ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE ON OUR DOORSTEP

I have spent some considerable time on this blog going on about our water problems here in South Australia which have been highlighted by, but not caused by, the recent drought. I was hoping to put it out of my mind for a few months over winter but we are having a very dry winter and today, as I got out of my car after returning from the market, with some lovely stories to tell, I saw that once again, my fennel is drooping. It is July and the soil should be saturated but no, down where these old fennel have their deep roots, it is as dry as a desert.

Still, this is not enough to bring the fire back into my belly about this whole water issue...but....oh yes, there is a big but....there was a meeting of all the political leaders of Australia, yesterday, in Canberra, the unknown capital of Australia, and the hot topic was water. It should have seen some practical solutions going into place; after all we have had this problem surfacing and resurfacing like a festering wound for over 30 years, gradually sapping the life out of our food production areas in favour of mining and manufacturing. It should have actually been an update on progress made, but again it was a talk-fest and a re-shuffling of money into projects for many years into the future which will no doubt be another government's problem to implement. It was a bickering session between state governments and involved the quoting of laws and rules and even of the constitution itself but nowhere was there anything....anything concrete for South Australia. A $600,000,000 injection of funds from federal to SA state funds was claimed as a win for us....but the project?? The details?? The solutions?? The extra water?? Not a bloody thing; just another feasibility study into pumping water to the farmers of the Lower Lakes from Tailem bend but not to the lakes themselves.

This was all on the radio this morning from early morning and is still going now and people - real people, like me, people who can see solutions and are irate and furious, are slowly getting to a point where even old cadgers and normally mild-mannered women are on the radio incensed, almost with murder in their voices, that nothing is being done by those that could do something. Even to this point I could have just turned it off and spent the day in my vegetable garden, illegally watering my fennel, but two words were read out on the news from a recent scientific report that made me stop the car and write them down - our whole lower lakes fresh water system will succumb to ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE if they do not get water by November.

When I think of ecological collapse I think of nuclear disasters like Hiroshima and Chernabol, or massive oil spills like the Exon Valdez, or the melting of polar ice-caps - all places distant in both miles and culture. But this time ecological collapse is less than 100km from my home.



Ecological collapse of an entire river and lake system that I have spent years holidaying on and even teaching sailing on, in tune with the natural wonder of the bird life and the winds and the dozens of intricate channels weaving their reedy magic between little islands. I have canoed there and sailed there and camped there and I have worked there, month after month, for several years, with teenagers, teaching them about my love of it all and how to see it as a way to gain self-confidence and self-respect and to respect life itself. I have wonderful photos and memories of a place that now faces death, through lack of a decent plan.




As the water dries up and recedes from what was once the shore, it eventually causes a phenomenon which I have not read enough about to explain here, but the upshot of it is that the lake bed becomes a sulphuric acid pit and all life is extinguished, with little hope of recovery for thousands of years, if ever, even with the addition of water. So much has the water receded already that crops are being grown, temporarily, where once we used to moor the boats that I used to teach sailing.


OK, you say, get the water to it by November. All very well, even if they let enough water down the river today, which is basically what all the arguing was about between the politicians, it takes months to get here! We are talking about a darn long river that the water has to flow down to get here - the Murray - and it flows so slowly that it would only just make it, maybe, if we opened all the floodgates right now! And these lakes are big - at least 30km across - that's a lot of water. This is because all the available water is 2 or 3 states away - thousands and thousands of slow, meandering waterways away and it might as well be a million miles away for all the collaboration that goes on between the states. Along the way communities take water as allocated by entitlements issued by governments over the last hundred years, until more water has been allocated for irrigation than the sum total of all the water in the river. Now that's smart! Not having any overseeing body, the states just kept on selling licenses. An unsustainable system has turned into a disaster. Even if water was allowed to flow down, all these communtities would have the right to take some and then still there wouldn't be enough to reach these dying lakes.

We can go and buy plastic or steel rainwater tanks and install kilometres of plastic tubes for dripper systems but this is a far bigger problem, as you can now see, than a small city like Adelaide and a few tanks of rainwater can solve. I don't want to write about solutions now or go into any more detail, but ecological disasters on this scale are not something we should be having in Australia. What is equally as distressing is the fact that this will cause many local communities to collapse and affect every single person in South Australia and eventually cost us all heartache as we struggle with the aftermath for generations to come.

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