Bathurst Community Climate Action Network

Whatever else may be said about the elections just gone – and an awful lot is being said as we go into the first hung parliament since the Second World War – it would be safe to say that concerns about climate change are now firmly on the political agenda. The rising vote for the Greens, for whom this is the number one issue, stands in contrast to the declining vote for the major parties, who tried to dance around the issue rather than give us clear policy. While the major parties were more comfortable talking about the economy and even "the boats", they can't stamp out a rising feeling in the electorate that "the great moral issue of our generation" is still to be decisively confronted. (I'd just like to add that I'm not a member of the Greens, although I did support them in this election. Bathurst Community Climate Action Network, for which I am publicity officer, has no affiliation to any political party, and people of all political persuasions make up the membership of BCCAN.)
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Last Thursday night, environmental consultant Professor David Goldney gave a presentation to the local historical society about the natural history of the Bathurst region. When he started with the creation of the universe I thought we were going to be in for a long night, but he quickly got on to more recent times. Professor Goldney has been picking over written accounts from all sorts of people as they came across the mountains to the Bathurst plains in the nineteenth century. Their observations give an insight into how rapidly the landscape, created over millions of years and then tended by the Wiradjuri people for tens of thousands, was transformed within just a couple of decades by European settlement. White cedar disappeared almost immediately and soil erosion set in very quickly. He ended by saying that today, landholders should be paid to restore and maintain the health of our landscape. He added that there are many examples of ecologically beneficial farming and landholding practices in our region that should be supported and propagated. Professor Goldney is now working on a book about all this, ensuring that his research will be available to the people of this region into the future.