Without first WATER-SECURITY, there can be no BIOSECURITY
Slides and commentary from a power-point presentation given by Chris at the GROUNDED conference
Tasmania, 04 December 2024 - Chris Henggeler, Kachana Pastoral Company
What advice do we give here?
Context often allows us to step up to a level of conscious incompetence.
Curiosity (not certain knowledge) needs to drive science.
Allowing for context, we are able to ask better questions.
I’ve always wanted to visit Tasmania.
I was waiting for a combination of drought and heatwave.
Then Matthew asked me if I was interested in sharing some of my observations.
So here I am, and I thank you all for contributing to a shared learning experience.
From a Tasmanian perspective, WATER-SECURITY might not seem such a big deal.
But what if that island to the north actually is a whole lot larger than we think it is?
And what if it were to further dehydrate?
Might that impact Tasmanian weather-patterns?
In this session I will present a Kachana perspective of things in Australia’s backyard.
To get us all onto the same page I’d like to show a six-minute video-clip:
What do we do when we have an ambition, but recognize that we are dealing with forces far greater than we can control, or perhaps even anticipate?
My experience has been that fighting or attempting to subordinate nature can only ever be a short-term strategy.
I have no idea to what extent city-based cousins can relate to what it really feels like, to be sandwiched in between modern civilization and an untamable geosystem.
Life is all about relationships.
When dealing with forces of nature, it is wise to first recognise how small and insignificant we really are. A whole wet season in a camp on Kachana can do that for you. – We’ve enjoyed over 30.
With a sense of awe and humility we attempt to work with the nature of what confronts us.
As my sister did with elephants, we as regenerative managers of land attempt to work with what is out there.
As custodians and land-managers we are confronted by an ongoing juggling act.
As pastoral innovators, who have been on the front line since 1992, we remain painfully aware how easy it is to mess up.
Those of us who have built deep connections to the land, juggle primarily on behalf of our great grand-children.
What will be good for my great grandchildren, ought to benefit everybody’s children and grandchildren.
Twenty years ago, the science began catching up.
Today it is safe to say that the science has caught up.
This does not mean the science is settled… the science is never settled… and academia must never stop testing anything that is being challenged by new evidence.
Science merely offers us a process to move forward more confidently whilst alerting us to where extra caution might be called for.
As the saying goes: We cannot be green when we are in the red.
(Ball No. 3) - For me this means the justification of time and capital invested in Kachana since 1985
Opportunity-cost is by far our greatest expense.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
Off-farm income has largely payrolled my learning-curve.
Given Kachana’s unique context, management will need to be holistic.
In this sense I am a Savory scholar.
However, I remain quite prepared to look at any decision-making process that is as good or better.
The direction that I am favouring, is Joel Salatin’s “fiefdom-model”.
To anybody planning succession, I highly recommend Joel Salatin’s book: Fields of Farmers
Ball No. 1 - This one stirs my passion.
To explore the relevance of Australia’s new megafauna and multi-species interactions
Can we together, old and new Australians, build a healthier continent?
Can we get animals to behave in line with their original ecological function?
Will self-regulating principles come to our aid?
Should we use animals to re-build healthy landscapes?
Herbivores, behaving as nature intended, make a huge difference.
Animal behaviour harnesses ANIMAL-ENERGY!
This is potentially a solar-powered renewable energy source.
It is manageable
It can work for us
It can also work against us
The challenge is to manage or influence behaviour appropriately within given contexts.
In functional savannah landscapes we find three teams at work
- Producers or sunlight-harvesters - Their net-role in life is production
- Consumers – whose net role is consumption
- Recyclers – their game is cleaning up and recycling
We humans are on the consumer team.
I’ve got the elephant in there because it is the largest land-based herbivore left on the planet.
According to scientists nearly all of Australia’s large herbivores disappeared soon after humans arrived on this continent
This is what some of them supposedly looked like
What are we attempting to achieve?
What is the context?
Zoom out …
Where to from here?
Four broad options come to mind
1. Sustain a largely dysfunctional geosystem?
2. Give way to trends pushing towards further ecological decline?
3. Colonise other planets?
4. Why not first look at recolonising human-made deserts? Re-greening our own planet?
What if we were to put nature's gardeners to work?
Primarily those who have long track-records of collaborating with humans?
For those not already in it, I invite you to watch this space!
Ball No. 2 – As mentioned earlier, I do not know how relevant this ball is to Tasmania at this point in time.
Where I come from it is highly relevant.
When I grew up, the answer was “YES”.
So, on Kachana we began looking closer and reporting in 1992
This is Kununurra February 2014
This is not an accident.
The road did not get fully severed and after a day or two, traffic was able to resume.
We could call it a near miss.
And anyway, there were plenty of witnesses to report.
On the same day, just a few km to the NNE (Ord Irrigation Area, Kununurra - February 2014)
This too got reported…
Was this an accident or a near miss?
We can be sure that insurance companies would have considered this question.
This was a close shave for Cape-Town in 2018!
We are talking about 4.6mio people here; a population only slightly smaller than that of Sydney...
My take is, that a major accident was narrowly avoided.
Here another close shave…
… but a death-sentence none the less.
Many people would call this natural.
Technically speaking, they may be correct.
This is how nature responds to humans lighting matches, once everything has dried off.
We end up with more and more country looking like this…
Is this “natural”?
Yes, but as Ray Archuletta might say: The country is “naked, thirsty, hungry and running a fever”
Fire, drought and flood, are siblings!
All three are symptoms of ecosystem dysfunction.
They are mostly spawned by unhealthy vegetation and dying soils.
This is not new knowledge.
It simply does not suit much of today’s compartmentalised thinking.
Therefore, now we have independent bureaucracies at work instructing us on how to fight individual symptoms. That is at least the case where I come from, it might be different here?
Let us connect a few dots
1. Bones of dead herbivores lying in unhealthy senescent grass
2. Fire
3. – 5. Bare, dehydrating ground that is subjected to weeks or months of radiation
6. Wind-erosion and compaction seal the surface
7. Raindrops become bomb-shells and rivers flow red as we lose soil
8. instead of quenching a thirsty landscape, Water further seals it and runs off
9. Erosion accelerates at an exponential rate (Energy = Mass/2 * Velocity^2) …. and “accidents” happen!
Downstream reporting also uses words like: “acts of God”, “natural disasters”, “climate-change”.
There appears to be a strange lack of interest in the compounding effects of changing micro-climate upstream.
A 200 Million Dollar “repair” bill for the township of Warmun (2011)
This could be called the result of an accident.
As it happened, that accident was waiting to happen for some time.
Reporting only took place after the event.
Here is "Starvation Billabong", just over the range from us.
Another accident waiting to happen. - We had been reporting for years but nobody of any “importance” listened.
(The photo was taken a few months earlier. - November 2010)
(Starvation Billabong, Chamberlain River 2011)
Then in March 2011 the accident did happen.
This was no near miss. - Those trees were alive and growing until floodwaters arrived.
Potential livelihoods got wiped out; we tried to report the accident; nobody investigated
ONE for the price of THREE!
A bridge “six times stronger” than the one that just got washed away. (Fitzroy River, January 2023)
What a deal for the engineers and construction workers.
Tax-payers alone were saddled with unexpected costs amounting to over of half a billion dollars.
Private and corporate players continue to lick their wounds as investor confidence for the region is being put to the test.
Cost to private operators, local residents and insurance companies are masked by rising GDP and inflation.
Predictable events can of course be labelled “accidents” or “natural disasters”.
If calling them that, means that we keep accepting more and more of them, perhaps we’d be wiser to begin using other terminology?
How we prepare for what drops out of the sky, will impact WATER-SECURITY
Soils for Life described the “story of 100 raindrops” that typically fall onto the Australian land mass:
50 of them evaporate
Gravity and evaporation tend to be by far the greatest thieves of water.
With good surface-management, we can prepare for, and begin to minimise both.
In order to rehydrate, water needs to percolate through the body or the soil
The lesson that nature teaches us is quite simple: No WATER: No LIFE!
WATER-SECURITY implies reliable reserves and appropriate hydration throughout the year.
Building water security is a process that must be driven from the bottom-up. It cannot be legislated from the top-down.
For the individual citizen or property, WATER-SECURITY remains “circle of concern” stuff.
At a community level, WATER-SECURITY lies within the "circle of influence".
This is why the definition as well as the provision of WATER-SECURITY require active community support.
Even better would be the collaboration of top-down regulators, who encourage innovation and empower custodians to manage bottom-up processes!
This is an attempt to put the message onto a single page.
On our website, In our Kachana News for early 2023 we go into all this in detail
https://www.kachana-station.com/january-2023/
Without first WATER-SECURITY, any quest for sustained “biosecurity” will be simply another “for-ever war”.
A war against nature…
An unwinnable war against a far more intelligent design of natural systems.
The good news is that we already have an industry in place that has the people, knowledge, skill-sets and tools to radically improve WATER-SECURITY on mainland Australia and beyond.
As we begin to work with nature to re-create abundance, the “need” to do battle with her evaporates.
As pastoralists we can offer solutions that are in line with how nature works.
Solutions that are family friendly, community friendly, low tech / high skill.
Such solutions promise new knowledge, new skills, new jobs, new industries and new wealth!
All we require is a green light for regenerative pastoralism, and real incentives.
Such partnership-possibilities with nature, give me hope, for us, our children, our grandchildren and their children in this part of the world.
One final slide before we get to the questions.
Given the giant ecological hole left by the loss of Australia’s original megafauna,
do we reference regeneration against how our landscapes supposedly functioned 300 years ago?
Or do we reference regeneration against the natural wealth and the level of landscape function that might have existed before the first humans arrived in this part of the world?
This slide - Backdrop for question-time
Links
- GROUNDED Australia - Farming Better
- Speakers - GROUNDED Australia
- Recorded presentation (will be made available in the near future)