What are wetlands. Look them up on the NSW department of environment and heritage and read of their importance.
. . . Wetlands also help reduce the impacts from storm damage and flooding, maintain good water quality in rivers, recharge groundwater, store carbon, help stabilise climatic conditions and control pests. They are also important sites for biodiversity.
. . . Wetlands support agricultural activities by providing a source of water for irrigation and livestock and for domestic consumption.
. . . Wetlands improve water quality by trapping sediments, filtering out pollutants and absorbing nutrients that would otherwise result in poor water quality for downstream users. They may also be linked to groundwater resources.
. . . Wetlands reduce the risk of flooding by slowing down the movement of floodwaters along rivers and releasing water over time. River systems with intact wetlands in their headwaters have more consistent flows than rivers where the catchment and its wetlands have been largely cleared. Wetlands, such as hanging swamps in the Blue Mountains, are important for providing fresh water to large urban areas such as Sydney, especially in times of low rainfall.
[[ http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/wetlands/WhyAreWetlandsImportant.htm on 2015-01-23 ]]
There is no end to their biological functions. In the Sydney special catchment areas, the upland wetlands on the platueus that are the real basis of Sydney's wonderful water supply, now they have a new special use. They are now to be 'drained' as a side effect of being undermined and 'dropped down' by long wall coalmining.
This is despite reading on another government website, the Upper Parramatta River Catchment Education Resource Kit, 2002.
. . . Current water usage practice in urban areas is not sustainable. Most of the high quality water delivered to consumers at high environmental and economic costs is used for non-potable purposes, whilst stormwater that could be used directly for non-potable purposes is treated as a waste product.
. . . With current water usage, population growth will eventually necessitate damming new rivers at enormous environmental and economic costs. Meanwhile, not capturing stormwater on site for non-potable uses adds to downstream flooding and increases pollution loads to our creeks and waterways.
[[ http://www.uprct.nsw.gov.au/sustainable_water/sustain_home.htm on 2015-01-23 ]]
How could anyone possibly justify the sell out and risk the destruction of this irreplaceable resource, for the sake of a few years supply of coal?
Its not they have not been told about already extensive damage caused by mining projects to Sydney Water Catchment and Rivers.
[[ http://riverssos.org.au/2014/06/03/media-release-waiting-for-a-complete-data-set-may-be-too-late-for-sydneys-drinking-water/ ]]
NSW politicians can, both Liberal and Labor, sell all of NSW out to foreign mining interests. Water Rats by profession. Assisting them is the notoriously forgiving Planning Assessment Commission, - PAC a handful of public servants, who are the perfect example of Upton Sinclair description.
. . . "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
These "Bureau-Rats" have managed to approve the consignment of environmental jewel after another in NSW as sacrifice to the dirty coal and gas industries. Nothing short of a threatened armed uprising will convince them that the public really values the environment. These PAC-Rats are real cowards, afraid to say "No" to a project.
Here is a link to material put up in opposition to a now approved project. This is about real violence to nature, a massive Someone Else's Problem.
Occasionally they put in minor compromises, but never anything to stop a project going ahead and making billions of dollars by the creation of Someone Elses Problem fields. Nothing much less than a population insurrection will stop a project. They do plenty of public hearings, which help mollify the public into thinking they have done all they can. But nothing weighs more in balance of politicians minds, than billions of Someone Elses Money, a small amount of it which can be yours, with a few hundred temporary jobs, if you let this become Some Elses Problem.
Decades of NSW Political Rats and Bureau-Rats have made policies, designed legislation and set up approval structures to ensure that the Precautionary Principle regarding environmental damage can never be heeded. Someone Else's Problems are allowed by dividing opposition into small bits. Plans are cut into the smallest possible pieces and submitted at one stage at a time. Objectors have to fight each and every piece, over and over again, and are confused by each pass of a matadors cape. Like a surgeon harvesting all your organs and tissues, this 'won't hurt a bit' , as each little piece is removed.
". Everything is consigned to neat little Bureau drawers. Information is separated , to reduce the danger of someone ever putting two facts together and drawing an inconvenient conclusion. Climate change mitigation is separated from mitigation of damage to wetlands because of coal mining that is supposed to being reduced in a current environment of low world commodity prices, so the NSW government is actually subsidizing these industries to destroy our environment while at the same time failing to support any wholesale adoption of renewable energy to replace coal burning. Only tiny little isolated blinkered minds, that carefully avoid considering two contradictory facts, can possibly keep trying these tired old solutions of more dirty coal business and 'economic growth' as a solution to the problems they are making worse.
Even the NSW chief scientist cannot get all the information together at one place and time. As if the politically appointed scientist was likely to be the sort of person who would be able to put up meaningful opposition, or had values that disagreed with her employees. With a risky project like undermining water catchments, one would have thought that the government would have set up information collection and monitoring beforehand. But no, the government is busy making sure the only department with direct responsibility is not able to use it. This looks like a classic criminal heist job on behalf of "Corpo-Rats".
It is very important that any organization that actually has responsibility for an environmental area to be converted into "Someone Else's Problem", that they be completed shorn of any authority or say in the outcome. The Sydney Catchment Authority, soon to be completely dismembered by legislation, had the temerity to say they didn't like coal mining under their special catchment areas. Such an institution is rendered mute, in this our 'democratic' system.
What motivates these sell - out rats? The big money comes from the multibillion dollar financial world of "Corpo-Rats". The profits of the money gets spent on luxury lifestyles. The costs of Someone Elses Problem come from the money and resources that could have been used to taxpayers benefit. What the Heck, GDP goes up, even as global happiness and health goes down. The politicians lie and say what a good job they are doing, and the brain washing media believe them.
The richer the Corpo-Rat and further away from your city its Directors live, the more power they have been handed over to destroy the resources that your biological life depends on. Clean local water, air and food. Nothing gets to stand in the way.
Energy Decline of Developed Economies
The world view framing context of our civilization, and supposedly our governments policies, is now a decline in employment, wages and amount of affordable personal consumption. This is because of global warming, and also because oil is getting scarce and expensive, recent lower price fluctuations being only temporary instabiliy in an inexonerable rise in cost.
Global Warming means an urgent necessity to reduce coal and gas sourced carbon emissions, and therefore the quantities of energy that they provide. Turning the city lights off at night would be an option, if only it takes nearly a week to shut down a generation unit of a coal burning power station. This 'feature' of old style fossil fuel power was called 'Baseload', and so it was for a long time the complaint against renewable energy that they didn't have this 'feature'.
Oil is used in providing nearly every consumer 'necessity', including the rapidly decreasing marginal returns to mining every mineral we need for making stuff, and growing stuff.
Lots of energy wasting civilization accessories are going to become gradually more expensive. Examples are our high tech Hospitals, with expensive medical diagnostics, and ICUs, which lavish expensive care for the rich and elderly. Universities are going to have to cut down on expensive technology and go back to blackboards and memory skills. IT departments will have to cut energy consumption, and numbers of devices will not be replaced as they start to fail.
The end result is that we are going to become much more dependent on local and naturally powered resources, to get our food and water. We are going to have to grow more local food just to survive. That is going to need more water.
The most stupid idea in this our very real context of our future, is that our government should be now telling us, that we sacrifice our heritage and environment for more dirty coal works, for some elses billions, and adding to Our Future Problems. That is what the current governments "Environment and Heritage" department is really all about. That is what the PAC assessments are all about. Nature is lost as the "Say nothing , hear nothing, see nothing" departments of our government fail to act in our long term interests. A world where every Corporation plunders every natural resource until everything is gone becomes a dead world.
Not only will our population still grow, but its usage of water for food will increase when we can no longer import or afford what comes from far away. Having an intact and long lasting, health river and upland wetland system is the Heritage we should be looking after. Our governments have failed us. They must be thrown out of office.
Upper Avon and Nepean swampy stuff. Lush water underneath.