Liturgies

Des Boyland, a botanist and ex Executive Director (Conservation), Queensland Environmental Protection Agency, actively lobbies for enhanced environmental management through Wildlife Queensland and serves on various Ministerial Advisory Committees.

Kathleen Ellerman-Bull came from a large, extended rural family and grew up on a sheep property in the Riverina. She is a keen bushwalker and is an active member of the Queensland National Parks Association. Her career in Psychology has focused on social justice issues, particularly as they apply to children and young people.

Des: Good Evening, I am a self confessed, passionate conservationist and conservation is about stewardship not preservationism. I believe in the need to strive for a balance among sustainable industries, meeting the needs of the community and society and conserving our flora, fauna and the natural landscape, all major components of our environment, as well as our cultural heritage in the broadest sense.

Unfortunately the balance is not being achieved. The chase of the almighty dollar, resulting in over-consumption and waste of our resources contribute to the downward decline in our environment and its natural components.

The reading tonight speaks about stewardship- and I am of the view that this points the way forward. Appropriate stewardship, underpinned by science, tempered by the knowledge of our Indigenous peoples and guided by prudent land managers, may arrest the decline in our biodiversity, enhance our natural environment and conserve our cultural heritage. There is an obligation to care for our environment so necessary natural ecological processes can continue unabated and all resources are wisely used. There is an obligation to ensure intergenerational equity exists. After all, we don't inherit the land from our parents, we borrow it from our children.

John Sawhill, ex CEO of Nature Conservancy said, 'A society is judged not only by what it creates but what it refuses to destroy'.

All major religions provide comment on our interaction with the environment. The Bible both New and Old Testaments refer to our obligations and there are conflicting views presented. There are many an academic paper pointing to Judaism and Christianity as being principal driving forces that has lead to the exploitation of our planet yet there are countless verses in the Bible that advocate care for the environment, our plants and animals.

I have formed a view that religion has two principal threads,
" Theology- the source of dispute and argument
And
" Spirituality- a common concept through many a religion- To me spirituality is about being a good person, a good neighbour, a good citizen and even a good conservationist

Australia is one of only two developed nations among 17 megadiverse countries in the world-countries that have large numbers of plants and animals as well as other elements of biodiversity. Australia also has a high level of endemic and distinctive species among its plants and animals. There are legal and ethical obligations for the conservation of these species

Yet policy and legislative changes by Australian and State Governments are eroding the necessary but totally inadequate existing measures currently in place to conserve our biodiversity and protect our environment.

In Queensland, Wild River legislation has been weakened, vegetation management laws have been amended with the potential for the return of broad scale clearing, excessive fragmentation of remnant vegetation and massive destruction of wildlife. Regrowth guidelines have been rescinded and the Nature Conservation Act is being turned on its head.

The joint Australian and Queensland Governments' recent report on the iconic Great Barrier Reef indicates the overall health of the reef has declined. Under the Reef Plan targets set for farmers/and graziers to adopt improved practices for controlling pollution have not been met, with only 35% out of the anticipated 80% being attained. 72% of the reef''s coral appears to be dead.

Another natural icon, the Great Artesian Basin, is at risk. This icon is over 200 million year old, 70% of the Artesian Basin is located in Queensland, its volume is 112,000 times that of Sydney Harbour, it is the life blood of the pastoral industry and people living west of the great Divide. An adaptive management approach is used to control the Coal Seam Gas industry. Using this approach, problems are fixed only when detected and that can only occur provided the change is not irreversible. Although some guidelines are in place the Precautionary Principle to which Australian and State Governments are signatories has been set aside for all practical purposes. As Ansell Adams, a renowned American Naturalist, stated back in the early part of the twentieth century, 'It is horrifying to think we have to fight our own Governments to protect our environment'

The problem is care for the environment is no longer a major concern for the broader community and hence it is no longer a priority for major political parties. Diminishing fund allocation as a percentage in federal and state budgets to environment portfolios is clear evidence of this.

A balanced stewardship of our non-renewable and renewable resources is what is required. As Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) espoused in his ecologically-based kid's book, the Lorax 'Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not!' and let me assure there has to be a lot of 'yous'

Conservation of our natural heritage relies on several different tools however the corner stone of conserving our flora and fauna is our National Park system.

Kathleen: 

When we think of spirituality, we often imagine a one-on-one connection between the self and God. And so, it is often portrayed.

Can we contemplate a spirituality, not directly focused on God, but on creation in all its manifest forms?

We can understand that as humans, we have compassion for other humans; a sense of empathy with their suffering, even when it is far removed from our own experience.

But having a deep spiritual connection to forests, animal species and plants which leads to a commitment to their preservation and well being seems 'radical' to many people in our society, particularly to some people in State Government. Their attitude to National Parks is utilitarian: "locking up land which could be turned to commercial agriculture…" Further, this land is seen as problematic in that it may harbour feral pests such as pigs or wild dogs that raid nearby farms or may present a fire risk.

It might be said that when it comes to the natural world, the Biblical instruction of "Go forth and subdue the earth…" has been taken all too literally by people like those in the Qld State Government..

The first seamen who visited the uninhabited Mauritius found the Dodos had no fear of the sailors, who carried them off to their ships, thus installing the Dodo as the archetype of extinction. Tim Flannery, in documenting extinctions says "it has allowed me to glimpse, in my imagination, at least, a tiny flicker of wonderment at this lost world."

The extinctions, however, continue, in Australia as in other places in the world. In Queensland, the bilbies are down to two protected sites, one of which has been recently ravaged by feral cats.

In Queensland, our National Parks offer a last hope for hundreds of species, animal and plant, which have been destroyed elsewhere in the rush to clear the bush for agriculture.

The role of the National Parks in providing protection for threatened plant and animal species is easy to understand.

Australia has the worse mammal extinction rate in the world. Altogether 18 mammal species have become extinct since the arrival of European settlers a little more then 200 years ago. Twenty percent of our remaining mammal species are threatened with extinction.

The role of National Parks in human well-being is not as widely appreciated. Recent research at UQ has identified the significant contribution to well-being even of urban green spaces. Any of us who have spent time in the forests and bushland of our National Parks can bear witness to the sense of well-being and peace of mind that can be found there. This should be something that is a given - an agreement that in the wilderness, we can find a peace with ourselves, with the rest of the natural creation and, ultimately, with the Creator.

In the last months, there have been disturbing developments in the State Government's approach to National Parks in Queensland. In an excess of zeal over cost cutting, they are seeking to reassign our national parks and reserves to "businesses' which have to cover their own costs from the income they can generate through fees, extended usage by commercial enterprises, logging and opening up the parks to use for purposes contrary to the principles for which they were created.

This includes opening up some parks for cattle grazing, introducing quad-bike and four wheel drive tracks, even in opening up the parks to shooters, as has been done in NSW.

"However, what concerns me most is that the protection of the entire plant and animal wealth of our state is restricted to National Parks that cover only 4.8% of Queensland. Not content with having access to more than 80% of the State for grazing, the  LNP Government has compounded poor land management by turning some of our National Parks into cow paddocks." (Paul Donatiu NPAQ.)

Despite what the State Government says, this is not just the opinion of "radical greenies" The Australian newspaper, not known for radical thought or utterances, says of this move:

" Newman has bowed to the National's demands to allow grazing in national parks - a move with potentially serious consequences to the fragile ecology of arid zone parks. He insists that this will save the lives of starving cattle, but they will be slaughtered soon in abattoirs anyway, The objective of graziers is to fatten the cattle to boost financial returns, not to Save their lives." (1st June 2013).

We do not doubt that animal welfare is at stake, but allowing cattle to graze in National Parks is not the solution. Queensland has just come through one of the worst droughts in its history, but at no stage did the State Government resort to allowing grazing on National Parks.

The five national parks in question collectively provide refuge for 20 rare or endangered species including the endangered Julia Creek dunnart, protected in only two NPs. On of these two provide protection for many Australian icons including kangaroos, koalas, emus, wedge-tailed eagle, square tailed kites, and the rare squatter pigeon.

Queensland has seen the effects of widespread land clearing during which countless thousands of native animals and birds perished. Some of the few pockets of intact vegetation that survived this holocaust were gazetted as National Parks, including some patches which had been previously grazed; these have been restored by ceaseless work over the last 20 years by the QPWS rangers. All this effort will now be lost.

Furthermore, in a time when the "Greatest moral challenge of our age" is global warming, the continued degradation of our remaining forests and savannahs removes important carbon sinks where carbon dioxide is taken in to be replaced with oxygen.

An attitude that the State has the over-riding right to exploit the natural world for immediate financial gain ignores a series of other rights:

• " Our rights as citizens of the State to have open access to the remaining pockets of beauty and grandeur of our natural heritage;
• " Our children and grandchildren's rights to a world which maintains diversity and respects nature;
• " The rights of our native animals to live and breed in their native environments - not just confined to zoos as curiosities;
• " The rights of the natural environment itself - the trees and streams, the wild rivers and the mountains and gullies - to survive and carry out their functions which, indirectly, but, often, directly, support human life itself.

A spirituality that focuses narrowly on a relationship with the Creator, but which ignores the destruction of the Creation, seems limited and narrow.

A spirituality that supports a sense of connection to and wonderment in the glories and diversity of the world and a connection to all of creation, seems richer and more profound for it takes into account a real sense of our own place in the world as humans - not as the as the owners and masters of land but as curators and stewards of a world that will belong to countless generations in the future, We do not own this world, in all its beauty, its fragility and strength, its diversity and all its conflicting needs and complexity. We hold it for the brief duration of our own fragile lives, in trust for our grandchildren and the generations that will follow them.