Sifting the future from the past: a personal assessment of trends impacting the Australian rangelands

Abstract

The fore-sighting exercise undertaken at the Australian Rangeland Society Conference at Port Augusta 10 years ago in 1996 developed four scenarios: ‘economic growth’, ‘best practice’, ‘extra green’ and ‘partial retreat’. These were later collapsed into two broad directions, ‘looking out’ (the economic rewards generated by a full application of free market policies with rangeland enterprises having strong external linkages will result in production and management efficiencies which benefit the Australian economy) and ‘looking in’ (rangeland Australia and its human, economic and ecological resources will be best served by the development and maintenance of strong local communities in each rangeland region). It was anticipated that ‘looking out’ would apply to only a few rangeland regions where pastoral production is highly valued and rangelands are resilient; ‘looking in’ would apply to the majority of the rangelands where other values might outweigh pastoral production in the future and where the rangeland resource is considered less resilient. Given the world’s embrace of economic and trade globalisation, and the dominance in the federal sphere of one coalition government and one prime minister, it seems inevitable that across Australia the last 10 years were dominated by the ‘looking out’ direction, while many marginal rangelands had few options but to ‘look in’. The 1996 discussions failed to appreciate fully the importance in shaping today’s world of singular issues such as terrorism, global climate change, potential disease pandemics, the emergence of China and India and, in an Australian rangelands context, the continuing success of the northern beef industry. In the interim, rangelands science has produced an impressive underpinning of integrative information led both by industry investment and government funding. However, long-term resilience is still not assured in many areas of Australia’s rangelands. It continues to be outpaced by those four horsemen of the (rangelands) apocalypse: the need for growth, periodic droughts, personal gain and introduced organisms. During the next 2 decades the rangelands will be buffeted by many of the same old issues and well as obvious emerging ones. Important human-centric ones will be the tension between European and Aboriginal demographic trends, the increased economic dominance of mining, tourism and defence in the rangelands, and the ‘sponge effect’ of successful towns and particular enterprises. Ecological and bio-physical issues will include carbon trading, energy generation, water catchments, weeds and diseases and agricultural incursions into the northern rangelands. The broad directions of ‘looking out’ and ‘looking in’ still retain some currency for today’s rangeland decision makers but are now embedded in far stronger and shifting currents that are frequently determined by global and national dynamics, rather than local issues. A distinguishing feature of the Australian rangelands is that they are still essentially intact (apart from their fauna) in a world context and may gain future ecological and economic advantage by remaining so. How to retain this status remains one of the great challenges for the next generation of Australian rangelanders.