Most, if not all, of us would agree that Australia's birds are beautiful. But how many of us appreciate that they are more than just pretty faces. Our birds provide extremely valuable "environmental services" through pollination & pest control.
First detected in the mid north of South Australia the beet western yellows virus is now attacking canola crops as far away as Victoria. It's interesting to note that the mid north of SA has been extensively cleared of bushland in order to maximise the area available for human agriculture. However, this clearance has destroyed the habitats of small birds such as thornbills which predate the aphids which are the chief vector for the beet western yellows virus. Canola growers are now almost certainly paying the price for their forbearers not keeping large areas of intact bushland.
To wreck the bushland using human technology takes little time at all but to restore bushland to the point of being able to support a range of aphid predators will take many, many years. We establish large scale monocultures at our own peril.
For a species that that credits it self with superior intelligence we seem to stuff it up more often than we get it right trying to "control" or "change" nature you think we would have learned from our mistakes but "nooo" the smarter we get the bigger and stupider the stuff ups seem to get ,the one that allways comes to mind was the the Chinese campaign against the 'Four Pests' it was initiated in 1958 as a hygiene campaign by Mao Zedong, who identified the need to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. Sparrows – mainly the Eurasian Tree Sparrow were included on the list because they ate grain seeds, robbing the people of the fruits of their labour. The masses of China were mobilized to eradicate the birds, and citizens took to banging pots and pans or beating drums to scare the birds from landing, forcing them to fly until they fell from the sky in exhaustion. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings were killed. Sparrows and other birds were shot down from the sky, resulting in the near-extinction of the birds in China. Non-material rewards and recognition were offered to schools, work units and government agencies in accordance with the volume of pests they had killed.
By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased. Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs in the ongoing campaign against the Four Pests. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, Locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great leap forward , including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which at least 20 million people died of starvation.
I copied a lot of this from the net
Today its is seen as one of the biggest Ecological disarsters of in history but there are plenty of others to pick from !
Agriculture is faily new to Australia but in 200years when it comes to monumental mistakes we have made some doozies !
As you have pointed out only now have we realised that pushing over every tree we could see was a bad thing or at least some of us have for every farmer trying to put a green buffer around their farm there's another clearing the land to increase their yield .
People will always amaze me with their capactity for stupidity and failure to learn form past mistates !
Complete clearing, without leaving wide natural fringes along gullies and waterways and continuous wildlife corridors, is incredibly greedy and stupid. After over two centuries we still haven't learnt, and there are probably only a hundred or so farmers who are now applying conservation measures on their properties. Governments aren't giving this priority and the sad thing is that they could make a big difference with incentives and conservation zoning.
As for Mao, what a dick that man was. I suppose the Chinese government has to keep him on a pedestal to keep a founding pillar in its shaky structure. Jung Chang knows the score and his book is a great read.
I sometimes wonder if we're evolving into a new species: Homo stupidis. Even when we clear land we don't get it right. In the Mt Lofty Ranges there are many situations where bushland has been left on ridges but almost entirely cleared from slopes & valleys. The result is an imbalance in plant species as the species on ridges are often different from those on slopes & in valleys. This makes for huge changes in the composition of bird & other animal populations with potential devastating effects. It also has the effect of increasing soil salinity. Yet there are still strong advocates for bush clearance in Australia. Go figure, as my son said on his return from the US.
I was going to comment, but there is too much to talk about and I don't know where to start. Just one remark, Homo stupidis, you only have to look at the clowns we call government, that says it all
M-L