The above photo is of the Hinze Dam and the City of the Gold Coast, SE QLD, Australia.

I have also included some of my Astrological Symbolic Collages. These have been based on themes using planetary positionings, Sabian Symbols and Fixed Star locations for particular times of the year (2009). They are more of a curiosity, than anything else.

Firstly, here are some of the Phantom Koala Collages. Phantom Koala (PK) comments for environmental sustainability, Land and Water Stewardship & environmental education issues. He has stories, poems and articles throughout bluecray.org and bluecray’s “Balance of Faeries” blog.

There is also a bluecray.org article about some of Phantom Koala’s Collages, history and stories HERE.

You will also notice that I use photos of  Benoit, my little crow friend in many of the Collages, as well as photos of  his Father. They are wild Torresian Crows that live nearby to me.

Environmental Advocacy collage reminding us that Caring for our Country is also about Caring for Our Children

protected by more than money can buy, our hearts, prayers and loving visions for this beautiful blue planet can help change the world

In the Bluecray “Journey for Wisdom in the Land” blog stories, I mention that the Goanna visited the Glyphosate bank, and eventually, the Goanna left also.

Here are a few LINKS to explore, to further understand restoration ecology, the complexity of biodiversity in disturbed fringe rainforest ecosystems and to help you with decision making with regard to suitability of spraying with Glyphosate (or any other herbicide) and mowing the area,  when embarking on a restoration project.

Factors affecting the use of reforested sites by reptiles in cleared rainforest landscapes in tropical and subtropical Australia. article at : Restoration Ecology 14, 67-76.  Kanowski, J., Reis, T., Catterall, C.P. and Piper, S. (2006)  This article can be found HERE.

Restoration Ecology – Wikipedia article

Pesticide fate and behaviour in Australian soils in relation to contamination and management of soil and water: a review : at CSIRO Australian Journal of Soil Research

NSW Government – Parliament Questions and Answers time at HANSARD : No. 10, Tuesday 19 September 1995 : if you scroll down this page, you will see Q’s & A’s pertaining to the NSW Government’s answer to the management of Bitou Bush involving the spraying of GLYPHOSATE. This is back in 1995. And if you have a look at current practices today, you will find that glyphosate is commonly sprayed in many areas of LAND and WATERWAYS. Landcare Groups, Land Managers, Developers, Councils – the list is endless as to those practicing glyphosate spraying.

Infection of frogs by amphibian chytrid causing the disease chytridiomycosis – key threatening process listing : KEY THREATENING PROCESS in Schedule 3 of the Threatened Species Conservation Act, NSW

“Is Batrachochytrium dendrobaidiss really the proximate cause of frog decline?” 2005 Shelley Burgin

Some other Articles concerning chytrid fungus HERE

Chytrid fungus at Wikipedia

Inclusion of species in the list of threatened species under section 178 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (55) (07/12/2007)  : This instrument amends the List of Threatened Species (16/07/2000) to include Litoria booroolongensis (Booroolong Frog) in the endangered category – at COMLAW

Action Statement Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988No. 118 Booroolong Frog :  Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victorian Government : this is a PDF, downloadable from the above link. I shall give you a small section from Page 4 of the above Action Statement where glyphosate and chytrid causing disease is mentioned: -

“Over the past 20 years there has been an increase in the general use of broad-spectrum herbicides (Tyler 1989).  The active ingredient in many formulations, glyphosate, and the surfactant have been shown to be toxic to frogs and tadpoles (Bidwell and Gorrie 1995).  Formulations which contain glyphosate and surfactant are commonly used to control emergent water weeds.  The wide use of these pesticides may have contributed to the decline of the Booroolong Frog in rural landscapes, such as the Northern Tablelands region.

Studies of ill and dead frogs have implicated a chytrid fungus in the decline of some tropical and sub-tropical frog species in north Queensland and Central America (Berger  et al. 1998; Lips 1999). Several species of temperate riverine frogs have been infected with this fungus (Berger et al. 1998; Berger unpublished data).”

Bluecray Regional Environmental News-Mt Warning Caldera  Search Engine:-

search “Litoria booroolongensis threatened species”    RESULTS

some useful article on restoration and ecology: at Biodiversity Assessment & Management Pty Ltd (BAAM)

And so, lets just look at what has been going on here:-

Frogs , especially very small frogs, can be undetected in banks of streams and gullies. They may be in the soil, under vegetation, on vegetation or in the water. If, and when, a person comes into this habitat, and sprays glyphosate, some frogs are documented as not handling this very well. It may make them sick. Sickness from a chemical, plus loss of habitat, via death of vegetation (less cover, lessened insect activity, loss of biodiversity – even IF it happens to be that the only current biodiversity in the area is weeds) can cause stress. Stress can be a cause of illness manifesting.  I now leave it up to you to work out.

CHOICE 1. Spraying stream banks and gullys, or indeed, anywhere, with glyphosate,  thus killing vegetation and habitat areas. Mowing and slashing and/or spraying, thus decreasing groundcover for smaller wildlife species

PK wonders if Litoria & her friends will escape the Glyphosate and Slashers in the Landcare Project on their Creek in NE NSW

CHOICE 2. Sound, environmentaly sustainable practices for maintaining biodiversity . This may include:

• careful, selective  hand weeding,
• mulching with local leaves, branches  and debris,
• dense planting to promote quick canopy,
• leaving wood, rocks and logs in place, rather than removing to allow a slasher in
• incorporating native groundcovers, grasses, herbs  and middles storey plants and seed into revegetation program,
• slow mindful approach to sensitive stream bank areas – there is a huge choice of careful land stewardship methods.
• Basically, minimum disturbance of the habitat that is to be regenerated is best, thus allowing the species already present, to stay, in a protected habitat situation. In a later article, I shall discuss these and other methods,  a bit more in depth.

And so, in answer to WHY Goanna left the Glyphosate Bank in my story?  Well, because, (and there IS some artistic licence here) ……..

Because all the other wildlife began to feel ill, exposed, and the seed and insects had gone. The small seed eating birds left.  They all had to move into other animals’ habitats for a while.

And  Goanna left too,  before he got too stressed or chased by a slasher!  And of course, the tall grasses with their open high thatch, as well as the cover of lantana, leading from the forest to the grassy bank had allowed the goanna some protection, as he searched for food in the gully and along the bank. Once all this was dead and dried up and sparse, the goanna, being more exposed in his searching for food,  left the Glyphosate Bank.

• loving vision to heal + habitat = more habitat and more biodiversity
• killing to heal + habitat = less habitat, less biodiversity

The Agricultural Chemical and Machinery Industries‘ direction within mainstream society has endowed future populations of  our world with:

• fast food production,
• decreased biosphere activity
• fast development
• increased production yield in mainstream Horticultural, Agricultural and Amenity cropping systems.
• Everywhere you drive, along the side of the roads you can see this legacy of the Agricultural Chemical in the form of  dead grass and micro habitat sprayed with herbicides.
• Everywhere you shop, you can purchase food products as a legacy of this fast fix Agricultural Chemical legacy.
• Every time you meet council and landlord requirements to “pest proof” your new building or leased property, you sponsor this legacy of Agricultural Chemicals.
• Everytime you you chose the comfort of  poisoning a rat, spraying a fly, safeguarding your home from those “terribly annoying and threatening spiders and ants”, you further this legacy of Agricultural chemicals into the world and the food chains.
• Every time you need to travel many kilometre to retrieve food and accomodate lifestyle, the machinery industry helps you, via roads, non regionalised industry, and non sustainable developments.

Now, I do not mean to make you feel uncomfortable about this. Or do I…….

• Agricultural Chemicals and Large Machinery  are a wonderful and terrifying gift from Science and, in turn God. These pesticides and machines, if I may so loosely term them, have saved lives, and helped feed millions.

And this, dear environmentally concerned reader, is the quandary. The annoying dichotomy of existence today.

The Quandary

*Chemicals + machinery+microhabitat and habitat = Bare soil / limited habitat

How does one practice and live valid, sustainable lifestyles (especially those that we, and our peers have become so accustomed to), and yet keep our environments comfortable, safe and abundant?

“Chemical free” I hear the advertisement chirp cheerily on the radio. “Without harmful chemicals”, “biosafe” .  .  .       I see the presenter announcer –  in pristine white gleaming kitchen, as she wipes those dangerous germs from the kitchen bench, her baby’s hands, and her swing lid garbage bin.

Well, we are all chemical. It is highly chemical. We are a biochemical complexity on a biochemically complex earth.

*The trick is: chemicals , particularly man made ones, are on the rise, permeating our food chains, air, water and soils.   Our world has become so full of these new, and often combined chemicals, that. . . …… that it is hard to know what was natural, in the beginning, and what is “natural” now.

Our minds have become so full of this knowledge, about these chemicals, that we have reached new plateaus of tolerance and comfortability about them all (well, at least many of them).

Yet, listen to this reasoning:

• We may be all chemical.
• We may strive to define what is a “good chemical” and a “bad chemical”.
• Essentially, in between all those biochemical components that make up the living earth………. in between all the organic, and inorganic chemicals of our living planet, there exists SPACE.

And there is alot of it!                 In fact, mainly, we ARE composed of SPACE. There is quite alot going on, in that space….. another story………. I digress.

Tolerance Plateaus and Stress

So the tolerance plateaus that  much of society have reached, with regard to man made chemical creation?

• Food chain chemical adjustment.
• Brain wave chemical adjustment.

The combined effects from media and industry onslaught of killing the bug, monculturing the lawn, product fixation, running to a deadline, playing with the beast?,

Generally, over-driving natural systems to the same extent we drive our neurotic selves., Causing a number of  abreactions.  Combined effects of combined effects carry with them unpredictable outcomes.

Chemical Monoculture Mindsets

*Bare soil    =      limited habitats,limited biodiversity

*Chemicals + machinery+microhabitat and habitat = Bare soil / limited habitat

These mindests have been built up of a number of generations now – courtesy of

• marketing,
• advertising (some of it, you even invite into your home via tv, radio, via playing it while YOU go about YOUR day). Why look!!! I even have google ads on bluecray…well, i tried them for a while…
  
• Product & Company endorsement via guidelines laid down in government and agency activities
• Schooling “norms”
• Peer Higher Education interfacing with Corporate/ Business.

Now all of this makes me think of R J Lifton’s writings,  how my experiences in life show me that many people adopt this strategy of “killing” in the name of healing, as explained by R J Lifton.

Nature is also under stress. And like us, has coping mechanisms.

However, consequences from all of these stresses  - the ongoing complexity of them…… makes the little things rather important.

Little things, like not killing, but growing habitats.

In our dazed neurotic state (complex as it is),  we forget what we were doing. We forget our simple, caring lives.

Instead, we find ourselves caught in an ever informed, mindblowing realisation that it really IS going way too fast!! All of us, so many people in the planet lost into their moment, and times are changing, again!

Vision and Love

I would like to bring this article back to the beginning now.  Back to that directional  idea. That idea of killing something with chemicals, spraying the country, waterways and estuaries with chemicals.

• Machinery and chemicals cause small localised losses of biodiversity
• These losses can accumulate rather rapidly owing to other localised pressures that are also within that particular ecosystem or even habitat.
• I have noticed that many small and sometimes larger property management tree plantings  are cleared extensively by mowing or herbicide. A strange birth path for an environmental project. Killing the land to heal it. It isn’t even a gentle killing!!
• Various different growth stages, over time, of different plant communities = Variously different habitats and related biodiverse flora and fauna communities

This is a symptom. This is looking it right in the eye, at the ground level. TAKE A LOOK!!!

*Over cultivation  + Mowing + herbicide use  =    limited habitats  +  limited biodiversity

*Bare soil    =      limited habitats,limited biodiversity

• Australian landscapes have a fundamental dynamic biodiversity that has functioned for tens of thousands, even millions of years.
• Different biodiversity dynamics appear regularly. The trick is in keeping the biodiversity going, so that balances can occur more readily.
• Nature is amazing, and it can re-invent iself quite remarkably. A bare mown patch of ground can, perhaps, turn itself into a forest. It certainly can, if it is in the middle of a wet rainforest, surrounded by biodiversity. If it is along the Darling River, it may take many, many years or even decades and centuries to “reinvent” itself into a dynamic yet stable over time,  biodiverse habitat.

Various different growth stages, over time, of different plant communities = Variously different habitats and related biodiverse flora and fauna communities

• Habitat regeneration, without chemicals and large machinery is caring for our country, flora and fauna.
• Habitat regeneration need not be  about killing habitat. Although natural processes do respond to death in a rebirth way.
• Habitat repair, after destruction via machinery and chemicals,  having gone past critical level, responds with less and less resilience.
• Habitat regeneration is about understanding and loving habitats. Loving nature, and bothering to spend some time there, to care, before you race in and kill habitats and micro-habitats.
• A loving approach to Habitat regeneration makes more sense.
• A loving approach to Habitat regeneration takes more time. The birth energy of such a regeneration project is alot more well adjusted to fit into natural rythms already working on the revegetating sight.

Meanwhile, back to the Abreactions, the biochemical and psychological stresses that we are handing ourselves over to.

• When someone is acting from a primed stress response, any further stresses can cause chronic illness.
• When an animal is acting from a stress situation,  especially if stress patterns are already deeply based in the animal’s responses, with further stresses occurring, that animal may become further stressed, depending on it’s coping mechanisms.
• Changes that occur too rapidly, will often then cause more stress.
• The same can be said for a micro habitat.  The most basic micro habitat for much survival, here on earth, is the humus level. This humus level is a fantastic earthly biological wonder.  Beyond this are the smaller creatures of earth, the bacteria, the insects, the spiders, the fungi, the lichens, the small molluscs, reptiles, mammals etc, plants, vegetation communities.
• As our personal environment changes about us, be it social, homelife, daily or work related, our earth’s environment is also moving  fast, about us. (especially in rapid development areas).
• Social Environmental Stress is also rapidly changing.
• Habitat destruction comes in many forms.
• Habitat destruction stresses us and earths precious creatures and life forms  in more ways than you can imagine.
• Habitat destruction has far reaching consequences on, and via the more basic earth elements, such as fire, wind, rain, heat, cold, weather etc.

Killing to heal is an auto response that doesn’t always serve us. Loving to heal is a whole much better. Get it?

killing to heal + habitat = less habitat, less biodiversity

loving vision to heal + habitat = more habitat and more biodiversity

Environmental Ethics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Peter Vintila at Postkyoto Centre : See some of Peter Vintila’s work here:- ABC Unleashed: “Climate War” 6th November 2009; Post Kyoto Journal . His works show the dichotomies of human acquired learning responses and social adaptive tendencies when, the whole of our beautiful blue planet is at risk from our collective social activities. The tendency to “fight, flight and freeze” – the trauma adaptive qualities of centuries of “threat from outside” are now being acted out en masse by society. These learned adaptive processes, whilst possibly serving us collectively in humanity’s “youth”, are now outdated, and a new, brave form of courage is required. That of a VISION encompassing loving, sharing, forgiveness, acceptance – growing and nurturing “the good” in place of fighting and destroying “the bad“.

This can be said, in general,  for wars, developments, community revegetation programs, roadside management, planning instruments, daily lifestyles of individuals and much much more.

“A Balance of Faeries” 1989 – A true story

• Weed Identification – IBRA – SE Qld
• Weed Identification – IBRA – NSW North Coast

Engineering and developments that cause land to become bare, vegetation to become fragmented and biodiversity to lessen for long, or even relatively short periods of time hold no place in this modern world of stress and foreseeable biological disaster.

The precautionary principle,  “Where the possibility exists of serious or irreversible harm, lack of scientific certainty should not preclude cautious action by decision-makers to prevent such harm. Management needs to anticipate the possibility of ecological damage, rather than react to it as it occurs”, is one legal principle that can lead to Courts helping biodiversity being saved in a region.

• “Administrative Law in an Environmental Context” search results at bluecray Environmental search engine
• Duty of care and the precautionary principle : search results at bluecray environmental search engine.

However, it is up to each and every individual to work to help this planet today. Development Groups such as Leda make much money from large scale development at the cost to nature, valuable regional resources and biodiversity health, well being and sustainability of natural resources. This type of development (Kings Forest Residential Project)  flies in the face of current government trends to create policy and Australian and Global legal treaties to protect biodiversity at a regional level.

Little Bat finds NE NSW Coast Lifestyle, near Kings Forest to much to survive in

This little Bat in the above photo is a consequence of development – dead on the doorstep of a duplex in the housing development west of Pottsville, Tweed Shire. With 21 threatened fauna species threatened even more byLeda and the development proposed, what will be the costs, if all that stands between them, and survival, is documents written, verbal provisions made and “intentions”  outlined, when the bulldozers and engineering machinery move into Kings Forest and further develop this area?

Bluecray – previous article on Kingscliff – Kings Forest Development by Leda

Kings Forest Kingscliff  Tweed Development Planning Documents for perusal and comment ( due 2nd March 2009)

Development project threatens second largest Koala Colony in Tweed Shire - candobetter.org ** this is a good article to help you understand this development, with contact details for the project and some great Koala info

Australian Native Vegetation Policies at Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage & the Arts – “This Framework is a joint initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments, and is designed to provide a mechanism through which the native vegetation management commitments agreed to by all Australian governments can be progressed.” - 2001, the Native Vegetation Framework or NVF

NSW Woody Vegetation Change Report 2006-2007 Google HTML Doc of PDF Report at   NSW Government Department of Environment & Climate Change (Native Vegetation Management : Information Sheets & Publications)

Friends of the Koala – article about Kings Forest Development and Koala Concerns in the Far North Coaster online (Online Magazine for Far North Coast of NSW)

Sydney Morning Herald article –  an  historical news item re Kings Forest (November 8th, 2004) – “Development yeilds nothing but a crop of Litigation” by Anne Davies

• Some Australian Aboriginal  (Indigenous peoples) research literature for the North Coast of NSW at the Libraries Australia Search

Below are a few more threatened species that will suffer from the increasing non-sustainable development on the Tweed Coast:-

Rose-crowned Fruit- Dove (Ptilinopus regina) – and images .

Grass Owl (Tyto capensis) – and images

Masked Owl (Tyto novaehollandiae) – and images

Black Bittern (Ixobrychus flavicollis) – and images.

Black-necked Stork (Ephippiorhynchus asiaticus ) – and images .

Bush stone-curlew  (Burhinus grallarius) (Aust. Govt) and at NSW Govt- and images .

Bush-hen (Amaurornis olivaceus) – and images .

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) – and images .

Eastern False Pipistrelle (Falsistrellus tasmaniensis) – and images .

Yellow-bellied sheathtail Bat (Saccolaimus flaviventris) – and images .

Common blossom Bat (Syconycteris australis) - and images .

Common Planigale (Planigale maculata) -  and images .

Long-nosed Potoroo (Potorous tridactylus) – and images .

Red-legged Pademelon (Thylogale stigmatica) – and images .

Grey-headed flying-fox(Pteropus poliocephalus) and images .

Olongburra Frog (Litoria olongburensis) and images .

Wallum Froglet (Crinia tinnula) and images .

Glossy Black-cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus lathami) and images .

ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITY : Coastal Cypress Pine Forest (Callitris columellaris Forest) ****ENDANGERED****- and images

There are many more species threatened by this development (State Significant Site under the NSW planning law and Part 3A), and the developments that have already been occurring on the Tweed Coast. The above list is incomplete, but will give you an indication of what type of losses can occur, should this development be allowed by the Director General and Minister for Planning in NSW.