The Existence of Koalas

 

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

The Cerura Moth, The Scott Sisters and Nature Depictions

This hairy moth was hanging out where coastal rainforest trees are allowed to be. Cerura australis (Lepidoptera) is attracted by the perfume of the Flintwood tree (Scolopia braunii). It is the favourite food plant of its larva.

Both moth and tree were depicted by the scientific illustrators and naturalists the Scott sisters, Harriet (1830–1907) and Helena (1832–1910). Their book 'Australian Lepidoptera and their transformations' was published in 1864.

The father and co-author took possession of 2560 acres of prime land on the Hunter River estuary in 1827. Ash Island was seen as a 'paradise for naturalist'. For thousands of years the Worimi and Awabakal people had cultured this tidal wetland into a biodiversity hub. Alexander Walker Scott, an entomologist of the day invited other explorers, like Ludwig Leichhardt to his tropical place and even "offered to clear 10 acres in the district, construct a cottage and establish a vineyard for Leichhardt."(source). With time the usual degradation took place at the hands of settlers: subdividing, clearing, draining, agribusiness and finally industrial use of the landscape. In 1866, AW Scott went bankrupt and sold the Ash Island property. (source)

The young women had many years to depict 'paradise' and functioned as 'lady’ plant collectors to 'male experts' as was common in colonial days. "Their father’s bankruptcy forced the sisters to seek payment for their art and endure the perceived social shame for doing so." (source) Excluded from careers, universities and learned societies they continued to draw and paint Australian animals and wildflowers commercially till the end of their life. The artists were largely forgotten (in the land of pesticides) until there was an exhibition in 2011. (source)

 
One outstanding aspect of these 'amateur' naturalists was, that Harriet and Helena were drawing from live animals. "Most natural history illustrators of the time worked with long-dead, pinned specimens that were faded and lacked colour."(source) They refused the 'pinned' appearance of butterfly and moth cadavers and let them live. They also refused to depict 'the thing' in its decontextualised form. Like Maria Sibylla Merian before them they displayed the mutualistic symbiotic relationships between flora and fauna. The plants and the animals are shown at various stages of their cycles as an educational understanding of living creatures.

The scientific minds and the market demand an encyclopedic knowledge and repository for present and future disposability. Till today 'nature' is classified for the logistics warehouse of man. The 'thing' is still pinned, cut, tagged, frozen in vaults yearning for the self-made catastrophe. The bio-diversity of the ecosystem is reduced to a free service to humanity.

Removing a living organism from its larger environmental context in mind and practice allows for the reduction of life into mere stuff, living beings become mere material for one species' industriousness or the collector's wunderkammer.

The 'thing', once removed from its habitat/ biome can be utilised or exterminated by us and we can remain in proud denial about the basis of our life being pulled from under our (and others) feet.
 
It is also popular to have individual bird sound repositories for example. The 'thing' is without it's home habitat. The soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause: " is interested in a given habitat’s entire soundscape—its “biophony”—(he) finds the single-species paradigm absurd...each living organism in a biome evolves in situ to find its own acoustic niche, based either on frequency or time, so that “their utterances are not buried by other signals.” Thus, each animal sound, plus the sounds of the wind in the trees, or waves on a beach, fit together like pieces of a puzzle to create the kaleidoscopic composition we hear. According to this theory, animals change their sounds when their habitat changes." (source)

A perception and depiction of the whole in situ could contribute to the continuing existence of the web of life.

Today Ash Island is part of Hunter Wetlands National Park.


Images:
Cerura australis
Detail of hand coloured lithograph by Harriet Scott from A.W. Scott, “Australian Lepidoptera and their transformations drawn from the life”, London, 1864

The acoustic ecology of native bird extinction and the sound of “cock-a-doodle-doo”

For eons the Laughing Kookaburra has been announcing the break of dawn for eastern Australia. The loud 'koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-kaa-kaa-kaa' is often heard in a chorus. The bird is one of the larger members of the kingfisher family and lives in one place for most of its life. It also mates for life.

The more settlers convert bio-diverse landscapes into mono-culture and populate it with alien species, the ecology changes into an artifact. The soundscape too takes on the characteristic of a noise composition.

Now the highest-ranking rooster has priority to announce the break of dawn. The (overseas) circadian clock of the domesticated fowl often is set off long before dawn. They do not sing in a chorus but in a strict hierarchical pattern. The sound of “cock-a-doodle-doo” echos over the dark valleys. Barking dogs and cars complete the early morning cacophony.

Non-native species and fossil fuel combustion machines constitute the ambient soundscape that announces the break of dawn of more industrial activity. The bird chorus of kookaburras and other common native birds fades as the environmental noise increases.

Deforestation and land clearing robs Kookaburras (and other Australian wildlife) of their homes which they need for nesting, roosting and perching to catch snakes and mice. The generously splashed pesticides poison the insects that the birds eat.



Kookaburra and magpie among Australian birds in decline, says report , Guardian 15.07.2015

Magpies, kookaburras and willie wagtails among common Australian birds 'starting to disappear', report suggests, abc, 15.07.2015

The highest-ranking rooster has priority to announce the break of dawn, Tsuyoshi Shimmura, Shosei Ohashi, and Takashi Yoshimura, July 23, 2015 in Scientific Reports, 5, Article number: 11683. DOI: 10.1038/srep11683

http://birdlife.org.au/state-of-birds/

Wedge-tailed Eagle vs rooster

Wedge-tailed eagle rescued from a chicken coop. WIRES
 

Images
Graffiti EU

Noise Pollution and Vibration in the Bellingen Shire

On the 15th May the Royal Australian Air Force will fly jets day and night until 10.30 pm over the Bellingen Shire. (source)

The morning chorus of rural Bellingen usually consists of chainsaws. During the day the cacophony is enriched by mowers, slashers, lawn trimmers, sweepers, mulchers, chippers, shredders, bulldozers and other fossil fuel powered equipment. Cars speed on unpaved roads, cavalcades of mining and logging trucks thunder through the shire and the scenic little village. Hovering (pesticide spray) helicopters and sightseeing planes ensure that the sky is also abuzz with noise pollution. On weekends gangs of trail bikes rev up. At night the odd out of control ad hoc party distributes its industrial sound waves over the valley. The barking and yapping packs of dogs will be ignored here, as the focus is on machines powered with fossil fuel.

As a special annual event, the Bellingen shire (and Nambucca, Bellingen, Coffs Harbour and Clarence Valley council areas) puts itself on the map by hosting car races. " 200 kilometres of NSW forest roads will be used for a three-day car race." (source)  The fossil fuel burning spectacle is generating a lot of noise and dust. During that time, "the public is being denied access to various state owned forests." (source) Local endemic wildlife better not be near the many roads fragmenting their habitat.

Back to the aerial machines: “Up to 18 aircraft may be involved in these exercises, of which the major part will be conducted further off the coast, however northern NSW residents may notice aircraft activity this week." The aircraft will be the "F/A-18F Super Hornets from RAAF Base Amberley, near Brisbane and F/A-18 Hornet aircraft from RAAF Base Williamtown, near Newcastle." (source)

Ron Brent, Australia's Aircraft Noise Ombudsman, mentioned that the F/A-18s  "when used at full power... are among the noisiest planes we've seen here in Australia". (source)

In other places, aircraft noise has caused 'friction with surrounding residents'. One resident 'recorded jet noises as loud as 100 decibels at home.' "According to the RAAF, at Ludmilla Primary School the average maximum noise of an F/A-18 Hornet taking off from the RAAF Base Darwin is 92.6dB." (source)

A resident reported her experiences: "The whole house literally shakes...It's impossible to conduct conversations. You can't hear the radio...You feel the sound waves hitting your body...The worst part is not being able to predict when the noise will come...You don't know when it's coming. It's Chinese water torture...Then you start to hear it coming and your whole body tenses.." (source)

Celebrating Fossil Fuel Culture on Forest Roads
Staging Car Races in Nine State Forests of NSW

Images
Graffiti in the public sphere