The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

I live here. What happens in New South Wales and Australia has to interest me. Overseas readers, however, may feel differently.

Ultimately, it’s up to them, but I still think this subject shall be relevant to readers abroad.

It’s not just parochialism that compels me to write about the Murray-Darling Basin. As climate changes, rain patterns are bound to change. Rain is bound to become scarce in areas where it was abundant. I’ve presented this chart before:

(source: PDF)

This nightmare may be coming soon to rural areas near you. If Australia is any indication, the future of our species is bleak.

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The Murray-Darling Basin is called like that because of its two main rivers: the Murray and the Darling. Since December the Darling has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Little has been written about the much larger Murray. How is it faring?

(source)

That screenshot, from the WaterNSW website (part of the NSW State government), shows algal alert levels for the main NSW water courses last January 28, when the third Menindee mass fish kill happened. It may help answer that question

The dense cluster of red dots towards the west is the Darling: above Menindee almost entirely red; downstream to its confluence with the Murray, over a short extension, one still sees two green and two amber dots, but no red. The mostly green series of dots along the south, marking the NSW-VIC border, is the Murray. A more precise description of the colour coding is here, but the short version is red means “algal bloom”, amber means “cyanobacteria multiplying” and green is relatively good: “low cyanobacteria density”. To sum up: by January 28 the Murray was in relatively good health, which is consistent with the fact that all fish kills reported recently were outside the Murray catchment area.

This is how that map looked yesterday:

Not only virtually the whole Darling is under red/amber alert, but now even the Murray is in amber alert too -- in all its extension.

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Water policy in Australia has always been a hot issue. It’s getting hotter in NSW.

So far, an influential group had remained on the sidelines: the Murray irrigators in the Riverina, southern NSW. Not anymore. Now they are up in arms

Their northern counterparts’ looting of the Darling has them outraged. They are not alone: Sussan Ley (MP and federal Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories) supports them, particularly as the State and Federal elections loom over the horizon (March 23, for the former; an as yet unspecified date for the latter).

Ley wants irrigators to have access to environment’s water allocations as a supplement to their own allocation. As irrigators say: they have “lost millions of dollars worth of crops this year”.

It may sound like Ley demands for them the same right to plunder the Murray. After all, the Murray is only marked amber.

Ley claims otherwise:

“A lot of people interpret this as taking water away from the environment; I’ve never said that,” Ms Ley said.

“I’ve talked about borrowing it so that when the environment doesn’t need it it’s not just sitting in a dam waiting. It’s actually out there growing something useful.”

So, for instance, using MDBA latest data, on average, Government water storage[*] in the Southern Basin, where those irrigators operate, is at 40% of capacity, but Dartmouth Dam, within that Basin, is 65% full. At least that 25% “excess” water -- one imagines based on Ley’s statement -- isn’t growing anything useful. In absolute terms, this means about 964 GL extra water could be allocated to irrigators at no cost, and the Dartmouth would still be within the Southern Basin average.

Someday irrigators shall repay it by forsaking a part of their future allocation. Someday, that is, when the environment actually has something useful to grow with it. I’d fear to ask -- for I can imagine the answer -- whether providing water for natural vegetation and breeding grounds for fish and birds counts as something useful at all, for I know it’s a lot less profitable than growing crops.

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As rainfall decreases pressures to divert water from the environment to agriculture will inevitably mount. Ultimately, under capitalism the environment (just like workers) will always take a back seat to profit: the environment neither votes, nor makes political contributions (but it can still kill us). Cashed-up and politically influential pressure groups are not subject to those constraints; they can and do whinge.

In the next post we’ll see how less influential communities have reacted to the environmental chaos in the Basin and the reaction to them.


NOTE:

[*]  It’s worth noting those figures don’t include private water storage. My understanding is that nobody -- outside perhaps irrigators’ associations -- really knows how much water is privately stored.

UPDATE:

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW is behind a campaign to protect the Murray and Darling from more fish kills. This is their petition to the NSW Water Minister. Please, consider signing it.