Tag Archives: Aboriginals

Green on Green: Wilderness Protection Laws and Indigenous Rights are Derailing Renewable Energy Projects

 brood frog

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Laws protecting Koalas and “the magnificent brood frog” have prevented a renewable energy company from clearing 500 acres 500 hectares of native vegetation in the Australian tropics.

Federal environmental laws ‘single biggest challenge’ for delivering renewable energy projects in Australia

By national regional affairs reporter Jane Norman

In far north Queensland, traditional owners, clean energy developers and conservationists had spent three long years sweating on this decision.

Depending on which side you believed, this development would either supply 150,000 homes with clean, green energy or destroy the forest habitat of threatened native species.

Late on Friday, the wait was finally over.

An email from Ark Energy landed in inboxes, announcing the company had “withdrawn the Wooroora Station Wind Farm proposal from the federal environmental assessment process.”

In other words, the proposed project was dead.

The Korean-owned developer had planned to clear more than 500 hectares of native vegetation next to the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area, home to animals including the koala and magnificent brood frog.

…Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-22/environmental-laws-biggest-challenge-for-clean-energy-developers/103750830

This isn’t the only wind farm in trouble in Australia’s far north, WUWT recently reported on the Aboriginal campaign to block the Chalumbin wind farm, which would have despoiled part of the beautiful Australian Atherton Tableland.

Aboriginals are also playing their in other places to derail the green revolution, by demanding fair compensation from any infrastructure which intrudes onto their sacred lands. All those empty looking deserts where entrepreneurs hoped to install vast solar arrays are actually full of protected Aboriginal sites and places of special cultural and spiritual significance.

And let’s not forget farmers and rural people, who have spooked renewable developers with their ferocious campaign to prevent power lines from crossing their land.

I think when the dust settles we’ll all owe a vote of thanks to all of these groups, for their determined effort to stop greens from ruining the landscape with their ugly mechanical monstrosities.

We have to stop these green developers from exploiting the wilderness. The lesson is, if you don’t want a beautiful part of your landscape to be despoiled by greens, and you can’t find a local indigenous group who are prepared to fight for their sacred claims, nesting boxes for rare and endangered species and perhaps a few livestream webcams are your next best line of defence.

Update (EW): Click here to see Ark Energy’s description of Wooroora Station, along with a map showing the location – right in the middle of one of the most beautiful sections of the Atherton Tablelands. Ark Energy claims to have the support of locals for their project.

Correction (EW): 500 hectares, not 500 acres (h/t Tombstone Gabby).

More Nauseating Climate Grief from the Guardian

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t strativarius; Another moan for a dying planet…

Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet

David Shearman
Wed 5 Jul 2023 01.00 AESTO

Our leaders’ addiction to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources has me paralysed with fear and solastalgia

…

In some, like Queen Victoria, the loss of a partner may cause lifelong grief with self-imposed withdrawal and solitude.

I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged.

My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Winton’s series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earth’s last truly wild and intact places. I use the word “tried” because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon.

Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner.

I suspect that this grief had probably festered in my brain since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 in South Australia and Victoria, which caused 75 deaths and enormous structural and environmental damage. I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation. The 2019-20 bushfires overwhelmed me when at least 33 people died, with smoke pollution killing many more, and more than 3 billion native animals died or were displaced.

…

We are slowly coming to realise that grieving for country is always with Aboriginal people and probably increasingly as the encroachment on their environment has advanced over the 200 years since our invasion. It must be aggravated by their realisation that their 60,000 years of sustaining an environment is mostly dismissed by a so-called advanced civilisation which takes little notice of their experience and knowledge.

…

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet

The part which really got me is the inference that the Ash Wednesday bushfire was bad, that it was somehow an encroachment on the land custodianship of traditional owners.

The Ash Wednesday fire was bad, around 75 people lost their lives.

But the truth is Aboriginals before white men arrived lit more fires than anyone.

… Saw several smooks along shore before dark and two or 3 times afire in the night. we lay becalm’d driving in before the Sea untill 1 oClock AM at which time we got a breeze from the land with which we steer’d NE being then in 38 fathom water – At Noon it fell little wind and Veerd to NEBN, we being than in the Latitude of 34°..10’ and Longitude 208°.27’ Wt and about 5 Leags from the land which extended from S-37° Wt to N1/2E. In this Latitude are some white clifts which rise perpendicularly from the sea to a moderate height …

Source: The Journal of Captain Cook, 26 April, 1770

Aboriginals claim they set lots of fires because of their cultural land management wisdom, though all the free BBQ food left behind by the fire might have been an additional bonus.

To be fair, the fires lit by Aboriginals were likely a lot less damaging than the Ash Wednesday fire, because they lit fires so frequently. Frequent fires reduced the fuel load, which reduces the intensity of fires. So maybe there was some wisdom involved.

So why expose you, the WUWT audience, to yet more public climate grief?

Because I believe a response has to be made. A very experienced politician once explained to me that you have to challenge every point, otherwise that point stands. Because such pieces sometimes reach people.

None of us will ever be free, if we completely ignore such appeals, if we always let such appeals to public sympathy go unanswered and unchallenged.