I’m encouraging my kids into science/engineering/land management. Earth repair is propbaly the future of employment.

Cows, eh?

The point is that if nature is not real, if it is an artefact of human agency, and whatever nature we have now certainly is (McKibben), then this changes the issue from ‘how do we protect nature?’ to ‘what sort of nature do we want?’

That strikes a chord with me. Last year on our boat cruise down the Rhine the tour leader told us that in Europe nature had been pushed back into the mountains. He didn’t mention the sturgeon that once used to populate the river.

I work on some properties in Upper Brookfield, a Brisbane suburb, with typical holdings of 5 or 10 acres. One is a new house on a block carved out of a dairy farm, which is still operating. The other day I was thinking that the cow paddocks were in the best shape, followed by a horse paddock and the property I was working on was a poor third. A gully choked with weeds, a hillside covered with long grass beyond the reach of the mower, plus recently disturbed soil with grass cut too low with a ride-on, hence subject to erosion.

I heard once about some work done on landscape archetypes in Australia. It seems that a popular one is open woodland, with no understory and the grass cut short with a ride-on. This is typical of Upper Brookfield. Bad for erosion, no good for wildlife.

There is a local group promoting the planting of species native to the area, but my observation is that the exotics and weed species are winning. I’ve been involved in a couple of minor restoration projects, but just knocking over the weed species is extremely labour intensive, never completely successful and if you give up for even a year all the crap returns.

In Queensland there is a broader political struggle between green groups and farmers over woody vegetation management, with the green groups in the ascendancy through penetration of government. For the farmers the struggle is existential, as they see it. I’ve been planning a post on the issue. So far it’s been too hard, but hopefully next year.

You’ve got to remember that the history of farming is one of permanence, generation after generation.

It's a self serving myth. Most Australian farming families barely stretch to two generations on any given bit of ground. Large scale commercial farming is slowly eating into the market share of family owned farms, whose succession strategies never work (warring brothers are not pleasant when the family farm is at stake).

The subsidies and drought payments aren't really for the farmers either. They end up in communities (some of it) and the rest ends up with our banks and the big export companies. Farming is big business – not that the National party ever acknowledges their real paymasters.

The big lie of western civilisation does get revealed every now and again: democratic socialism is never about the "little guy", or the battler, or the working family, or Howards Battlers or Abbots Barmy Army. It's about making sure those crumbling edifices that are banking institutions remain solvent no matter how stupid their lending practices or crazy their trading strategies. No government wants to be the one overlooking mass foreclosures and no bank wants to do it.

Farmers, of the ones I've spoken to, are far more broadly spread in their opinions of carbon trading than Barnaby Joyce (or that filthy "Land" rag) would have you believe. Sequestration is quite an attractive industry if your soil and rainfall no longer support seasonal cropping due to climate change. Lots of this generation of farmers have been to university (unlike their fathers) and without making generalisations, are a little better at seeing through bullshit and demagoguery. Plus, statistics is a huge part of animal science so they implicitly understand the the tropes of climate science. Don't write them off as a force of change or romanticise their involvement with the land. Mcleods daughters is not a documentary.

Farmers have always been subject to the weather (not the climate per se), and whenever things got bad they could expect a bailout at least big enough to stay on the land and complain about how small it was.

They have plenty of personal or family stories of droughts, floods, February hail, &c &c, predating “current warming”, to give them ammo for a couple more generations of climate scepticism, minimum.

Their main question would be “okay, if ‘global warming’ is real, why doesn’t the government bail us out again and again and again, just like before when it was ‘natural variability’?. Don’t they still need wheat/beef/cotton/rice/sugar &c &c?”

It’s actually a fairly strong argument, because Oz govts have been propping up unsustainable agriculture for more than a century. Why stop now?

No, judging by their shiny tractors and late model utes and 4WDrives, they seemed to prosper even if from time to time the kids had to go to the local school.

One word: overdraft.

I’ve wondered that myself and take myself back to the early 1980′s when I spent several years running a school in the wheatbelt where drought meant a flood (sorry!) of farm kids back into the local school when funds for private school fees were scarce. Surely men and women on the land are the first to feel the impact of climate change? They live and die by the weather! Of course they should all be climate change activists, not deniers! As well so many of them were regular and intelligent listeners to the ABC and Country Hour where so much information about research and informed opinion is broadcast daily.

But then I remember too their stoic acceptance of the vagaries of climate and how government subsidies, tho’ often complained about as too little, were always there to help them through the driest of years. So from generation to generation, from decade to decade, they survived in their sunburnt country and stoically bore the alternating droughts and flooding rains. They got by. No, judging by their shiny tractors and late model utes and 4WDrives, they seemed to prosper even if from time to time the kids had to go to the local school.

In the recent years of truly devastating and unrelenting drought I read the MSM and see TV news stories of rural heartbreak as many are finally forced off their land. I sense reluctance in many of those interviewed, almost dragging their heels as they look back at those staying, thinking that his year maybe, “She’ll be right”. Accepting the ups and downs of climate is an attitude now ingrained in their DNA, as we’d say. No need to panic for the long term. Is there?

One might as well ask why racism was rife and entrenched in rural areas. After all, white and black have lived side by side there for generations. Shouldn’t that have resulted in mutual understanding and toleration?

“The second is to find a genuine point of connection between culture and nature, which can be leveraged to found and refound a politics.”

This is a long shot however following on from McKibben’s argument that nature is ‘dead’ are the arguments that what we construe as nature (specifically that nature seen to be separate from human nature) is in fact not natural. Significant elements of nature, according to historical ecology, are artefacts of human activity. This is upheld by good scholarship and (briefly) can be seen in the ecological histories of Scotland where the rolling hillsdies that we accept as classical wild nature were in fact covered with heavy forest up until the sixteenth and sevwenteenth centuries. The same applies to Ireland. Both landscapes were denuded by the need for timber for iron smelting prior to the development of coaking coal. Similarly, Greenland was denuded by the Vikings in about the ninth century and the entire Mediterranean basin was cleared of forests by the Roman Empire.

The point is that if nature is not real, if it is an artefact of human agency, and whatever nature we have now certainly is (McKibben), then this changes the issue from ‘how do we protect nature?’ to ‘what sort of nature do we want?’ I think this might be linked to democracy. Future nature, subject to global management, can be democratised to support as much social- and bio-diversity as possible. The alternative is coporate nature and government run nature farms designed to produce the means of subsistence.

My favourite greenie poster features a heavy 4WD hurtling through an absolutely barren landscape while trailing a cloud of thick dust. The text reads ‘Nature, it’ll grow back’. The point is that it won’t in the forms that it has existed in the past unless we decide to have that sort of nature.

Maybe.

There is an open Copenhagen thread for more general observations as well as particular ones about what’s happening at the conference:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/12/07/copenhagen-open-thread/