DICKS CREEK, Australia (Reuters) - Farmer John Ive squints through the barbed wire fence separating the roadside from an ulcerous patch of ground where salt has risen from the earth to collapse the land into crumbling, barren ravines.
Black stumps from an earlier fence, decayed from the bottom up by salt, dance from wire strands in the biting wind.
"These sites are pockmarked across the southern tablelands," says Ive, shaking his head in despair at desertification of Australia's farmlands as underground salt rises to the surface.
Only the Sahara has more desert than Australia, whose red center has long been thought uninhabitable by modern man.
But while Australia's central deserts are now seen as benign and are starting to yield fruit, salination is turning once productive farmland into lifeless dirt tracts and threatening the country's A$30 billion ($22 billion) agriculture export industry, one of the biggest in the world.
Around 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of land is now officially salt-affected, half of that in southwest Western Australia...
...OUTBACK DESERTS GROWING
The outback deserts are also growing, due to climate change. Officially, lowland arid regions cover 3.6 million square km (1.4 million sq miles) of Australia's heart.
"Central Australia will get drier. And the periods of drought are likely to get more ferocious," says Professor Mike Archer, a longtime desert enthusiast and dean of science at the University of New South Wales.
Feral predators, tourists, grazing animals and big fires are all adding to pressures ...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060713/sc_nm/environment_australia_salinity_dcWorldwide our conservative friends are just doing a bang up job of governing. We're so banged up, our very survival is in question.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
