Caring for the Australian countryside

Tweet

The Australian Academy of Science’s 2012 public lecture series will examine sustainable communities, mining, agriculture, culture and environment in country Australia.

Tuesday 7 February 2012
The Biggest Estate on Earth: Aboriginal land management

Adjunct Professor Bill Gammage
Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University

The lecture outlines the logic of Aboriginal land management in 1788. It shows why Australia’s plants and animals made long-term, precise and detailed management possible. The lecture illustrates Aboriginal land management with examples, and explains how land management rules were enforced. Country was maintained locally, but conformed to universal religious sanctions and prescriptions. Australia was thus a single estate - not an untamed wilderness as newcomers thought. It was made to obey the Law, to ensure biodiversity, and to make all life abundant, convenient and predictable.

Tuesday 6 March 2012
From dust bowls to food bowls: the conservation farming revolution

Dr John Kirkegaard
Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Plant Industry

The challenges of global food security and climate change have re-focussed public and political attention on agriculture in Australia. Images of dusty ploughed fields and dying sheep and trees have generated a public perception of an inappropriate ‘European’ agriculture in Australia that belies the innovative, efficient and productive farming systems that have developed during the last 30 years. Underpinned by fundamental and adaptive agricultural research, Australia’s innovative farmers now grow a diversity of crops and pastures without tillage. They retain stubble to protect the soil, and use satellite-guided precision seeding, spraying and harvesting to provide highly efficient production with reduced environmental risk. Innovation is continuing apace, with rapid soil and plant sensing to guide management, better forecasting of weather and crop yields, and novel physiology and genetics to provide better crop varieties to meet the challenges of substantially increasing food production in environmentally benign ways.

Tuesday 3 April 2012
Trade-offs between agriculture and the environment: how do we decide what to protect?

Dr Anna Roberts
Senior Research Scientist, Victorian Department of Primary Industries

Most people want to know that ‘the environment’ is being protected, including water quality, habitat, threatened species and specific environmental assets. Agricultural land management greatly affects the environment and large amounts of money are being committed to protecting aspects of the Murray-Darling Basin, Great Barrier Reef and many other areas. A focus on process, including making plans, and setting targets, helps create a sense that outcomes will be achieved, but often they are not. In addition, many programs are based on an implicit assumption that largely voluntary adoption of improved agricultural practices will be sufficient to deal with environmental problems. Often this is not the case, leaving large policy dilemmas about trade-offs between land management and the environment. This lecture will explore interactions among science, economics, politics, and policy, and will address how to get more effective discussion about what aspects of the environment are sufficiently important and feasible to protect at acceptable cost.

Tuesday 5 June 2012
Australia’s desert heartlands: a vibrant future or a victim in decline?

Dr Mark Stafford Smith
Science Director
CSIRO, Climate Adaptation Flagship

The lightly inhabited remote rangelands are the quintessential imagery of Australian advertising. When compared to their population, these lands are a disproportionate source of the country’s wealth, particularly through mining and tourism, and a source of the country's angst in the form of land degradation, species loss and social troubles. Ecologically, they are dominated by poor soils and a highly variable climate. These conditions have been well managed for grazing purposes, but not so well managed when variability affects managing businesses, settlements, service delivery and governance processes. How should we manage a variable natural and social environment? What implications does this have for our nation? And what opportunities could there be to apply this knowledge to the benefit of the rest of the world?