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Known Leadbeaters colonies in 2014
Leadbeaters colonies identified since 2014
While The Conversation is very useful site for academics keen to pad CVs with easily expanded lists of their papers and essays, those viewing its content from outside the ivory tower can sometimes find themselves a little baffled. Today’s featured essay by Professor David Lindenmayer, of ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, makes that point rather nicely.
The professor has long been an ardent advocate for the Leadbeaters Possum, Victoria’s cute-as-a-button faunal emblem which has been said for some time to be on the brink of extinction — not least by Lindenmayer, who has insisted its survival hangs on the curtailing of logging in state forests to the north-east of Melbourne.
“If logging continues, the Leadbeater’s Possum will be the first to become extinct, but it would not be the last. Think of it as the canary in the coal mine,” he prophesied earlier this year, reiterating his sentiments of 2012 when he assured The Conversation‘s readers that timber-getting must inevitably lead to “the rapid demise of the species.”
Well here we are, five years later, and the professor finds himself with some awkward explaining to do, most notably the inconvenient fact that the latest Leadbetters population surveys are extraordinarily encouraging — indeed, jaw-dropping after all those years of doom-laden talk about species demise and extinction.
Atop this post are two maps. The first represents known Leadbeaters populations as of 2014. Beneath it, fresh Leadbeaters populations brought to light over the past three years. There are rather a lot of fresh colonies.
For some reason Lindenmayer’s current essay at The Conversation neglects to include a link to the latest Environment Victoria population-survey maps, updated in early September, but the curious can inspect them here. At The Conversation, by contrast, what the professor provides is an intriguing explanation why good news should not be regarded as such. He writes (emphasis added):
There have been more records of Leadbeater’s possum in the last few years, but this growth is most likely a function of a large increase in the amount of effort invested in trying to find them.
In areas zoned for timber harvesting, locations with a confirmed Leadbeater’s possum sighting are excluded from logging. This has motivated large numbers of people who are concerned about the plight of the possum to devote many hours to finding animals.
Pause here to consider the logic of those two paragraphs and what they imply about the green lobbyists, captured bureaucracies and sound-byte publicists who wish to put an end to logging.
Back when known Leadbeaters colonies were scant, their alleged scarcity was presented as proof that logging must be banned as a matter of great urgency.
Now that the populations have been shown to be exponentially more numerous that, too, is “proof” why logging needs to be banned. As Lindenmayer explains above, green-eyed observers have gone looking for the possums because, whenever they find some, logging is banned within a set radius of their sylvan roosts.
So, either the Leadbetters possum was
(a) not in severe danger of extinction in the first place. It was just that greenies saw the advantage in not making strenuous efforts to find them.
or
(b) is not now in danger of extinction because populations are recovering quite nicely from the Black Saturday infernos of February, 2009.
Actually, there is a third possibility.
(c) green activists were suppressing details of known possum populations when the animals’ purported rarity made a useful tool for harassing the timber industry. Now that discovering fresh populations has become a useful tool in that same campaign, suddenly there are possums all over.
Whatever the truth, much shoe leather and public monies poured into committees, consultants and alarmist press releases might not have been spent had Lindenmayer and others read forester Mark Poynter’s 2012 Quadrant Online essay, Greenies Stir the Possum. They can remedy their ignorance by following that link or the one below.
— roger franklin
