Is anyone else blown away that life as large as a couple hundred of these trees could remain hidden from discovery until 1994 in a developed nation? We're talking about a national park in Australia, not the inaccessible depths of the Amazon encircled by the Andes.
It makes one wonder what else is out there to still be discovered.
> We're talking about a national park in Australia, not the inaccessible depths of the Amazon encircled by the Andes.
It is pretty inaccessible. Experienced hikers go missing never to be found all the time in the blue mountains - just walking off the suburban commuter train lines that service sydney. And that's in a few kms radius of the train line. The wollemi national park is miles away from that still, has no roads or trails that cross it, and is (was?) true wilderness - right on the outskirts of sydney. Huge part of the map was somewhere there wasn't even trails you could get in. Right next to sydney a place of equal size where you could be sure there was not a single human sleeping :) We'll have to see how it recovers.
I think what is unusual is people dont' have an experience of nature anymore where its wild.
To add to that parts of many parts of 'the bush' require a ridiculous amount of effort to get through.
Little story, I've heard of a little town in NSW that has an unexplored collapsed gold mine from the late 1800's. The location is roughly known, somewhere in an area approx. 20km2 on some old Australians property.
Few people know about it, everyone who does at some point has talked about going to find it, the landowner doesn't mind if they try.. Yet in all these years, no one has attempted it, because even if the land was flat(which it's not) it's impossible to get through without a bulldozer.
Makes you wonder how the old settlers did it and what did they find in there that made it worth going to that effort.
In Australia mineral resources belong to the Crown, the government can issue licenses to survey and/or mine, and in most cases the landholder can’t veto this process. However I believe that the landholder is entitled to a lease payment. See for example https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2014-04-03/mining-rights/5...
Ah, well in that case not only do prospective searchers not have an incentive to look for the mine but the landowner doesn't have as much incentive either.
EDIT: It seems that these pines are in NSW, which is in the southeast of Australia, not central Australia. My point about the size of the place stands however.
Yeah that’s the point of it, if you grab a country near the equator and drag to the poles it will balloon.
It’s about showing relative sizes of countries by placing them at the same point on the projection than it is about creating a projection with accurate absolute sizes.
Yeah, they are just outside Sydney. The thing I loved the most about living here was the wild, it grieves me that we have lost over a billion animals, not counting insects, fish and birds.
Needle in a haystack. It's roughly as inaccessible as the Amazon; at least there you have water. We "know" as a matter of statistical likelihood that there are significant numbers plant and animal (mostly insect) species in the Amazon that have been destroyed by human action before they can be meaningfully catalogued, it's just fortunate that these trees have been found and protected.
This might boggle those unfamiliar with the size of Australia, but they are actually on the same order of magnitude. The area of land under Australia's National Reserve system of state & federally protected areas is 137m ha. The rainforest coverage in the Amazon basin is "only" four times larger at 550m ha.
Both present access challenges due to sheer scale and remoteness. Note that Australia itself is larger again at 769m ha.
Notwithstanding which, the Amazon represents a vastly higher level of uncatalogued biodiversity. The Australian locations have a diversity of biome instead, including some that are quite inhospitable to life.
Since we're talking bushfires and scale, note that Australia's largest ever fire season (FY1975) burned an estimated 117m ha of land, but in remote locations; this season's fires have burned "only" 11m ha of land, but by affecting densely populated areas the the profile is higher.
I'm not entirely surprised - describing these groves as being "hundreds of trees" seems somewhat generous.
Offord et al describe the sites somewhat differently:
"... is restricted to two populations (Site 1: approx. 23
adult trees; Site 2: approx. 15 adult trees, sites approx. 2 km apart) in the Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains"
It's pretty easy to imagine overlooking small groves like this in a mixed stand.
Some forms of Australian scrub are fairly thick. You aren't always walking on a forest floor amongst trees or pushing through soft bracken. Some types are dense and spiky. If it's too steep for grazing, in a country with a meagre population like Australia I'm not surprised at all that some areas go unnoticed.
Not for nothing, but doesn't the occasional fire help habitats overall? I would expect ground-based seedlings in a canyon to perhaps regrow, and perhaps they have had a few fires over the millions of years of their existence?
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
Not saying this is a net good - more of a silver lining / glass half full.
Yes, but the idea is to set controlled fires to prevent these larger uncontrolled ones. It not only requires regular controlled fires, but when they are performed, for how long, and where are all critical. The remaining factor is you have to ensure the controlled fires do not burn too hot. This is knowledge that was passed down from the indigenous people of Australia, but apparently has not been well understood (it’s not easy, especially the part about hot enough versus too hot).
Not necessarily. Increased fire frequency is the primary hypothesis cited for why the population of Wollemia nobilis is so small today. They've absolutely seen fires in their past, but due to the nature of the physical isolation of this particular grove (incredibly steep, wet, narrow sandstone canyons), they've been insulated from the worst of it.
Fire is a natural part of many ecosystems. However, magnitude matters. Natural forest fires that creep along the forest floor and don’t turn into raging, out of control wildfires, can help certain seeds germinate and keep invasive plants under control. But when the fires burn out of control, they can push ecosystems totally out of whack to the point where they become something else entirely.
Many Australian species are evolved to coexist with fire, but not the catastrophic level that has been occurring recently and is forecast to become worse.
Rainforest areas especially haven't evolved with much fire tolerance and these places are being gutted. We will lose many species of plants and animals to extinction from these fires without major conservation efforts (which are underway).
From the articles I've read, it seems that the scale of this year's fire is partly due to the lack of controlled fires and clearing of accumulated dead plants over the recent past.
If so, this year's fires might actually be closer to what bushfires used to be before humans arrived in Australia. Though perhaps they occurred less often (many of the current fires probably have an human origin).
Regarding the risk of extinction of animal species, I think this is also because the range of these vulnerable species vastly shrunk because of humans, not necessarily because of the fires per se.
Beware; the news outlets peddling the twin lines of "it's arson" and "greenies stopped us clearing land", or their slightly diluted variants, are the same that wheel out coal lobbyists to make dark pronouncements on how climate action threatens jobs.
There has indeed been a lack of controlled burning, but that's because the planned clearance was itself inhibited by hotter, drier conditions earlier in the year.
The causes of ignition are statistically very poorly understood. What is known, however, is that convictions for arson have been in steady decline, and 2019 had the lowest levels of intentionally causing a bushfire for at least a decade.
Not only that, but despite the proximity to human habitation, the current fires have been (so far, touch wood) less fatal than the catastrophic bushfires of 2009. The Royal Commission into those fires found a lack of preparation and poor advice. Since then, policy and awareness of risk has changed dramatically for the better - including a reduction in the sources of inadvertent/accidental human causes of ignition.
To sum up, both suggestions fail to support the conclusion "this is how it always was".
Hopefully, you're also reading articles from less gaslit publications.
I'm from southern Europe. Fires are a common occurrence.
Most of the time they have a human origin. Not necessarily arson, though it is not uncommon (but it's difficult to catch perpetrators), but human activities make accidents happen (cigarettes, BBQ, cars, electric circuits, controlled fire gone awry, etc).
I never said or suggested that that current situation in Australia was mostly arson or that it is how it always has been. But equally I do not subscribe to the current hysteria. I think that Australian bushfires before humans arrived must have been quite a thing.
A problem we have is that it is difficult to have a measured discussion on these topics these days as illustrated by how my previous comment is downvoted and your ridiculous suggestion about the sources of my readings.
How can they make this claim given the current political powers that be in Au?
“””
Kean said. "There's a huge opportunity for us to lead the way in terms of tackling climate change and help the rest of the world decarbonize. There's no better country on the planet better placed to do that than Australia."
"We have to lead the way to X" sounds much better than "the current policy is a huge mistake because it doesn't do X". Both lead to the same action, but one frames it as a way to recognition and a new legacy, the other is accusing people of incompetence or worse.
If you want people to act then telling them they can become internationally recognized generally works better than accusing them.
Kean represents the ‘progressive’ side of the center right NSW State government.
The big problem is with the Federal Government. Even though Kean is from the same party as the federal govt, at the federal level the party has been taken over by highly conservative elements - the progressives are basically absent at the federal level.
This whole disaster is provoking a bit of an existential crisis for them
This may sound cynical, but I'm honestly just curious in hearing arguments:
What's the point of risking human lives and wasting resources on something that is kept a secret? For all we know, more people have walked on the Moon than seen this forest.
I'm not criticizing that they did it. I'm glad they did. I can see the emotional value to it, in keeping a species that has survived millions of years alive longer, and I share that emotion.
But was it rational? What was the benefit of this action?
I don’t think the benefit of our natural spaces is primarily for us. It’s for every generation after us.
We’re at a high point of consumerism and urbanism, but I don’t expect that to last long. I believe future generations will be much better at both conserving and exploiting what to us are arcane natural resources.
It just feels rude to destroy our natural inheritance and leave so little for the next generation.
It wouldn’t be the first time a human civilization did so. But that’s not the kind of civilization I want to be a part of.
This is going to sound wishy washy (and so probably tick the "No" box for your first question) but I think that humanity sometimes needs to remind itself that it can do things that don't plot rationally on the cost/profit quadrant.
Think about those Thai boys in the cave - the amount of effort and money required to get them out could have saved multiples of lives from preventable disease, etc. But something about that situation (helped by media interest, techy solutions, our archetypal fascination for people stuck in deep holes and so on) brought the world together and made lots of us care about something that really had nothing to do with us and that we stood to gain zero benefit from regardless of outcome.
We live in very splintered times. There's an immeasurable value in coming together to Do Better for a while before we all splinter off and start f*cking each other over again.
From a purely monetary standpoint, genetic diversity has growing commercial uses [1]. Isolated ecosystems often contain genes and enzymes that let us access new areas of chemical space (this is big in drug discovery ATM). We recognize that sequencing methods at a given time may not capture all of the relevant info about a gene (ex. methylation, weird folds, expression), so having living samples as new technology becomes available is critical in this research.
Speaking of genetic diversity, interestingly, the grove in question has none whatsoever.
In the gorge there are perhaps 100 clumps of trees, but genetically there could be as few as one or two 'individuals'. This is because each plant has multiple clumps of trunks. The plants basically clone themselves, which makes the entire population extremely precarious in terms of disease.
You're appealing to an emotion that I have already conceded to share. And it can't be more than an emotion, unless you are one of the very select few who have seen this forest.
However, my emotions occasionally tell me something that intellectually, I know not to be in my best long-term interest (or even far from it).
Edit: Try to think of my argument another way: I feel a certain way about this, and I would like to rationalize that feeling.
> Try to think of my argument another way: I feel a certain way about this, and I would like to rationalize that feeling.
Don't. This is fundamentally a "type error". Rationality can tell you how to achieve what you consider important, but ultimately it can't tell you what to want.
(Notice that mainstream economics has already abdicated this; it talks of "rational" actors with "preferences", but the preferences are assumed to exist a priori and not to evolve in response to information)
>Don't. This is fundamentally a "type error". Rationality can tell you how to achieve what you consider important, but ultimately it can't tell you what to want.
This.
This is such good advice. Really good advice to be exact. This exact piece of advice has been a multi-decade learning experience in my case.
However, I share GP's desire to be the fool that tries and offer them the closest thing I have to reconciliation.
"We made the problem, we need to fix it. Triage is a function of irreplaceability
and capability to remedy."
But feelings are often rational. To dismiss ethics as irrational is to dismiss social cohesion, a necessary need in human psychology.
To allow a rare thing to be destroyed is a loss to our collective human potential, because we can no longer study or understand it as it shifts through time.
In-spite of our self confidence, our knowledge of biology and ecology is just the tiniest beginning. Letting organisms and genes disappear is insanely reckless.
An analogy would be an illiterate dark age monk wondering if he should let random Greek and Roman books burn in his fireplace.
Despite all that we understand about the world, we still no shockingly little. Once certain species are gone, they’re gone. Biodiversity is critical to life on earth. We often take a mechanical view of nature, but it’s a vast interconnected web of which we’re a part of.
The article says they saved the only grove of them in their natural habitat in a secret location, so I assume that means they're growing in botanic gardens in other parts of Australia. But since they were only discovered in 1994 it's likely we're dependent on these groves.
You can even buy Wollemi pine seedlings at the Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens in the Blue Mountains, which is near the (still secret) spot they were found. But they cost $100+ a pop and are apparently rather tricky to grow.
I wonder whether it’d be dangerous to introduce them on other continents. I’m naturally against such ideas usually, but the entire American continent is full of such things already. At least the SW has invasive trees that seem somewhat integrated.
They are growing in Scotland according to the Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollemia and I've seen a large one growing unprotected at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.
I have two of these Wollemi pines after reading about the story of them a few years ago and being fascinated (I paid $100 for them but worth it to tell people the story). The trick to keeping them alive is to not do anything with them at all I think.
Probably not. Is cultivated from seeds, is huge, needs a lot of time to flower and reproduce, and is economically valuable.
Creation of new populations ex-situ of critically endangered species is normally seen as beneficial. Is an exception allowed under certain circumstances.
Some of this trees, still alive, were born when Europe was in the Middle Age. The genus is monotypic and exists since the last 200 millions of years or so.
Those are invaluable comprehensive reviews about australian climate and history registering each single, warm, hot and cold year, each volcanic eruption. In a place of the planet without written documents and mostly unknown before the arrival of the white men. We can infer from here if something happened with the macrofauna (when), if people migrations match some harsh decade and dry spell, if it was an equivalent to a small ice age or not, etc. Is a treasure of data.
OK, so they're scientifically valuable, historically valuable, perhaps emotionally or culturally valuable. That's plenty good enough reason to save them - I'm not trying to argue they shouldn't have been saved.
But I'm still not seeing that they have any current economic value. Which is fine, not everything needs to have economic value, I was just curious if there is some that I was missing.
Yes, it is planted in several botanical gardens and other places, and work is being done on propagating it.
What we avoided is having a situation like what happened with the golden fuchsia (Deppea splendens) in the 1980s, where it becomes extinct in the wild and only exists in botanical gardens.
Some people have planted saplings in their yards. My partner's father has one down in Sydney. Although it looks superficially similar to its pine brethen, it is a quite unique tree! Apparently his tree is struggling in the drought but the recent rain should help it.
We gave a seedling to my parents in law over ten years ago, it's grown really well in a large pot out the front of their house in the rural outskirts of Sydney (and we didn't pay $100 for it either).
My immediate thought is that satellite pictures could show where the trees are at, since it's burned all around them, and then people will try to visit them.
They are asking people not too, but also its hard to overstate just how rugged and inhospitable the terrain to the north west of Sydney is.
It is essentially untouched wilderness that is very difficult to traverse for even experienced bush-walkers and hikers. The area is riddled with steep canyons that are all but impassable without specialist equipment.
Even if you knew the exact location, it would still be very hard to actually get there.
And if you did, you would probably bring the diseases that wiped out this species that used to cover all of Australia and Antarctica and has some how miraculously survived in 1 hidden valley.
I'm not at all arguing that everyone should go visit, but if the trees are really that fragile how did they manage this fire-fighting operation? I can't imagine the firefighters scrubbed up and put on surgical scrubs before rappelling into the forest.
I can. I mean, Australia is OH&S mad & really full on biosecurity. I do high risk work as a rigger, we need a whole bunch of random OH&S qualification, then on a job, might have rope access gear a bunch of tools, and that's just showing up for a gig. In this case you're talking the same, plus helicopter experience (belaying down), ability to signal and radio with a helicopter, search and rescue qualifications, firefighting experience. Can't imagine that in addition to putting on the harness and kitting up, they had a bit of a spraydown before hand. It would probably be something that kills fungi and bacteria, maybe as simple as tea-tree oil.
Seems it is widely available for sale as well, which as only discovered in 1994 is kinda good to know that had this growth died, the tree would live on.
Sure, but that needn't connote Australia waiting for everyone else. Given our extreme vulnerability to climate change (on most accounts, we're one of the worst-placed wealthy nations), our government should be fighting like hell on every possible international front for the strongest possible action.
Our current government won't really even try, for extrinsic reasons; but even if it wanted to, it couldn't. Our piss-weak policies and decadal political sclerosis make us a laughing stock in the relevant international forums. This has only recently become apparent, as there's a lot of momentum in international affairs, and Australia did have a decent stock of political capital. But it's well and truly depleted now, at least in this area. Only serious domestic action on emissions can get our federal government positioned to actually do its job and make all possible efforts to protect the nation.
If Australia and the USA both came to their senses then climate action would very much happen.
China could also take the lead here; it's actually surprising that they aren't because it's an ideal opportunity for them to project power on a global scale and an important step in their replacing the USA as the global super power.
Climate action does not project power or offer an economic return. It's pretty much guaranteed to be the opposite - forgoing an opportunity or building things at your expense in order to not disadvantage the rest of the world.
That's not guaranteed to be true. Leading the way on fostering new cleantech is a way to get ahead of the same cleantech industries elsewhere. The question is really how good can the timing be rather than if it's going to happen.
Australia does export a lot of coal. If they stopped doing that the price would probably rise a bit. AFAIK many coal plants are already barely profitable.
> Hopefully the Australian government wakes up to the climate crisis
It's very hard to imagine, given the current crew. They're pretty hard core on the motivated reasoning front. And they've moved from outright denial to a more nuanced accept-but-deflect position, which could go on for years with nothing meaningful happening.
Expect little before the next federal election (2022).
For sure - Australian politics at all levels has long been deeply corrupted by the mining & real estate industries. In that respect we're probably not very different from many other semi-democracies. Though the Australian voting population is notably easy to scare, and tends to be unthinkingly obedient to authority (larrikins, my arse).
do we even have proof its due to climate crisis. eucalyptus is highly flammable, tourism increases, im pretty sure fires can start from some foil paper on the floor in those regions. also like the aboriginal australian use to do, you need to clean the bush and forests. we should focus our efforts onto that rather than talking about a philosophical "climate crisis" that wipes out concrete efforts that governements can lead to protect their forests.
Ignition sources are pretty much a constant so don't remotely explain a truly dramatic rise in the extent and ferocity of forest fires. Eucalyptus has been flammable for millennia. Tasmania and Queensland have seen fires in forests and forest types (rainforest!) that literally haven't burned for thousands of years. The RFS is having to redraw its boundary maps because longstanding firebreak forests are no longer firebreaks. What were permanently wet forests are now dry. My local council is having to rethink housing planning permissions because longstanding truths about which vegetation types are safe to build around are themselves going up in flames.
As for hazard reduction burns, these have been on the increase for years. The rate of increase has been hard to sustain, because the fire season has been rapidly extending, and reducing the windows of opportunity for burning. There's certainly scope to draw on indigenous understanding of cool burns, but that's not something that is likely to happen quickly at scale.
Simplistic notions of 'proof' are no more pertinent to assessing the evidence on the relationship between climate collapse and forest fires than they were with lung cancer and smoking. These are complex systems we're talking about. We just have to assess prior scientific knowledge and multiple lines of empirical evidence as best we can. University-based research, the CSIRO, and relevant on-the-ground forest management and firefighting agencies have been predicting an increase in forest fires consequent on expected climate change patterns in Australia for many years. This has now come to pass. If people have alternative explanations, these would be bolstered by, preferably, pointing out where they similarly predicted the increase in forest fires, and then making their predictions for what will happen in the coming decades.
This is not something that can be proven, the correlations are too complex and you have n=1.
You can predict that probably statistically you'll see changing patterns of precipitation with changing climate leading to dryer woods, but whether that correlation holds is only clear with observed statistics, and whether that specific instance is connected can only be quantified probabilistically.
Do you want to wait until we're reasonably sure that this specific issue is connected, let alone all the other things bound to happen? (Some more probable than others.) By then it'll be too late to roll it back or do anything but keep it from getting worse in a meaningful way.
The point that we can revisit forest management practices regardless of climate change still holds though. While yes we may be seeing more fires due to climate change, we also may be able to make it less of a problem in the short term. And doing that doesn't take off the table doing something about climate change, so why not?
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Am I the only one who winces at the brain-numbing robot-like false confidence and dogmatic preaching of attributing all natural disaster to man-made climate change?
There's a reasonable case for the impact of climate change here: the drought in Australia has been partly caused by the reversal of the Indian Ocean gyre, which is linked to climate change, and the fires occurred during a heatwave, during a time when heatwave are becoming more common, which is also linked to climate change.
Like you I'm also frustrated by the dogmatism around climate change. I think the majority of people on both sides have chosen their position on the basis of political allegiance and social identity rather than a consideration of both sides, and that's a really big problem because it moves the debate away from observable reality and into the realm of politics.
>the majority of people on both sides have chosen their position on the basis of political allegiance and social identity rather than a consideration of both sides
How would you suggest most people actually consider "both sides"? (i.e. a method not requiring more skills than most people have, or more time than most people would want to invest.) I think I have above average skills in reading scientific papers etc, but still it's not clear to me at all how to go about doing that. I guess I'd find the climate change report that seemed to have the most credibility with (ultimately) the kind of people whose politics I like, and yield to that because of its authority. Not much "considering" involved.
> How would you suggest most people actually consider "both sides"?
I'd suggest that they have a look at local weather data going back a couple of decades, compare it to global data, check out the methodologies used to calculate that data, read a few of the best resources they can find from each side, and try to work out what the debate is about.
I don't think many people will change their minds, but I hope that they'll learn what both sides actually are and come to have more respect for the other side.
> And..are there actually only two "sides"?
I think there are two sides to the question "how much effort should we spend preventing climate change?", and those sides are "no effort" and "all available effort", with plenty of middle ground. I think serious debate around climate change is about where we are on that continuum, rather than whether man-made climate change is actually happening.
As mentioned on the above comment, I don't think the sides are "yes" or "no", I think they're "do nothing" and "make enormous sacrifices to economic growth and non-climate government expenditure". It's extremely frustrating to watch this debate happen because nobody is engaging with the "do nothing" side and trying to convince them, just beating on the strawman of outright climate change denial.
It makes one wonder what else is out there to still be discovered.