was far from settlement but during relatively calm weather and low temperature, so it was not suppressed but ‘monitored’..then the wind picked up.
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It and a second ignition west were allowed to continue burning for days until they eventually coalesced with compounded backburning into a firestorm some ten days later down in the Grose Valley. On 20061122, the prized Grose Valley and its iconic and precious Blue Gum Forest were incinerated under a pyrocumulus cloud of towering wood smoke that could be seen from the Sydney coast a hundred kilometres away. Some 14,070 hectares of National Park habitat was burnt. The tragedy did not so much as ‘strike‘ from the lighting itself, but as Blue Mountains residents we saw it ‘unfold‘ over many days and nights under the trusteeship of Bushfire Management.
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..ten days later
The pyrocumulus cloud of a screaming, dying Grose Valley precious to many, including wildlife
The Grose Valley and its Blue Gum Forest and wildlife burning to death on 20061122
A greenhouse gas estimate was not taken.
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Community shock, sadness and overwhelming sense of loss
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How was this allowed to happen?
In the days that followed, many Blue Mountains residents and especially the many conservationists familiar with the Grose Valley and Blue Gum Forest over many years became deeply shocked at learning about the loss of this magnificent sacred preserved forest – its tall 300+ year old rare Blue Gums (Eucalytus deanii).
Without knowledge of personal accounts, one respects that the dramatic scenes of the smoke and fire inflicted personal trauma with many, given so many people’s long and established personal knowledge, affinity, love, awe and respect for..
‘The Blue Gum‘
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The Habitat Advocate reaches out to these people (doesn’t matter the fact that years have passed) and we choose to express the view of a need to tell truths and to seek some sense of learned maturity from it all. For the Grose Valley contained many tracks, many walks and many special places if one knew where to look. Popes Glen and from Govetts Leap down under Bridal Veil following the popular Rodriguez Pass to Junction Rock then Acacia Flat and the Blue Gum Forest in the heart of the Grose. Many special places includes Beauchamp Falls, Docker Buttress, Pulpit Rock, Lockley Pylon, Anvil Rock lookout, Perrys Lookdown, Hanging Rock, Pierces Pass, Asgard Swamp, and the inaccessible Henson Glen and David Crevasse gorge.
To this editor, the return in 2007 to a previously sacred special, but incinerated Neates Glen was emptying in spirit. There was heartfelt shock and dismay by many local conservationists familiar with the iconic Blue Gum Forest who became deeply saddened by the tragedy.
Neates Glen, as it was But since incinerated, not by the wildife, but by deliberately lit ‘backburning’
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Phone calls and emails were exchanged with many locals wanting to know the extent of the damage and whether ‘the Blue Gum‘ could recover. The original fire had been fanned westward from Burra Korain Head spotting along the Blackheath Walls escarpment, but then decended and burnt through Perrys Lookdown, Docker Buttress and down and through the Blue Gum. Deliberately lit backburns had descended and burnt out Pierces Pass (Hungerfords Track) through rainforest into the Grose and everyone had seen the pyrocumulus mushroom cloud towering 6000 feet above the Grose on the 22nd.
There was an immense sense of loss. The relatively small Blue Gum Forest, perhaps just several hectares, was unique by its ecological location, by its grand age and by its irreplaceability. The sense of loss was perhaps more pronounced amongst the more mature conservationists, now lesser in number, who knew its original saviours of the 1930s – Alan Rigby, Myles Dunphy and other dedicated bushwalkers who had championed to save it from logging 81 years ago.
The conservation heritage of The Blue Gum Forest dates back to Australia’s earliest conservation campaign from 1931For this reason ‘The Blue Gum Forest’ has been passionately respected as Australia’s ‘Cradle of Conservation’
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The region is home to threatened or rare species of conservation significance living within the rugged gorges and tablelands, like the spotted-tailed quoll, the koala, the yellow-bellied glider, the long-nosed potoroo, the green and golden bell frog and the Blue Mountains water skink. Many would have perished in the inferno, unable to escape. The Grose is a very quiet and sterile place now, with only birds. But to the firefighters, these were not human lives or property.
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Deafening silence from the ‘Firies’ naturally attractedcommunity enquiry and suspicion
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The day after the firestorm that enveloped the Grose Valley, the wind subsided and from 20061123 through to the final mopping up date of 20061203, the 2006 Grose Bushfire and its many ember spotfires came under bushfire management control and were ultimately extinguished or else considered to be ‘benign‘.
It is important to note that during the entire bushfire event from 20061113 through to 20061203, only NSW Rural Fire Service ‘Major Fire Updates’ on its website and headline journalism appeared in the local Blue Mountains Gazette newspaper. Initially, the community, conservationists and ‘firies’ were respectfully passive. In the immediate aftermath of the fire from 20061204 through to the weekly issue of the Blue Mountains Gazette on 20061129, the local community, conservationists and ‘firies’ were letter silent in the paper. It was a combination of shock, preoccupation with the emergency and respectful anticipation of communication from the bushfire authorities.
One can assume here that given the scale of the tragedy, many in the Blue Mountains community were respectfully patient in anticipation of an assured announcement from Bushfire Management or some communication process. But none eventuated.
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Injustice
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The following weekly issue of the Gazette was published on 20061129, but no communication from Bushfire Management. Only dismissive bureaucratic statements came from Parks and Wildlife’s Regional Director Geoff Luscombe with a tone suggesting minimal damage and business-as-usual.
This was the article:
6th Dec: ‘Park managers take stock as smoke clears’
‘Hundreds of fire-fighters are celebrating a return to normality this week after cooler weather and an intense two-week campaign by volunteers and professionals brought a fire in the Grose Valley under control.
According to the Rural Fire Service this good weather, combined with a thorough mop-up operation and ongoing infra-red monitoring, means flare-ups are unlikely.However the 15,000 hectare burnt area – including the iconic Blue Gum Forest – is likely to remain closed for the “foreseeable future” due to safety concerns and regeneration.
Geoff Luscombe, regional manager of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), said the fact that only part of the Grose Valley burnt meant many animals had been able to seek refuge.
“Many of the Australian plants and animal species have learnt not only to survive fire but to exploit it,” he said. However he confirmed fears that the fire had burnt Blue Gum Forest – a Mecca for bushwalkers and conservationists in the heart of the Grose Valley.
“Blue gums aren’t a particularly fire-tolerant species,” he said. “Fire last burnt through Blue Gum in 1994. The effects of this fire we don’t know yet and we may not know for many months to come.”
A botanist has been sent to inspect the area and there could be ongoing monitoring.Mr Luscombe did not wish to comment on how the fire was handled due to a lengthy absence, but Inspector Jack Tolhurst from the Blue Mountains District Rural Fire Service has warded off any potential criticism.
“I think at the moment we should be looking at the positive,” said Inspector Tolhurst. “The fire is contained . . . It’s been a very long campaign but at the end of the day we haven’t lost any property or lives and half the Grose Valley at least remains intact.”
A fire that broke out near Zig-Zag Railway last week has also been contained. [Ed. According to inside reports, Zig Zag Railway Station was accidentally firebombed by an aerial helicopter attempting backburning].
“We’ve had a lot of help from a wide range of people. We’ve had wonderful support from the community . . . it was a wonderful effort from everyone.”
Meanwhile the hard work has only just begun for another group of dedicated volunteers.Blue Mountains WIRES are expecting to rescue a number of fire-affected native animals in coming months as they wander into residential areas for food and water.
“The arboreal animals – possums and gliders – they come to grief,” said chairperson Greg Keightly. “Birds suffer heat stress and smoke inhalation. They’re going to be flying around bewildered.”
He said residents who see native wildlife in urban areas should keep pets inside, provide water off the ground in a place safe from predators, and avoid the temptation to feed wildlife.
“Things come up for months after fires,” said Mr Keightley.“Do ring us (4754-2946) if you thing something is injured or doing it tough,” he said.
The national park south of the Great Western Highway, and the lookout at Govetts Leap, are open to visitors.For information on closures call 4787-8877 or visit www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au’
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Mismanagement?
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So the silence from the firies, from Bushfire Management and from the New South Wales Government ultimately responsible and accountable, was deafening. It was as if the entire Firie fraternity had gone to ground in a code of silence behind closed doors.
So naturally the community response was that something smelt fishy. This communication intransigence was a public relations blunder by Bushfire Management, to its detriment.
Then filtered out accounts of crazy operational mismanagement during the bushfire and of bush arson by the firies behind the roadblocks beyond the public gaze.
Rumours circulated that the initial ignition had been left for burn in the critical first few days of 13th November and 14th November up on Burra Korrain Ridge because it wasn’t right next to a road so that fire trucks could get to it. The fire had even been abandonned. Then the wind picked up and it spread. Airborne firefighting was not called in until a Section 44 incident declaration was effected on 15th November.
A second fire nearby to the west near Hartley Vale, purported also lit by dry lightning on 14th Nov, had attracted broadscale backburning from the Hartley Vale Road. But the backburn got out of control, ripped up the valley fanned by winds and crossed over the Darling Causeway on to the Blackheath Escarpment and the Upper Grose to join up with the first blaze. The onground evidence shows that this was a hazard reduction burn starting from alongside the Hartley Vale Road just east of the village of Hartley Vale.
Then came the account of senior bushfire management at the Rural Fire Service headquarters at Homebush ordering a ‘headburning’ a new 10km fire front along the south of the Bells Line of Road into the Grose Valley. Perhaps the NSW Government had stepped in demanding action. Perhaps RFS headquarters response was a series of overreactions, albeit too late and to be seen to be now ‘acting’ was only compounding the fire risk to the Grose . Apparently, the RFS Commissioner had even touted imposing a massive defacto hazard reduction north of the Bells Line of Road right though the vast wilderness of the Wollemi National Park, to somehow head off another fire on 20th November some 80km away north of Wiseman’s Ferry, but that strategy was rejected in a heated operational debate. [“The Wollemi National Park is part of the World Heritage Area and covers 488,620 hectares. Important values of the park include the spectacular wild and rugged scenery, its geological heritage values, its diversity of natural environments, the occurrence of many threatened or restricted native plant and animal species including the Wollemi pine and the broad-headed snake, significant plant communities, the presence of a range of important Aboriginal sites and the park’s historic places which are recognised for their regional and national significance.” – Wollemi NP Plan of Management, April 2001]
Even the Zig Zag tourist railway station was apparently accidently firebombed by an overzealous airborne firefighter starting backburning en mass
Then came the account of Blackheath residents who had their houses subjected to the risk of a deliberately lit backburn during the course of the bushfire. Despite the out of control wildfire being many miles to the north west of Blackheath, a broadscale backburn (some say is was really a ‘defacto hazard reduction‘) was lit along the fire trail below the electricity transmission line near Govetts Leap lookout. But it got out of control briefly and threatened to burn houses in Connaught Road. Indeed the entire Blackheath Escarpment fire from Hat Hill Road south through Govetts Leap Lookout and Ebans Head was started deliberately as a ‘strategic’ backburn.
Blackheath Escarpment completely burnt (top) for hectares, looking south from Hat Hill Road
(Photo by editor 20061209, free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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The rural property east of Hartley Vale where on 20070207 there was clear evidence of hazard reduction (HR)commencing only from the south side Hartley Vale Road, opposite.Eucalypts were burned only at the base, but further up the hill the tree crowns had been burned.The HR had quickly got out of control and then crossed over the Darling Causeway.
(Photo by editor 20070207, free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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Once two weeks had passed since the dramatic firestorm and with only silence emanating from Bushfire Management and the NSW Government, local people had had enough and they wanted answers.
Some 143 local yet disparate conservationists via ‘jungle drums’ met up, discussed the issue, united informally and agreed to go public. They informally formed the ‘Grose Fire Group‘ and contributed to a fighting fund some $1700 odd and became vocal. Two weeks after the Grose Valley Firestorm the Grose Fire Group managed a full page open letter in the local Blue Mountains Gazette on 20061206 on page 13. It was directed to the ultimate authority responsible and accountable for the Grose Fire Tragedy, the NSW Government. The Premier at the time was Labor’s Morris Iemma MP. The NSW Member for the NSW Seat of Blue Mountains as well as NSW Minister for Environment at the time was Bob Debus MP.
Those who valued the Blue Gum Forest challenged those responsible for its protection. The tragedy certainly stirred and polarised the Blue Mountains community. Conservationists naturally wanted answers, an enquiry, a review of bushfire prevention and management from:
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service under the direction of Regional Director Geoff Luscombe
NSW Rural Fire Service under the direction of Commissioner Phil Koperberg
Blue Mountains Bushfire Management Committee aligned with Blue Mountains City Council and chaired by Councillor Chris Van Der Kley.
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‘Grose Valley Fire – World Heritage takes a hit’
“The Blue Gum Forest, birth-place of the modern conservation movement, was badly damaged by the Grose fire on Wednesday the 22nd of November. If this precious forest was a row of houses, then there would automatically be a major investigation into how the fire was fought. The fact that this major loss of our natural heritage is only now becoming known is testimony to the prevailing attitudes of those controlled the media spin during this recent fire event,” said Keith Muir director of the Colong Foundation for Wilderness.
“Until today the overall perception from the media was that this fire was a good one. No houses or lives lost”, Mr Muir said.
“There where no media updates on the struggle to save Blue Gum. No the reports of success in saving fire sensitive rare plants and rainforests along the escarpment edge. All the media reports spoke of bushland burnt; not on the success of any strategy to minimise the impact on the World Heritage listed national park, while saving lives and property”, he said.
“The Blue Mountains National Park Fire Management Strategy 2004 sets out all the necessary actions to protect the natural environment, as well as life and property. Yet for some reason it appears at this stage that the fire was not fought according to that agreed Strategy, as far as its provisions on natural heritage were concerned”, said Mr Muir.
“Increased fire is a major threat to World Heritage values of the Greater Blue Mountains national parks. Unless we develop and implement better strategies to defend the bush, as well as lives and property, then climate change will make this threat much worse,” Mr Muir said.
“The fire management strategies and techniques undertaken during the fire need to be re-examined to ensure the diversity of the Blue Mountains forests is protected into the future,” he said.
“Future fire management requires the feedback that only an inquiry into the Grose Valley Fire can achieve. Such an inquiry should not be taken as a criticism of those involved in fighting fire. It is an opportunity to ensure that everyone stays on fully board with future efforts to minimise fire damages,” Mr Muir said.’
What exacerbated the conflict was not some much that the bushfire had got out of control and had raged through the precious Grose Valley per se, but it was more the defensive, aloof reaction by ‘Firies’ which escalated into a barrage of defensive and vocal acrimony against any form of criticism of the firefighters.
In the face of such palatable denial by the Firies,of any accountability the initial shock and sadness within the local community within days quickly manifested into outrage and anger, and even to blame and accusations.
Most conservationists however felt a right to question and seek specific answers from Bushfire Management about the Grose Fires, for lessons to be learned, for fundamental changes to be made to bushfire management policy, bushfire fighting resourcing and practices, all simply so that such a tragedy should not be repeated.
But the key problem was that the ‘Firies‘ adopted an ‘in denial’ approach to a community suffering loss. Many Firies denied that they had done anything wrong and rejected any criticism by conservationists. Some Firies vented their anger in the local media attacking anyone who dared criticise. Clearly, Bushfiore Management’s debriefing and review of the bushfire in its immediate aftermath was poorly managed.
Underlying the conflict was the Firies urban fire fighting mandate to ‘protect lives and property” – that is human ones, not forests, not wildlife. Whereas what emerged with many in the Blue Mountains community was the implicit expectation that the World Heritage Area is an important natural asset to be protected, including from devastating bushfire.
The Grose Valley Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area
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Hence, it was a conflict between differing cultural value systems. It was about recognition of the value of the natural assets of the Blue Gum Forest and the Grose Valley within the Bue Mountains National Park within the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
The iconic Blue Gum Forest
(Acacia Flat, before the pyrocumulus firestorm of 22nd November 2006)
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The iconic Blue Gum Forest
(The aftermath)
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20 Sep: (2 months prior)…‘Fire crews prepare’
[Source: ‘Fire crews prepare’, Blue Mountains Gazette, 20060926]
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‘With warmer days just around the corner and continuing dry weather the Blue Mountains Region National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is again undertaking rigorous preparation for the coming fire season.
“Every year around this time the NPWS run a number of fire preparedness days to ensure staff and fire-fighting equipment are fully prepared for the season ahead,” said Minister for Environment Mr Bob Debus.
NSW Labor Minister for Environment Mr Bob Debus MP
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“Fire preparedness days require fire-fighting staff to check their personal protective equipment, inspect fire-fighting pumps and vehicles and ensure that communication equipment and procedures are in place and working before the fire season begins.”
Mr Debus said a number of exercises, including four-wheel drive and tanker driving, first aid scenarios, entrapment and burnovers, were also employed to re-familiarise staff with all aspects of fighting fires.
“Burnovers, where fire-fighters are trapped in a vehicle as fire passes over it, is one of the worst case scenarios a fire-fighter can face so pre-season practice is critical to ensure that their response is second nature”, he said. “Local fire-fighters have also undergone stringent fitness assessments to make sure they are prepared for the physical demands of fire-fighting – like being winched from a helicopter into remote areas with heavy equipment, to work long hours under very hot and dry conditions wearing considerable layers of protective clothing”, Mr Debus explained.
Mr Debus said that fire preparedness and fitness assessment days worked in conjunction with a number of other initiatives as part of a year-long readiness campaign for the approaching summer.
“Over the past 12 months, NPWS officers have conducted more than 150 hazard reduction burns on national park land across NSW.”
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“Nineteen hazard reduction burns have been conducted in the Blue Mountains region covering nmore than 4500 ha” ~Bob Debus MP
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Mr Debus said that while fire-fighting authorities are preparing themselves to be as ready as possible for flare ups and major fires, home-owners in fire prone areas of teh Blue Mountains should also be readying themselves for the approaching season. “Now is the time to start cleaning gutters, ember proof houses and sheds, prepare fire breaks and clear grass and fuel away from structures”, he said.’
‘Residents in the historic Hawkesbury River village of St Albans prepared for the worst as raging bushfires neared. Their predicament came with a fresh fire outbreak in a remote corner of Wollemi National Park, 73 kilometres north of Windsor about 2pm. A Rural Fire Service spokesman said the blaze had destroyed 450 hectares by 3pm. It was being fanned by a string of north-westerly winds and had jumped Putty Road, causing its closure to traffic between Singeleton and Richmond. Winds of up to 80kmh forecast for the early hours of tomorrow are expected to drive the fire towards St Albans. About 45 Rural Fire Service volunteers with 10 tankers have been deployed to protect the small community as residents tried to safeguard their homes from floating embers. At least two helicopters were in the air to assist the operation.
Wildfire, spot fires and back burning across the Blackheath plateau
(Photo by Rural Fire Service)
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Blue Mountains:
‘Meanwhile a spokesman for the RFS, Andrew Shade, told (the Sydney Morning Herald) firefighters were waiting to see if changing winds would affect the Blue Mountains fires, which jumped containment lines overnight. “The fire is across about 7000 hectares; we’ve got 18 aircraft working the fire, including two sky cranes, [and] 400 personnel at the fire on about 60 trucks.”
..Other fires continue to burn across the state, with a number of fires across 7000 hectares in the Hunter Valley burning in remote and inaccessible areas. Two other fires, near Forbes and Bathurst respectively, are both contained but the RFS has expressed concerns over the weather and its ability to cause a change in the nature of the the two blazes. Firefighters set up a containment line to protect the outskirts of Blackheath in the Blue Mountains.
Rural Fire Service Commissioner Phil Koperberg said today winds gusting up to 80kmh were predicted for about 3am tomorrow – a time when firefighting planes are unable to fly. At a news conference in Katoomba, Mr Koperberg described the present threat to Blue Mountain towns as “fairly serious … not grave”. However, he urged residents to clean fuel away from their homes as a precaution. This afternoon the most intense efforts were along a containment line at the northern end of Hat Hill Road at Anvil Rock. If that line was breached, the outskirts of Blackheath could be under threat, he said. Firefighters expected wind changes in the area between 4pm and 6pm today. The Bells Line of Road remains closed and the Blue Mountains National Park will remain closed until further notice.
The Great Western Highway and the Darling Causeway were open but drivers were advised to proceed with caution, with smoke likely to affect the roads. A total fire ban now applies in all but the north-east corner of the state as temperatures in the high 30s (Celsius), the strong winds and low humidity combine to produce potentially savage conditions…’
‘Thick smoke continues to drift across the Blue Mountains as the largest firefighting and backburning operation in the region since January 2003 enters its second week.
Hundreds of RFS volunteers, NSW Fire Brigades, SES and NPWS personnel, a number of remote firefighting units and 16 waterbombing aircraft are enlisted under a Section 44 declaration with a mission of containing and then attacking bushfires burning in the Grose Valley. The fires are believed to have been ignited by lightning on Monday, November 13 and at the time of going to press had burnt out 3800 hectares of bushland and private parkland in the valley below Blackheath, Mt Victoria, Bell and Mt Tomah.
No homes were under threat on Tuesday morning, but the RFS almost doubled its resources in the Blue Mountains on Monday night following unfavourable weather conditions.
The NSW FireBrigades also deployed extra fire engines and firefighters ot the Blue Mountains on Tuesday.
The large Blue Mountains bushfire broke its containment lines at Anvil Rock about 11 pm on Monday. Earlier, a comprehensive backburning operation involving 300 firefighters commenced on Saturday night between Blackheath and Mt Victoria to protect the townships if conditions worsened. A second phase began along Bells Line of Road between the Darling Causeway and Mt Tomah on Monday morning, continuing to Pierces Pass picnic area to the south.
The backburning activities can cause heavy smoke to linger in residential areas and residents are advised to close windows and doors. An emergency operations centre is active in Katoomba under the control of Local Emergency Operating Controller and Blue Mountains Police Local Area Commander Patrick Paroz, with the RFS as the lead combat agency.
Blue Mountains RFS community safety officer Eric Berry said remote area firefighting units will continue to attack the fire at the fringe and a fleet of 16 aircraft based in Medlow Bath airfield will operate to contain the fire.
“14 medium to heavy capacity helicopters have been operating 24/7 since last Tuesday [Ed: This contradicts the official RFS Section 44 Incident Controllers Report – Wednesday 15th not Tuesday 14th] and we now have three air crane helicopters on the job,” Inspector Eric Berry said. “This is a massive operation, certainly the biggest in the last three years. “It involves up to 300 RFS, NSW Fire Brigades, NPWS, police and SES personnel and volunteers at any one time, sourced from all over eastern NSW as well as every Blue Mountains RFS brigade. “Then there are the support services chipping in like the Salvation Army, who have been supplying breakfast at 5.30 am on a daily basis for the firefighters.”
Inspector Berry said RFS community information meetings last weekend were very successful in seven upper Mountains towns. “More than 200 residents attended one of the meetings held at Blackheath Golf Club, giving us an opportunity to explain what is going on in plain English. “More meetings may occur, but in the meantime residents should phone the RFS information line for updates. “We are getting nearly 6000 hits on our website per day and are updating the site at regular intervals.”
The Gazette visited the Medlow Bath Airfield last Friday, which continues to be a hive of activity. Six helicopters, including a giant sky crane chopper, took off and landed several times inside an hour, collecting water loads from nearby dams and dropping them into and ahead of the flames. Kev Adams, an RFS volunteer from Gloucester, described the conditions the pilots had to deal with early last week as wild.
“I came down from Gloucester last Wednesday and we went up in a chopper and the wind was blowing at about 41 knots. “We hit a pocket of turbulence and I hit my head on the ceiling even though I was strapped in, that’s how wild the wind was. “Hopefully we’ll be able to head home soon.”
Inspector Eric Berry said good progress has been made, but the weather ahead could test the containment lines.’
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Ed: Additional reporting in the online version of this article:
‘Severe weather is expected for the Blue Mountains this afternoon between 2.00pm and 5.00pm. A Total Fire Ban has been declared for a number of areas across the state today, including the Blue Mountains. Temperatures in the Blue Mountains are expected to reach 31 degrees with west-north-west winds gusting up to 45km/h.
Fire behaviour yesterday was subdued due to mild conditions and the main front extinguishing in very low fuel levels. Advantage was taken of these conditions to consolidate containment lines. The fire has now been burning for fourteen days and burnt nearly 15,000 hectares.
The amount of smoke is likely to increase today. Aircraft and ground crews will be actively patrolling the fire for reactivation of fire edges. Infrared hot spot technology is being used in an attempt to identify stumps and roots that are still smouldering near the edges. Crews can then locate the hotspots and extinguish them.
The Bells Line of Road between the Darling Causeway and Mount Tomah has been re-opened but may be closed intermittently. Mount Banks and Pierces Pass trails and tracks are closed to the public. Residents in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury should remain vigilant.’
Volunteers back burn along Bells Line of Road as smoke from the fire front can be seen overhead
(Photo by Wade Laube)
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‘A major bushfire burning out of control in the Blue Mountains again broke containment lines overnight ahead of forecast rugged day for fire fighters. Two separate blazes have blackened more than 8,000 hectares of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, with the larger of the two burning on a massive front about four kilometres north of the township of Blackheath.
Wind gusts of up to 70kph are forecast to push through that area, around Grose Valley, about 4am (AEDT) today. Blustery conditions expected for most of the day with temperatures in the low 30s (Celsius).
Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Phil Koperberg has said the towns of Mt Tomah and Mt Wilson would be vulnerable to a wind change. An RFS spokesman said crews had been working on a 35km containment line through the night but the bigger fire had now broken its eastern containment lines. He said crews were prepared for the “tricky” conditions expected early today, with wind gusts expected to pick up as the day gets warmer. Waterbombing aircraft cannot take off until first light but no property is currently under direct threat.
Meanwhile, a new bushfire burning in the Wiseman’s Ferry area is not posing any immediate threat to the village of St Albans, 90km north-west of Sydney. However, the RFS spokesman said that could also change depending on today’s winds. A total fire ban has been declared for much of the state today, including the Greater Sydney and Greater Hunter areas, the Illawarra and far south coast, southern and central ranges, the upper and lower central west plains and the eastern Riverina.’
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23 Nov: “Massive fire back-burn effort’
[Source: ‘Massive fire back-burn effort’, Mx (free Sydney commuter newspaper), by Matt Sun, 20061123, page 1]
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‘Hundreds of firefighters are today hoping a massive 30km containment line will stop the Blue Mountains bushfire in its tracks. [Ed: Bit late, this is the day after that pyrocumulus firestorm]
About 200 Rural Fire Service and NSW Fire Brigade firefighters worked overnight on a back-burn between Blackheath and Wentworth Falls. Firefighters were on standby until temperatures dropped and winds died. They were sent in to light the back-burn as soon as conditions calmed down. Crews spent this morning back burning on the Bells Line of Road and hoping to create containment lines near the village of (Mt) Tomah if winds subside.
The RFS said 400 firefighters started work on the blaze this morning. The weather bureau forecast a maximum temperature of 27C, 45kph gusting winds and 17% humidity this afternoon.
Two fires, both ignited by lightning 10 days ago, joined up this week and have now destroyed 14,500 ha. An RFS spokeswoman said the fire was burning 2.5 km south of Mt Tomah and 7km north of Wentworth Falls…Crews and 15 aircraft will remain on standby to extinguish any spot fires that pass over teh containment line. Fire-bombing helicopters Elvis and Shania were likely to be sent to other fires burning across NSW.
The RFS today said Blue Mountains townships were not in immediate danger but should remain alert. But experts warned the extreme weather conditions would return next week, with the mercury reaching the mid 30s.’
The above photo shot taken by the local Blue Mountains Gazette newspaper’s lead journalist, achieved front page on 20061129. The caption read: “Assessing the aftermath: Medlow Bath RFS crew member Noah Taylor and team leader Michael Anderson near Evans Lookout last Friday.”
This same photo was re-used by the Blue Mountains Gazette a year later on 20071024 (page 7) to support an article by the Rural Fire Service incident controller in charge of co-ordinating the fire-fighting of the 2006 Grose Fire, Mal Cronstedt, who responded to an article in the paper on this subject by The Habitat Advocate dated 20071010.
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‘Hundreds of weary but determined firefighters are steadily gaining the upper hand over a Grose Valley bushfire that has burned about 15,000 hectares since November 13.
Daylight waterbombing by a fleet of choppers based at Medlow Bath airfield, increasing access by remote area firefighting units, successful backburns along the northern and southern escarpments and milder than predicted weather conditions since Saturday have limited the spread of the fire.
At the time of going to press, 130 RFS, NSW Fire Brigades and NPWS firefighters and nine helicopters were conducting backburns, mopping up buffer zones and cutting in access trails to the fire’s fringes. The active front of the fire was within containment lines yesterday morning, allowing the Bells Line of Road and Mt Tomah Botanical Gardens to re-open.
A small fire that started at Mitchells Lookout in Mt Victoria on November 23 is extinguished and investigations are continuing into its cause.
Blue Mountains RFS is warning residents to remain vigilant by continuing to prepare their homes for fire if conditions worsen and to immediately report any suspicious activity to CrimeStoppers by calling 1800-333-000.
The milder conditions are a welcome relief from the heat and 100 km/h wind gusts that put residents of Hazelbrook, Linden, Faulconbridge and Winmalee on high alert last Wednesday afternoon.
An explosion within the fire, which witnesses described as causing a mushroom-like cloud to develop, ignited spotfires four kilometres north of Lake Woodford and five kilometres north of Hazelbrook. Many residents headed home early from work to clear gutters and roofs and two Winmalee schools opted to close for 24 hours as a precaution. Eighteen water-bombing aircraft attacked the spotfires, extinguishing one within hours and the second by Thursday evening.
For daily fire updates and advice, go to www.bluemountains.rfs.nsw.gov.au, phone a dedicated 24-hour hotline manned by local volunteers on 1800-264-525 or visit your local RFS station, staffed by volunteer station officers.
“These people are the unsung heroes of the RFS,” Blue Mountains RFS public liaison and education officer Paul McGrath said.
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Overwhelming grief shunned by government hush, galvanised an immense sense of environmental injustice :
It was time to challenge (with due civility) the unaccountable bastards in authority…the NSW Government:
An extract of a full page letter in the Blue Mountains Gazette 20061206 on page 13 It was commissioned by 143 concerned Blue Mountains residentsIt was addressed not to the ‘firies’, but to the NSW Government.
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Pulpit Rock on the left of the Grose Valley, before the firestorm
It is easy to see why the Blue Mountains, with their Eucalytus tree oil suspended in the atmosphere, get their famous name.
(Photo by Chris Ellis)
Bushcare Rehabilitation Site on a tributary of Katoomba Falls Creek
The Gully, Katoomba, Blue Mountains
This was allegedly ripped up by Blue Mountains Council to accommodate a marathon.
(click photo to enlarge)
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‘The Gully‘ situated in the upper central Blue Mountains of New South Wales (NSW) is a natural creek valley surrounded by the township development of Katoomba, within a corridor and upstream of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
This valley has a disgraceful history of forced eviction of Aboriginal people from their traditional tribal lands by Blue Mountains Council in 1957, of environmental devastation to build a race track in the 1960s, of associated deforestation and commercial tourism exploitation, followed after the racetrack’s rundown and loan default, by many years of ecological neglect.
More recently, despite the efforts of members of the local community to rehabilitate degraded areas and eroded watercourses, a new threat has emerged – ‘Adventure Tourism‘.
Back in 2008, two separate organisations – AROC Sport Pty Ltd and The Wilderness Society NSW (an organisation which should know better) decided to launch respective marathons each through the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. They each proposed their respective marathon events with the government custodian of the World Heritage Area, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and since both marathon courses also involved running through community land, they also approached the custodian, Blue Mountains (city) Council.
AROC Sport Pty Ltd proposed its Ultra Marathon with UK outdoor gear sponsor The North Face which it termed ‘2008 North Face 100‘ marathon – a 10okm individual marathon along walking tracks through the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area including through the magnificent Jamison Valley. The Wilderness Society NSW proposed a similar marathon termed ‘Wild Endurance 100 Blue Mountains‘, also a 100km team-based marathon along walking tracks through the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area including the Jamison Valley. Both events were publicised as being one off events, but have since become annual events attracting hundreds of competitors and spectators.
In January 2008, The Habitat Advocate learned that these two events had already been approved by the Regional Director of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS NSW), Geoff Luscombe, without apparently any consultation either with the Blue Mountains community nor with any conservation groups that have for many decades had a close association with the Blue Mountains and its conservation. [BMNP POM: “A Neighbour Relations Strategy will be developed to raise awareness about the park’s significant natural and cultural values, inform park neighbours about park management programs and encourage appropriate behaviour to minimise impacts on the park. Within the City of Blue Mountains, “neighbours” will include the whole community.”]
On 20080130, The Habitat Advocate wrote to the Blue Mountains (city) Council’s then Acting Bushland Management Project Officer, Ms Arienne Murphy, explaining our concern:
“The degree of environmental protection and safeguards for these affected natural areas that Council may be imposing upon the respective event organisers, and the trend of adventure tourism and elite sporting events using natural areas of high conservation value is one that warrants appropriate environmental safeguards, monitoring and a transparent decision making process.”
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The Habitat Advocate requested from Blue Mountains (city) Council:
A copy of the user requirements including any standard terms and conditions that Council issues to (1) casual recreational license holders and (2) ongoing recreational license holders of Council-managed/controlled natural areas in the Blue Mountains Local Government Area.
A copy of the specific operating terms and conditions relating to the proposed Northface 100 and Wild Endurance marathon events both due to take place around Nellies Glen and through the Jamison Valley wilderness in May 2008.
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The correspondence was ignored by Council and no information was received from Council.
At the time, The Habitat Advocate also raised similar concerns about the risks of damaging ecological impacts and of the unsuitability of these two events through the World Heritage Area with interested representatives of conservation groups – The Colong Foundation for Wilderness, the Blue Mountains Conservation Society, the National Parks Association of NSW, and the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.
Issues raised included:
To examine and improve the rule that regulate these events
To identify the location of high conservation value natural communities that the routes of each event propose to pass through
How the responsible custodian (NPWS NSW) proposes to ensure these communities are not adversely impacted
To protect and defend the important natural values of the Blue Mountains and the rare and threatened habitat of its flora and fauna.
The hold the NPWS NSW as custodian of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area to account under the Blue Mountains National Park Plan of Management (May 2001) [BMNP POM]and in accordance with its mottos of ‘tread lightly’ and ‘take only photos and leave only footprints’.
Ensure protection of wilderness values and adherence to a wilderness code of conduct to ensure “minimal impact codes or practices for potentially high impact activities including cycling, horse riding, adventure activities and vehicle touring” [BMNP POM, p.52]
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A meeting was held at the office of the Colong Fondation in Sydney on Wednesday 20080206 between The Habitat Advocate, the above conservation groups and with Geoff Luscombe as well as with The Wilderness Society. The above concerns were raised with Mr Luscombe and he politely gave assurances that both events would not cause damage to ecology. The key document that would guide the conduct of the events and protect the ecology was the then ‘Interim Policy for Commercial Recreational Activities in National Parks of the Blue Mountains Region‘ (dated 20070926), by the then umbrella department of NSPW NSW, The Department of Environment and Climate Change.
However, no specific recognition, rules or guidelines were made to allow for commercial marathons involving large numver of participants and spectators within either the Interim Policy for Commercial Recreational Activities in National Parks of the Blue Mountains Region nor within the Blue Mountains National Park Plan of Management.
Indeed the Interim Policy includes clauses that run counter the large scale of two such commecvial marathons as per the following extract clauses:
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‘Environmental Protection’:
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Clause 5.1.11: “Commercial activities will not be permitted to lead to permanent or unsustainable impacts on the resource or become a significant proportion of visitor impact on a site or area.”
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Slashed vegetation for the marathon through The Gully’s swamp, KatoombaBut what is the impact is occurring upon flora deep in the Jamison Valley Wilderness?Who monitors the marathons? Who is the watchdog over the custodian?
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Clause 5.1.13 “The current Minimal Impact Bushwalking Code (Australian Alps National Parks) should be used by operators/guides as a minimum code of behaviour for all activities.”
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[Ed. But under NPWS NSW Activity Agreement with AROC Sport, AROC Sport needs only..”Use best endeavours to ensure that participants adhere to the approved route on recognised and approved fire trails and walking tracks within the Park and do not deviate from these trails and tracks at any time.”]
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Clause 5.1.14 “No modification to the environment, permanent or temporary, will be permitted (eg. fixtures or temporary caches) without specific Department approval.”
[Ed. So where is the NPWS NSW monitoring of compliance, or lack thereof?]
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Cliff Walk slashed along the top of the Blue Mountains Western Escarpment to accommodate the North Face 100 marathon in 2008
(Photo by Editor 20080517)
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North Face 100 participant runs through a Gully Bushcare Site, previously fenced off and sign posted
This riparian area was disturbed by Sydney Water in 2007 during its Sewer Amplification Project.
The site was subsequently rehabilitated with native plants by Networks Alliance in co-operation with local coucil and the local buschare group.
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‘Recreation Management’:
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Clause 5.1.21 “Commercial activities can only form a minor component of total use and not lead to the domination of a particular setting, site, route or activity, or unreasonably restrict or exclude the recreational opportunity of other users.”
Runners take right of way over bushwalkersWhat happens when the marathons are required to stay together in teams?
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Clause 5.1.22 “Acceptable levels of use, in relation to the conservation and protection of the environment, will be based on precautionary principles determined by the Department and this process may not maximise commercial opportunities.”
Northface100 competitors – 1000 registered entrants an “acceptable level of use”?
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‘Appropriate Activities’:
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Clause 5.1.25 “Activities resulting in minimal impact will be preferred over those causing greater impact (eg. track walking versus off-track walking).” [Ed. No mention here about commercial marathons involving hundreds of participants]
Does my team have to stick together over the entire length of the trail? Wild Endurance: Yes. It is compulsory for the whole team to stay together the whole time. The team must arrive together and depart from each Checkpoint and also cross the finish line together. Of course if you are in the Relay event, then only half the team needs to arrive at each checkpoint and cross the finish line together.
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Clause 5.1.27 “Where impacts associated with activities are high and sites are deemed suitable for recreational purposes, sites may be managed by the Department to provide for intensive use.” [Ed. No mention was made by Luscombe about any monitoring and enforcement by NPWS NSW]
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Revisiting the Blue Mountains National Park Plan of Management:
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The Service will continue to develop its Discovery interpretive program, including investigation of options for improving the quality, quantity and geographic spread of activities offered
The emphasis will continue to be on environmental interpretation and education and away from hard adventure.
Recreation Opportunities: Use by domestic and international tourists is largely day use concentrated on the scenic escarpment areas of the Jamison and Grose valleys, from Wentworth Falls to Katoomba and at Blackheath, although other relatively easily accessible areas are popular for adventure ecotourism (see section 4.3.8 Guided Tours and Commercial
Recreation).
With tourism in the Blue Mountains region projected to increase strongly over the next five years, the need to minimise the impacts of tourism on the natural environment is a growing concern.
Recreation use of the park includes a wide range of activities and is distributed throughout the park…Use is distributed throughout the year, with peaks during school holiday periods and long weekends.
The park is under increasing pressure from the growing number of park visitors, with some popular bushwalking and camping areas such as the Grose Valley, Wollangambe
area, the Wild Dog Mountains, Burralow Creek, Erskine Creek, Glenbrook Creek, Ingar and Murphys Glen showing signs of unacceptable environmental impacts.
Adventure activities such as canyoning, abseiling and rockclimbing have increased dramatically in 56 popularity, with visitation to one popular canyon having doubled over a two year period. These activities are associated with a proliferation of informal foot tracks which are eroding with increasing use. Vegetation is being denuded at popular abseiling and/or rockclimbing access points and public safety is an issue at some sites, particularly where there is conflict with other users.
Major management considerations include the need to raise awareness of visitor impacts, to monitor visitor use and, where necessary, to regulate visitor numbers to
protect the park environment, ensure visitor safety and maintain recreation experiences appropriate to a natural or wilderness setting.
Regulation of large groups, commercial activities and adventure activities needs to be considered in relation to both environmental impacts and public safety. Use of the park
by larger groups has the greatest potential to impact on the park. User conflicts, risks of accidents and injuries and impacts on natural and cultural heritage values all rise in
proportion to the size of the group.
The existing facilities have been developed over a period of more than a hundred years and are not necessarily compatible with existing design, safety and maintenance standards, may be having an unacceptable environmental impact and/or are inadequate to satisfy existing or projected recreation and tourism demand and patterns of use.
A major review of existing facilities is required and clearer priorities for maintenance and
upgrading of facilities or removal need to be developed to ensure that conservation and
recreation objectives can both be met in a management environment of limited
resources.
Natural areas: Recreation tends to be more dispersed and any facilities provided are relatively low-key compared to the developed areas, catering for a lower level of use.
Wilderness areas: This setting provides opportunities for solitude and self-reliant recreation.
Competitive activities including rogaining and orienteering will not be permitted in wilderness areas.
“The nominated area has a complicated border, defined partly by adjoining privately owned lands which, in the Blue Mountains Park section, also divides it into northern and southern sections along the corridor of the Great Western Highway. The heart of each Park is reserved as wilderness which totals 54% of the nominated area. ”
[Source: ‘Greater Blue Mountains (world heritage) Area’, United Nations Environment Programme, World ConbservationMonitoring Centre ].
The ‘Wild Endurance’ course map passes through the Jamison Valley Wilderness
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. ‘NorthFace 100’ marathon course map passes through the Jamison Valley Wilderness
“Saturday 19th May 2012: The 5th Annual North Face 100 will begin at Leura’s Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains Australia.
Some 900 runners will embark on a 100km trail race which will take them through Jamison Valley, Narrowneck Plateau, Megalong Valley…”
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Ed: Is this what custodianship of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area has become – all about maximising visitation over conservation?
I think of myself as child of Easter Island. I watch in admiration at a bird singing in a tree.
I watch in horror as the tree is felled by the grown ups and the bird flies away.
I tug on my father’s arm and ask why are the grown ups killing the trees dad?
He responds: “You’ll understand when you grow up.”
“The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”
~ Mark Twain
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Many of the younger generation cannot understand why the older generation is destroying the planet.
Without being ageist, there is a noticeable positive correlation between the young wanting to respect the planet, and the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation which largely remains hell bent on destroying it. Examples are everywhere. Start with our politicians and business leaders.
The Baby Boomers who find themselves aligned with those who respect the planet are noticeably in the minority amongst their peers and vice versa.
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria
Australia
‘A study conducted for the first time on five different species of owls inhabiting Western Maharashtra by city-based ornithologist Dr Satish Pandey, a fellow at the Maharashtra Academy of Science, has revealed how these nocturnal birds, who are losing their habitats because of environmental destruction and other superstitions, play a very important role in safeguarding the environment.
Five species of owls belonging to the Family Tytonidae (barn owl) and the Family Strigidae (Indian eagle owl, brown fish owl, mottled wood owl and spotted owlet) co-inhabiting the Deccan Plateau, the coastal region of Konkan and adjoining places were studied to understand preference habitat, reproductive behavior and food niche partitioning from 2005 till 2008.
The study was presented at the 7th Asian Raptor Research and Conservation Network (ARRCN) Symposium on Migratory Bird held in Korea last week on how the owl’s diet can be useful as a means of biological control of agriculture pests.
The studies revealed that spotted owlets and Indian eagle owls had the most compact habitat clusters, indicating a more specific habitat requirement, namely scrubs and grasslands. But since most of the lands are under development, the owls are fast disappearing. As the owls feed on rodents, birds, reptiles and insects and spend longer time in agricultural habitats, they are being subjected to anthropogenic activities and other interferences.
Mottled wood owls, which prefer deciduous forests are found only in India and inhabit mainly forested areas, where the use of pesticides is leading to problems as they eat rodents. Also, as they are tree-hollow nesting species, they are fast losing their nesting sites because of the felling of trees in their inhabited areas.
Barn owls and brown fish owls occupy more diverse habitats, with the latter preferring more water bodies and evergreen forests in their habitat. Due to the rampant destruction of rivers and lakes in Deccan Plateau, the birds have almost disappeared and have gone to upper streams as they require greener patches.
“We selected an area of 1,000 m radius around the nest in order to analyse the landscape features in all of the nest territories and visited each nest at least five times. We collected pellets of digestive foods, which were scrutinised by experts from Zoological Survey of India (ZSI),” said Dr Pande.
The study, besides understanding owl habitats, also included data based on Pianka Niche Overlap Index (PNOI) which suggested that spotted owlets and Indian eagle owls had maximum food overlap in terms of mammalian, avian, reptilian and insect prey, followed by barn owls and mottled wood owls, which are generalist feeders without specific food preference, while brown fish owls had the less overlap as they ate fish.’
. About Dr Satish Pandey:
‘Dr Satish Pandey is an Interventional Vascular Radiologist and Assoc. Professor of Radiology at BJ Medical College. He works in ecology and field ornithology and has made several video films on raptor ecology, marine ecosystem and conservation, has published more than 40 papers and has authored several field guides and popular books on ornithology, nature education, orchids and other subjects to promote conservation.’
"We're coming to you from the custodial lands of the Hairygowogulator and Tarantulawollygong, and pay respects to uncle and grandaddy elders past, present and emerging from their burrows. So wise to keep a distance out bush."
An emaciated Tiger in a Vietnamese farm cage awaits slaughter for TCM Tiger Parts
A mascot of an evil, barbaric and low-life society
A TCM practitioner plying her trade in Yin/Yang Bollocks
Cache of wildlife parts in Vietnam – the entrails of a barbaric cult
Tusks of Elephants savagedly butchered for TCM, their tusks chainsawed off while still alive.
This is a TCM stockpile of tusks intercepted in a shipping container in Malaysia
Skulls of Cambodians savagedly butchered by the Khmer Rouge
This is a stockpile of human skulls in the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh
Sumatran Rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis)
Members of the species once inhabited rainforests, swamps and cloud forests in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China.
In historical times they lived in southwest China, particularly in Sichuan.
But with TCM barbarism they have become persecuted and are now critically endangered,
with only six substantial populations in the wild: four on Sumatra, one on Borneo, and one in the Malay Peninsula.
(Photo: Bill Konstant/International Rhino Foundation)
For Asians seeking aphrodisiacs?
Viagra is proven to work, but TCM is bollocks
Bile being extracted from a bear’s gall bladder – while it is conscious
So when you visit your Ying Yang Traditional Chinese Medicine Quack,
remember this tiger suffered for your healing cult.
Tiger Wine – extracted from Tigers
It may as well be the cerebral fluid of Cambodians butchered at the hand of the Khmer Rouge
Human Cerebrospinal fluid
Not as marketable in test tubes, but then TCM Cultists haven’t got around to bottling and branding this yet
Abject Fear for Reason
Pangolines poached for TCM
Bob Parsons – Elephant Killer
Robert Borsak – elephant trophyist
New South Wales Shooters and Fishers MP Robert Borsak with an elephant shot on safari in Zimbabwe, June 2008.
[Source: ABC, ^http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-04-13/nsw-mp-robert-borsak-with-an-elephant-shot-on/2619226]
The Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa)
Is a felid found from the Himalayan foothills through mainland Southeast Asia into China, and has been classified as vulnerable in 2008 by IUCN.
Poached for barbaric TCM.
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Doomed: One of the tigers at Xiongsen animal park being turned into wine
Hundreds of tigers are incarcerated in battery-like cages by the Chinese TCM Cultists
So Visit China – see its wildlife, taste its wildlife, souvenir its wildlife!
Not sure what TCM says how Panda Parts heal you or give you a hard on?
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The Tiger – an animal far more intelligent that any TCM dimwit
