Good news for the bush: Peter Latz interview part 2

In the first part of this interview, Peter Latz talked about how increased carbon dioxide has been a boon for the Central Australian desert — while stressing his belief that we need to take action to reduce world-wide carbon dioxide levels.

It’s a view that recognises the complexity of interacting systems, one that doesn’t get a lot of airing by media that prefer to keep it simple and usually focus on the negative. But a conversation with Peter is likely to be full of reminders that the present is complicated, the future is rarely entirely predictable, and change is the only constant in our environments. What is endangered and what is a threat, for example, can change or even switch places within a generation or two.

In his decades living at White Gums, Peter has invested countless hours getting rid of the highly invasive buffel grass from his property, as well as giving his unpaid time to protecting native grasses and plants in national parkland. It’s given him the opportunity to  closely observe natural processes that sometimes confound conventional wisdom. This combination of action and observation has reinforced his natural optimism, as the second part of this interview reveals.

 

Dave: There is still this incredibly high level of anxiety about the future. Do you think we need to focus more on what we’ve got?

Peter: I blame the media as much as anything, because the media like bad stories. People are not interested in good stories. What we should be doing is saying to the ABC: “For every nasty story you give us you’ve got to give us an equal positive story.” Because there’s plenty of positive stories around, but we don’t hear them. It doesn’t make news.

The other problem we’ve got here is buffel grass and other weeds… but what people don’t realise is (the problems are not intractable)… there’s a wonderful book called Where Do Camels Belong? He (author Ken Thompson) is mostly talking about Europe and North America, but he’s found that within 50 to 200 years, 90 per cent of the serious introduced plants and animals are tamed down and just become part of the system, often change their genes and aren’t a problem anymore. And that’s already starting to happen here with buffel and couch grass, which are the two worst weeds we’ve got.

Is that something you’ve observed or you’ve got evidence of?

Wel,l I’ve been monitoring the plants on Simpson’s Gap National Park for 35, 40 years, and I’ve got permanent plots there. The last rain we had — I haven’t got there after this rain — but there was a quarter increase in native plants more than before. So the buffel and couch were becoming less of a problem.

Was there a corresponding decrease (in couch and buffel)?

Yeah, yeah, you could say a quarter decrease in buffel and couch.

What causes that?

Oh it’s very simple. In the same way as we overcame the rabbit problem —we brought in a disease for it. See the reason introduced plants can take off in new places is they leave their enemies behind where they came from. So in the case of rabbits, we brought some of the diseases across — and I mean even Harry Butler said years ago we must bring in a cat disease, just make sure we inoculate all the tame cats, and of course he had windows broken and so on. The couch grass, for example, is considered to be the world’s worse grassy weed, worse than buffel here, has now got a fungus in it, a fungus that occurs where it came from, and now the natives are growing through it.

But I’m not saying we still don’t have a serious fire problem with buffel. I mean that’s one of the reasons we haven’t had these huge dust storms because the buffel was keeping the ground (covered).

Once again the trade-off.

It’s a trade-off and there’s no simple answer to this sort of thing, there is good and bad. But you’d think we have enough brains to work it out and start pulling our finger out.

There seems to be a lack of consensus that we do, doesn’t there? I remember being surprised when Xavier Herbert said we have to go nuclear. I said: “Are you serious? Why?” He said look: “Genie’s out of the bottle. This can help humanity. We can’t put it back in, we need to use it.” Is that something we should be doing?  Because it seems like a lot of these renewable technologies are very land-intensive; they require a huge amount of resources to create the panels, the windmills, they then create new problems, the windmills are killing the eagles and so on. Do we need to look at more advanced technology such as nuclear?

And again, the Chinese are doing it. They’re producing safer, smaller nuclear power plants that will be handy for developing nations. We don’t need them in Australia. Just the area out of Tennant Creek would give us enough power for the whole nation.

So yeah, there’s no one simple answer. You’ve got to use everything you can.

Tell us about what you’ve done here, on the block.

Well, when I came here there were three of these native passionfruit, which are a really important food for ants and birds and other animals. Now there are 103.  I expected that when I got rid of the buffel and couch, I’d have native grasses take over, and I’d still have a fire problem.

It wasn’t just the grasses that came?

No, and the thing is that in the past, anywhere us humans have settled, we started off here with sheep and decided cattle were better, but every settlement had goats, and goats are really good at getting rid of shrubs and making sure the grass takes over. Now grass is a disturbance weed. You know that before any humans came to Australia, the whole continent was dominated by browsers (shrub-eating mammals). There was bugger-all grass here.

Well, you’ve written about that (in Bushfires and Bushtucker).

Yeah, but the goats round our settlements have helped the buffel take over because they’ve got rid of the competition, so buffel has done very well. So what I’ve done, is by getting rid of the buffel, instead of native grasses coming back — they’ve come back to a certain extent, but you can see there’s what we call chenopods, you know the saltbush family. Ruby saltbush, a whole lot of different chenopods popping up. And my block — I used to be worried because I was surrounded by buffel grass, I was scared shitless I was going to get burned out. I’m safe now, because there’s hardly any grass around anymore. The chenopods are taking over. We’re going back to what it was before humans came here, and fire would have been much less frequent. They would have still had fires — don’t get me wrong — but much less frequently.

So in some ways it’s like we have to have a working relationship with nature and then let nature take over at some point.

Oh, we’ve got to help it because we’ve brought in these introduced plants.

The other thing is they talk about loss of biodiversity. Even in Central Australia we’ve got a quarter more plants than when white people came here. They’re introduced plants; some of them are weeds, but others aren’t. So our biodiversity has increased. Now New Zealand has doubled its biodiversity by having introduced plants come in. Some of them are bad, for sure, but biodiversity is not decreasing, because as the plants settle into their new homes. they often change, become a different species, and settle in and meld in with the neighbours.

The other interesting thing about Central Australia, and talking about global warming not having a big effect on us, is we don’t know of a single plant in an area as big as France that’s gone extinct in the last hundred years. Now where else in the world can you say that about? There are possibly one or two that have gone extinct, but we can’t say for sure. So I’m going to make sure when the buffel and couch is no longer a problem, we’ve got a seed source to reinvade these areas that these introduced plants have taken over.

There are (residents of) three other blocks that are working on it. We’ve got over 100 acres of fertile alluvial soil and the creek just south of us. So there are 42 native plants  that live in this part of the world, and they are a seed source to replace the invaded areas. Olive Pink (Botanic Garden) has been working on the fertile foothills, which is another buffel grass habitat, and the Todd River.  Ken Johnson’s also working on the Todd River. And we’ve also been working on this square kilometre of Mitchell grass country out at the Alcoota Fossil Reserve, which hasn’t had cattle on it for 35 years. There are 44 native grasses out there, many of them different to the ones we have here. So every major habitat that buffel lives in now has areas that have still got a seed source to take over later on.

Do we have any idea how many native grasses we’re looking at?

I would say 60 or 70. I haven’t really worked it out. There’s only a few of them that are really threatened. One of them is becoming quite common on my block. It was a very important food source for bilbies and for humans in the past, and it’s flourishing now. That was almost extinct in Central Australia.

It’s one of the urochloas. (It) has nice big seed. After a fire in Simpson’s Gap,  I measured the amount of seed this grass produced and it was almost as much as the average wheat field in Australia. So that’s how prolific in the right conditions. And the other important one of course for the bilbies and humans in the past was the bush onion. That used to be among my plots in Simpson’s Gap. It’s now totally gone because of the couch and buffel.

We (are trying) to get bilbies re-established in Simpson’s Gap and we’ve had troubles with predators, but now we can’t put them back before we get the grass and the sedges back again.

How long do you think it will be before  we could put bilbies back there?

That’s a good question. Hopefully, it’s  only 10 or 20 years, but who knows? But we’ve got to be ready for the time when it’s possible to happen.