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After huge amounts of coral bleaching and rising carbon emissions, the Great Barrier Reef could really use some good news. Sadly, that's not what it got this weekend.
A draft report from the Department of Environment and Energy recommends forest clearing should go ahead at northern Queensland's Kingvale Station, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Prospective clearing was first authorised in 2014, and its purpose would be to make way for cropping and other activities.
Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg will rule on the matter, and if it goes forward it'll mean 2,000 hectares of forest areas right next to the Reef will be cleared. And that would almost certainly mean a soil pollution problem for the Reef.
[...] Not only is too much heat and light a problem, so is lack of sunlight. Sediment washed from the land into the Reef blocks sunlight onto the coral, restricting the necessary process of photosynthesis. It can also damage or kill some of the fauna supporting the ecosystem.
"Declining marine water quality, influenced by land-based run-off, is one of the most significant threats to the long-term health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef." Ironically, that's a quote from the Queensland Government's State of the Environment page.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 15 2018, @02:31PM
Steering tourists away from dead reefs seems a bad idea for raising environmental awareness. Anyone visiting the Great Barrier Reef has surely heard at least something about it dying back and shrinking. Yet, nothing to drive home the horrors of war like a fresh battlefield full of unburied bodies and still alive but fatally injured soldiers.
One sad sight are the logged parts of Sequoia National Park in California. A bit more than a century ago, these idiot loggers, not much caring or knowing just how old those trees were and that it would take a millennium for the environment to recover if it could at all, came in and cut down a bunch of giant sequoia trees as if they were like any other tree only lots bigger. They did it to see if they could turn a profit, but fortunately the profit was too marginal and too likely to turn into a loss, so they gave it up. They and their selfish, pathetic little money grubbing schemes are long dead and gone, but the damage they did is still very visible today.