Can data gathering and the courts save the koala and biodiversity from clear felling?
The koala is an endangered species that is predicted to become
functionally extinct in NSW by 2050. The NSW government plans to create
The Great Koala National Park, which includes publicly-owned state
forests, to halt the extinction trajectory of the marsupial. At the same
time the government owned state Forestry Corporation of NSW on the Mid
North Coast is planning and actively clear-felling the habitat of this
endemic species.
One of the first actions for the 'world leader in mammal extinctions' would have to be to refrain from 'business as usual'. The prime reason for the marsupial's demise is the destruction of its habitat through land clearing, deforestation, logging and rapid urbanisation. The associated road designs, car crashes, mauling by roaming pet dogs shrink and degrade the already fragmented habitat even further. Fossil fuel fanned bushfires further cause death and injuries.
Ecological data is essential for the understanding and the protection of species. The quantification and simplification of ecological complexity can inform decision-makers in government and law to ensure the resilience of ecosystems and genetic diversity.
To establish the existence, distribution and population size of an endangered animal, an array of spotting and monitoring techniques are available. Wildlife monitoring can take the form of spotlighting with 'boots on the ground', searching for koala sightings (image capture), sound (recordings) or scat surveys (poo) collecting around dawn and dusk. Passionate non-expert citizen scientists and consultancy services are involved in this biodiversity data gathering and database collating. Due to resource constraints, data gathering tends to get outsourced to technological techniques that require it to be cost-effective and rapid. The monitoring methods need to be reliable and cause the least harm to wildlife and its ecosystem. Good ethical practice should prevent the risk of unintended consequences.
“Boots on the ground” and spotting koalas in food trees in the daytime is one way. Images (GIS) and searching for scat (poo) is a daytime activity. Nocturnal animals can be spotlighted at night and sound recording can be made. Marsupials can be sensitive to any human disturbance.
Motion sensor high-resolution camera traps can be installed or drones fitted with infrared cameras that buzz an area in a 'lawnmower' pattern to capture the free roaming animals. Sound encroachment by the UAVs tends to cause stress in wildlife.
To fit radio-collars on koalas can be invasive to the animals due to handling.
One of the presently favoured local methods is scent detection by sniffer dogs. Fresh scat can also be used for genetic testing of populations in fragmented habitats. Wildlife perceives introduced dogs as predators leading to stress and negative impacts. Pet dogs will leave their scent in the bush which in turn disrupts the normal cycles of wildlife. Some endemic animals can avoid the area altogether after the presence of dogs.
One less invasive monitoring method of wildlife seems to be bio-acoustics. Soundscape monitoring can detect koala bellows continuously between 8pm and 2am. Low-cost, open source recorders can be used in microphone arrays. Computer algorithms can rapidly analyse thousands of hours of audio recordings to identify specific species' occurrences. Collating the data could also be done with open software under creative commons. Biophony approaches go beyond the 'decontextualized single-species model'.
AudioMoth is such a low-cost acoustic device for monitoring biodiversity. It comes as a small recorder about the size of a credit card and has ‘hearing’ up to 190 kHz.
The urgent need to establish the existence of Australian flora and fauna through expert consultants and their technology is in the light of the continuous assault on Country.
The gathering and collating of this data verifying the existence of ecosystems has the potential to be instrumental in halting the extinction trajectory of biodiversity.
Australia is built on the imaginary foundation of 'terra nullius', an 'empty' land without Indigenous peoples. Today, the 'blind spot' takes the form of an absence or manufactured sparsity of data on Australian native plants and wildlife and justifies the continuous defaunation and eradication of endemic flora.
The sheer existence of threatened species and biodiversity conservation laws appear as an obstacle to the 'business as usual' modus. Extractivism and the financialisation of nature continue to drive the Australian ecosystems into degradation and extinctions.
Reports by scientists and data by citizen scientists are often disregarded. A huge PR industry greenwashes the central issues with 'glossy papers' and 'raises awareness' in the mainstream media channels. A busy and stressed out public is in willful ignorance about the existential issues of their home.
The 'democratic debate' of a concerned public is now replaced by pre-framed issues that have migrated from the arena of political participation into the court rooms. The dialogues of controversial political processes have been shifted from the political arena into the courts (expensive and time consuming litigation). The new terrain for dispute resolution is no longer based on a democratic participatory process, but it is confined to the legal system.
"Ultimately, peaceful political protest should be addressed by politicians. The current government has decided, by making disruption of ‘everyday life’ a criminal act, that it is a matter not of politics but for the police and criminal law. This will have serious implications for society, and for freedom of speech, whether or not you believe it is the right approach."
(source)
In this milieu political protest is forced to take the form of civil disobedience and is viewed as yet another disruption to the flow of a perfect global supply chain. Criminal law takes care of the 'spanners in the works'. It is the criminalisation of voicing dissent to a catastrophic normality.
The actors involved in this sphere are lawyers, judges and (private) ecological consultants. The public has the freedom to participate in this system via user-pays access. There, the experts deliberate about the more-than-human world and its human advocates. The ecology of this social subsystem of environmental justice is made up of ecological justice and social justice.
Constitutional law and courts have to ensure that justice is done towards the past, the present and a future. The process must ensure intergenerational equity, the rights of nature and compliance with international agreements. An array of national law/s written in the past might not be able to take account of the global poly-crisis the planet is facing today.
When human 'developments' replace other species, custodians and their institutions have to decide whether that being exists at all or will be granted the right to continue to exist at all.
Expertise is manufactured by scientists in their field, the validity is established by a community of practice and the law of the time. 500 years of global extractivism history and neo-extractivism have established a clear value system and mindsets of what are the priorities of settler societies.
Under the Myanmar military junta or Amazonian right wing governments for example, the rich and unique biodiverse rainforests of their countries cease to exist and are then transformed into simple timber, crops and cash for a few. Justifying the unjustifiable becomes superfluous.
In the west, the market steers the curating of ecological data and the decision making into the hands of external consultants that are expected to provide accurate and valid data to the courts. Third-party consultants can 'cut corners' and resort to rapid surveys and 'box checking' of bio-diverse assemblages. Problems of reliability and validity remain. Western science is the knowledge system of that very system.
In a recent reproducibility trial for example 246 biologists got widely divergent results from the same data sets. (source)
James J.A.Blair argues that the
“practices of accountability prioritize mining interests and enable corporations to define the standards of performance that governments will use to establish compliance”
"In the late petro-capitalist normative order, private purchasing power for short-term profit gains continues to capture data infrastructure and yield influence over public resource management...."
"Environmental “sensing practices” may serve diverse political goals and objectives for humans and more-than-human subjects..., but their ethical and social origins lie in imperial hunting, domestication and policing, rather than principles of reciprocity common to Indigenous hunting and trapping." (source)
It is said that the essential feature of capitalism is the profit motive. The destruction of native forests by the state forest corporation has to be subsidised by the taxpayers. “Over 90% of native forest that is logged in NSW is pulped and sent overseas to be used in wood chips... “ (source)
As an economic project this rationality can only be explained by short-term political gains. Would decision-makers sacrifice a highly interrelated pattern and processes of flora, fauna and ecosystems? Would they exchange highly valuable, irretrievable, unique life forms for a quick 'multiplier effect'?
Could it be that the decision makers sacrifice native forests, (‘collateral damage’) plants and animals to keep a few timber workers and fossil fuel machinery owners in work for just another while longer?
60+ % of settler society recently confirmed a clear 'NO' to the existence and participation of the Indigenous peoples in this country. Australian endemic animals and plants are still largely unknown and can hardly be named by the general public. (Knowledge of the living', Canguilhem) Numerous reports attest to the degradation of the living in settler Australia.
The state of the environment on this continent has been ‘going in the wrong direction’ (Dr Ken Henry) for the last 235 years. (source)
The denial and lack of care for Country in mind, on paper and 'out there' is overwhelming. Only by refusing to acknowledge the existence of Country can the continuing destruction be rationalised.
Links:
AudioMoth: A low-cost acoustic device for monitoring biodiversity and the environment
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067219300306
Audio similarity search on the Australian Acoustic Observatory media archive. Users can upload audio recordings of an animal species, find similar sounds across the database, filter by location and date, and download the results. Open Source
https://search.acousticobservatory.org/
Four-legged friend or foe? Dog walking displaces native birds from natural areas
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6055768_Four-legged_friend_or_foe_Dog_walking_displaces_native_birds_from_natural_areas
(In) tolerance to Civil Disobedience in the UK
https://verfassungsblog.de/civil-disobedience-in-the-uk/
Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1
Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic, James J. A. Blair, 2023
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2zmkbzx?typeAccessWorkflow=login
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501771545/salvaging-empire/#bookTabs=1
Tracking penguins, sensing petroleum: “Data gaps” and the politics of marine ecology in the South Atlantic
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2zmkbzx?typeAccessWorkflow=login
Worth more standing: As NSW’s debt mounts, NCC calls for an end to subsidies for the logging industry.
https://www.nature.org.au/as_nsw_s_debt_mounts_ncc_calls_for_an_end_to_subsidies_for_the_logging_industry
Australia’s environment must be given legal priority over land-clearing and logging to survive, Ken Henry says
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/dr-ken-henry-environment-land-clearing-logging
Updates:
What is the admissibility of expert versus citizen evidence in court? Illawarra housing developer denies presence of platypus despite 'citizen science'. Outraged by the developer's refusal to acknowledge the animal's existence.
https://mastodon.au/@Bellingen/111411065583426641
Outsourcing koala monitoring to AI (soundscape) sensors, at Western Sydney University, 4.12.2023
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-04/biodiversity-monitoring-services-ai-track-male-koala-mating-call/103183972
