Suffering a bit of cabin fever after a couple of rainy days, this morning I decided to take a walk along some bush tracks in the urban area in which I’ve lived, on and off, for over 25 years. I used to know these bush tracks and the creek that accompanied them well. The bush through which they meandered was of reasonable quality, with some rubbish of course, but not so much that my friends and I, in juvenile fits of environmental awareness, couldn’t clear a sizeable area of the bits of junk that had found their way in within ten minutes or so.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. Today, owing to the local council’s presumed environmental management policies, the place looks like a wasteland. Such native undergrowth as there once was has been killed off in the successive rounds of herbicide applied with the intention of eliminating invasive weeds. The result is that the rather naked-looking tall timber which remains now looms out of expanding drifts of invasive weeds (that’s right, the same weeds which the herbicide was intended to eradicate). Ironically, these weeds seem to have been the sole beneficiaries of this untrammelled herbicide usage which was the apparently sole component of this environmental management policy.
The result of this process is that, apart from the loss of much of the existing native vegetation and the influx of invasive weed species, erosion along the creek bed is now significant as these weeds don’t have the root structures necessary to support the soil. In addition, waste, whether because of changes in usage patterns, attitudes towards waste disposal or the loss of the much thicker covering of vegetation which was present before the rounds of herbicide usage, or a combination of all three, is much more in evidence.
It is quite a tragedy to see urban bushland such as this, which ought to be one of the great, joyous triumphs of our urban spaces, retained against the odds as wildlife corridors, green spaces satisfying our love of nature, places where our children can play and learn about insects and plants and creeks and suchlike, with all the convenience of being literally just beyond our back fences, so dramatically degraded by poor management. It would be interesting to know what kind of accountability there is for such poor management strategies, and whether at the least there is some research component involved so that when disasters like this occur, the knowledge gained (even if it’s nothing more significant than “OK, so this way really doesn’t work”) can form part of a greater body of knowledge about land management to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated.