BFD readers no doubt belong to that vast majority of happy folk, greatly to be envied, who neither know nor care who Elizabeth Farrelly is. So I must apologise for bursting your bubbles of blissful ignorance.
If there was a pictorial calendar of watermelons, Farrelly would be its cover girl. Her simpering, head-tilted smirk is the epitome of complacent leftist ignorance. From the rarified confines of inner Sydney, architecture critic (for such is the only trade she is actually qualified for) Farrelly deigns to grace the rest of us with her views on everything from inconvenient tradesmen (she abuses at them, should they dare let their work intrude on her cycling progress) to how to manage the nation’s farms.
As farmer Tom Marland (with dual degrees in environmental management and law) says:
One thing I enjoy is being lectured to by urban media on how farmers should manage their land and environment.
[Elizabeth Farrelly] is your typical modern day urban environmental weekend warrior. She was late getting her article in because she was out planting trees. She has planted 70 this year!
That’s nothing – the rumour is that she only took one overseas holiday this year. Take that, greenhouse gases!
The reality is that the net gain of those trees would be wiped out by one of her commutes to work and wouldn’t even cover the food miles for the imported coffee beans at her favourite coffee shop. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good hack job.
After planting a few trees, she felt qualified to stray from her specialisation as an “architecture critic” to share with us her extensive knowledge of vegetation management and the benefits of trees she found in a google search.
I hate to play one-upmanship but my family manages somewhere around 10 million trees on our freehold country plus another 10 million in our national park. We didn’t plant any of them – they just grow naturally – in the millions…I rarely get the time to “hug” my trees unless I’ve been wiped off my horse by one of them chasing cattle. But I understand that to maintain a healthy forest you have to “manage it”. Whether by fire, axe or chain it needs to be selectively cared for to ensure it’s not choked out by woody weeds, lantana and noxious weeds. You can’t just “lock it up” other wise a bushfire will eventually come along and destroy the lot.
Michael Crichton rams home the same point in his excellent State of Fear: the environmentalist fantasy of nature’s “balance” is just that – a fantasy. The delusion of “environmentalists” who live as far from the natural environment as it’s possible to be. The Australian landscape has been managed for the benefit of humans for tens of thousands of years.
Like most urban environmentalists, the article starts off by painting all farmers as environmental vandals who are roaming around the bush on bulldozers chanting “Kill more trees, cut them off at the knees, kill more trees.” I’m not offended by that statement – it just demonstrates the ignorance of someone who has no idea what they are talking about…I’m not sure if she has actually read the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016. I have and it is hardly a puff piece. NSW vegetation laws are overly officious, technically confusing and inconsistent with extensive enforcement powers and heavy penalties.
Ask the farmer from Garah who stick raked previously cultivated wheat paddocks and was fined $350,000 for “clearing” 500 hectares of “native vegetation” regrowth about how “soft” NSW vegetation laws are.
But an “environmentalist” from the concrete jungle of inner Sydney thinks she knows better.
Sydney…[doesn’t] have to worry about vegetation management laws – the remaining vegetation are in parks or in pot plants.
It’s easy to moralise about vegetation management when it is someone’s problem and livelihood.
It’s easy to point the finger when someone else is picking up the tab.
It’s easy to have an opinion when the cost of that opinion is nil. That accordingly is also its value…I wonder if the author actually had to pay a farmer for the vegetation on their land rather than just take it for free whether she would be so eager to pontificate about the virtues of vegetation.
I doubt it.
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