Why vote for Bernie on March 9?

Most electors in Vasse will be well aware of the many misdemeanors, party tricks and more serious happenings that have dogged current Vasse MP Troy Buswell over the eight years he’s been in Parliament. There is a mountain of reasons why electors should vote against him but I readily admit there also needs to be good  reasons why electors should vote for me instead of the incumbent or for any of the other five candidates contesting the Vasse election.

There’s only one compelling reason why you should vote for me: so that I can work hard for you as your elected representative. The most important role of a Member of Parliament is to represent the people of his or her electorate: to raise their issues or concerns with government departments and to bring issues of broader community interest to public attention by raising them in Parliament. That’s what democracy is all about and that’s the job your MP should be committed to. Forget about personal ambition. If the opportunity to become a minister or sit on a parliamentary committee is offered, by all means, an MP should accept such challenges if they believe they have the ability and stamina to accept the new roles. But, first and foremost, MPs need to remember that they've been elected by their constituents to represent them - to look after their interests, not the MP's personal ambitions.

Can I do a good job of representing you if I am elected?
For eight years from 1996 to 2005, I was the member for Vasse. Throughout that period, I believe that I did a good job of representing my constituents to all levels of government. While I was the Vasse MP, the electorate received over $100 million in taxpayer-funded projects. I also helped many electors who had problems with Western Power, Telstra, Water Corporation, Housing and other large government agencies who sometimes forget the impact of their decisions on people. 

Representing an electorate is a delicate balancing act. While an MP has to act quickly and efficiently if someone's electricity or water has been turned off without justification, so the MP has to always remain aware of the bigger picture: is electricity or water supply infrastructure up to the required standards? And are the needs of a rapidly expanding electorate like Vasse capable of being met by government agencies such as the Water Corporation?

If your MP isn't balancing these many demands on his time correctly, something will be overlooked and problems will arrive sooner rather than later.

I’m an active member of the Busselton community:
When I was first elected in 1996 as the Liberal member for Vasse, Peppermint Grove Beach where Carolina and I live was within the electorate. The same situation applied when I was elected again in 2001, but, as Vasse grew, so the Electoral Commission was forced to move boundaries. By 2005, I found that our home was just outside the Vasse electorate. But does this mean that I'm not a member of the Busselton community? Absolutely not!

The change of electoral boundary has made no difference to my membership of and involvement in the Busselton community. For the last four years, I've been president of the Festival of Busselton. I've been president of  the Busselton Naturalists Club for most years since 1978. I'm chair of the Busselton Dieback Working Group; chair of the Tuart Forest National Park Management Plan Community Advisory Committee. Our two cars were bought locally and are serviced locally. I do most of my shopping in Busselton. I was a Busselton Shire Councillor in 2009. I’m a shareholder in the Busselton Dunsborough Bendigo Community Bank. For over 20 years, I umpired junior football in Busselton and I still play tennis at the Busselton Tennis Club as often as I can.

Because I’m an active member of the local community, I understand local needs and problems better than someone living in Perth (guess who I'm talking about here - someone who usually visits only on weekends?).

If you’re still not convinced that you should vote for me on March 9, I’ll try to persuade you with just one promise: if elected, I will work for all people within the electorate with dedication, honesty, self-respect, integrity and determination.

BLACK CARBON - A FAR MORE POWERFUL SOURCE OF GLOBAL WARMING THAN THOUGHT BY THE IPCC

For many years, I have accepted that the climate of our planet has been changing, with global warming the most obvious symptom. But I've been highly dubious of the claim by what are called 'climate change alarmists' that the problem is almost totally due to our burning of fossil fuels and the resulting carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.

Shown below are the results of new research which shows that black carbon - soot - has a much greater influence on climate change than claimed by the IPCC and 'alarmists'. Reduction of soot emissions to the atmosphere will also bring major improvements to the air quality of billions of people in developing countries, lowering their death rates and improving their quality of life. Please read on.....

From: Yale Environmental 360

17 Jan 2013: Analysis

Black Carbon and Warming:
It’s Worse than We Thought

A new study indicates soot, known as black carbon, plays a far greater role in global warming than previously believed and is second only to CO2 in the amount of heat it traps in the atmosphere. Reducing some forms of soot emissions — such as from diesel fuel and coal burning — could prove effective in slowing down the planet’s warming.

by Carl Zimmer

It rises from the chimneys of mansions and from simple hut stoves. It rises from forest fires and the tail pipes of diesel-fueled trucks rolling down the highway, and from brick kilns and ocean liners and gas flares. Every day, from every occupied continent, a curtain of soot rises into the sky.

What soot does once it reaches the atmosphere has long been a hard question to answer. It’s not that scientists don’t know anything about the physics and chemistry of atmospheric soot. Just the opposite: it does so many things that it’s hard to know what they add up to.

To get a clear sense of soot — which is known to scientists as black carbon — an international team of 31 atmospheric scientists has worked for the past four years to analyze all the data they could. This week, they published a 232-page report in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “It’s an important assessment of where we stand now,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution for Oceanography, an expert on atmospheric chemistry who was not involved in the study.

The big result that jumps off the page is that black carbon plays a much bigger role in global warming than many scientists previously thought. According to the new analysis, it is second only to carbon dioxide in the amount of heat it traps in the atmosphere. The new estimate of black carbon’s heat-trapping power is about twice that made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

This result suggests that cutting black carbon emissions could go a long way to slowing climate change. But the authors of the new study warn that we’ll need to be careful about the sort of black carbon we choose to cut. “There’s a significant potential, but you have to be very targeted,” said co-author Sarah Doherty of the University of Washington.

Soot is made up of tiny dark particles. When it rises from fires, it mixes with dust, sulphates, and other material rising from the ground. As it ascends through the atmosphere, it can drift into clouds, mixing with the water droplets. Rain and snow then wash out the black carbon particles and bring them back to Earth.

Along the way, black carbon exerts all sorts of influences, some of which help warm the atmosphere and some of which cool it. When sunlight strikes black carbon, its dark hue causes it to heat up, something like the way a black tar roof gets hot on a sunny day. When black carbon falls on ice and snow, it smudges their bright white reflective surfaces. As a result, less sunlight bounces back out to space, leading to more warming.

In clouds, black carbon has a dazzling number of effects. “The more we study it, the more mechanisms people find,” says Doherty.

If black carbon heats up the layer of the atmosphere where clouds are forming, for example, they will evaporate. They can no longer reflect sunlight back into space, and so the soot-laced clouds end up warming the atmosphere. But black carbon that hangs above low-lying stratocumulus clouds has a different effect. It stabilizes the layer of air on top of the clouds, promoting their growth. It just so happens that thick stratocumulus clouds are like shields, blocking incoming sunlight. As a result, black carbon also ends up cooling the planet.

All these effects depend, ultimately, on how much soot is in the air, which, in turn, depends on the many different kinds of sources of soot all over the world. Estimating that flux is a major challenge, and so it’s not too surprising that different teams of scientists have ended up with markedly different estimates for the net effect of soot on the climate.

In 2009, Doherty and her colleagues set out to make careful estimates of all sources of black carbon, using data from monitoring stations around the world. They then ran computer models of the atmosphere to measure the effects of the black carbon, based on what scientists have learned about chemical reactions in clouds from experiments and observations. Along with the effect that soot had on clouds, the scientists also estimated the total amount of warming that occurred as the soot directly absorbed sunlight, and as it darkened snow and ice.

After the scientists had taken into account all of these effects, they tallied them up to calculate how much extra energy was being stored in the atmosphere thanks to black carbon. Climate scientists typically express that energy as watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. The number they got — 1.1 watts — was enormous. Carbon dioxide, the biggest heat-trapper in the atmosphere, is responsible for an estimated 1.56 watts per square meter. Black carbon takes second place. “It took a while to convince ourselves it was correct,” says Doherty.

If black carbon is responsible for trapping so much heat, then reducing soot may be an effective way to slow down the planet’s warming. It’s even more attractive because black carbon washes quickly out of the atmosphere, and so reducing soot emissions would lead to a fast fall in the concentration of black carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, by contrast, lingers for centuries in the atmosphere.

James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been arguing for such a strategy for over a decade. But the new study reveals a paradox in reducing soot to fight global warming. If tomorrow we could shut down every brick kiln, every burning farm field, and every other source of soot, we would, on balance, have no effect on global warming whatsoever.

How can this be? Because when things burn, black carbon is not the only thing they produce. A forest fire produces black carbon as well as organic carbon molecules. The forest fire black carbon helps to warm the planet, but the organic carbon creates a haze that blocks sunlight, cooling the atmosphere. The two emissions cancel each other out. “In the real world you can’t just get rid of black carbon emissions,” says Doherty. “You get rid of other things as well.”

But Doherty and her colleagues found that some sources of soot — including coal and diesel fuel — produce a lot of warming with very little compensating cooling. They suggest that these sources should be the top priority for efforts to fight global warming.

Diesel fuel looks to be an especially ripe target. “That message is loud and clear,” says Ramanathan. Making diesel an even more attractive candidate for attack is the fact that reducing much of its black carbon emissions might simply be a matter of upgrading old, soot-spewing engines with newer technology. Developing countries, in particular, could put in place regulations about burning diesel to upgrade their rapidly growing auto fleets.

Coal is another potent source of warming from soot, the scientists found, whether burned industrially or at home. So are the small stoves that billions of people use to cook. Fueled by wood or coal, they spew billows of sooty smoke. Engineers in recent years have designed efficient, cheap stoves that release much less black carbon. Getting those stoves into people’s homes would take a lot of warming soot out of the atmosphere.

Doherty does not see her new study as the end of the story. While she and her colleagues conclude that soot most likely produces 1.1 watts per square meter, they still put a margin of error on their results. They calculate that there’s a 90 percent chance the actual figure falls between .17 and 2.1 watts. To tighten that range, they still need to better understand the many ways that soot alters clouds, and also get a better fix on the amount of soot each source produces. “We need to dig deeper on that,” she says.

Nevertheless, Doherty and her colleagues see many good reasons not to wait for a more precise understanding of soot before taking steps to reduce it. Along with its effect on the global climate, a number of studies also indicate it has powerful influences on some regions of the planet. A lot of soot falls onto the glaciers of Himalayas, for example, speeding up their melting. Millions of people depend on that ice for their water supply. Soot also has a particularly large effect on the circulation of the atmosphere around India, which ultimately reduces the amount of rainfall produced by monsoons.

Even before soot gets far into the air, it has a particularly harmful effect: it makes people sick. In recent days, news reports from China have provided startling images of Beijing swaddled in a blanket of sooty smog. That air pollution, from cars and coal-fired plants, takes a terrible toll on the country’s health. Far from the world’s urban centers, poor people suffer from air pollution in their own homes when they cook with smoky stoves and breathe in black carbon and other pollutants.

These benefits of cutting black carbon were already apparent before Doherty and her colleagues published their new study; now it’s clear that cutting soot could help not just personal health, but planetary health as well.

The link to this article is - 

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/carl_zimmer_black_carbon_and_global_warming_worse_than_thought/2611/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YaleEnvironment360+%28Yale+Environment+360%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Aboriginal Mining in Pre-European Australia

In the business section of the West Australian newspaper of December 4, 2012, David Collard - described as a leading indigenous spokesman - was quoted as saying that "Aboriginal people did not want to take mining jobs because digging up the land offended their traditional culture'.  I interpret this to mean that Mr Collard is claiming Aboriginal people never or rarely undertook mining activities prior to European settlement and that it's a new and not particularly palatable industry. I assume he's trying to insert this belief into  Australia's broader understanding of Aboriginal history so that indigenous people can more widely adopt a similar view, the end result being that Aboriginals will oppose or at least not offer support for mining.

As a geologist, I can attest to the falseness of Mr Collard's belief. Wilgie Mia near Cue was mined by Aboriginal people for thousands of years (Wikipedia says 40,000 years!), with much of its 14,000 tonnes of ochre traded throughout the western half of the Australian continent. The ochre from this mine was highly valued and it is my understanding that it formed an important part of many ceremonial and artistic practices within many Aboriginal groups.

The chert deposit now located offshore from Margaret River as a result of the sea level rise which stopped roughly at its current height some 8,000 years ago supplied tens or hundreds of tonnes of stone for cutting and hunting tools that were traded throughout the south west. The sharp edge that could be produced by skillfully breaking the stone into flakes made it a valuable and highly tradable mineral commodity.

In New South Wales, there are 183 identified Aboriginal mine sites, primarily for stone and ochre.

Clearly, Aboriginals were competent miners who undertook mining of a number of mineral commodities throughout Australia prior to 1788.

Mr Collard is then quoted in the same newspaper article as saying that indigenous people prefer green-friendly jobs. I agree with him and suggest that most Australians would prefer such jobs. For better or for worse, however, the reality of the world is that the products of mining are essential to our modern global economy and mining must exist if we wish to enjoy the social and economic benefits that its products provide.

Mining forms an undeniably important part of Aboriginal history. If today's mining industry can provide quality employment for Aboriginal people, then Mr Collard should not stand in the way of such jobs by asking us to accept his personal and inaccurate view of Aboriginal history. He clearly has an agenda that he's pushing - maybe he wants to reserve all the eco-friendly jobs for Aboriginal people and leave the other jobs to non-indigenous Australians - but I'm uncertain as to what his agenda is and hence what end goal he is trying to achieve by denying the reality of pre-European Aboriginal mining.

   ----------------------------

By the way, I've never been comfortable with the word 'non-indigenous'. I find it somewhat demeaning that the people to whom it refers are non-persons of some sort. So, if Australia's first people are to be considered indigenous to this country (and I'm very comfortable with this use of the term), then maybe we should call Australia's more recent settlers exdigenous. If you do a Google search on this word, you'll find I'm not the first person to use it so I hope it will receive greater acceptance and usage in the future.

ONLY 'ROGUE' SHARKS SHOULD BE CULLED

MEDIA RELEASE - BUSSELTON NATURALISTS CLUB

ONLY 'ROGUE' SHARKS SHOULD BE CULLED

The state government's response to the latest shark attack tragedy should not involve a general cull of Great White Sharks.

Instead, only 'rogue' sharks that have lost their fear of humans and interact with people and their boats should be culled.

The Busselton Naturalists Club held a lengthy debate among members after local Busselton man Peter Kurmann was killed by a shark in March.

The Club agreed that there was no justification for a general cull of Great White Sharks as this could result in the death of sharks that had never been involved in past attacks.

Instead, individual sharks that have a prior history of interaction with humans, such as visiting boats, biting on their propellers or threatening divers, should be culled.

The Club also called on the state government to do more than just adopt a knee-jerk culling policy.

According to Club president Bernie Masters, who was a fisheries inspector in the 1970s, the government needs to adopt a detailed and comprehensive policy that goes beyond just culling.

"The Club supports the government's current program of tagging sharks to obtain a better understanding of Great White behaviour," Mr Masters said.

"In addition, the research program should include developing methods to allow identification of individual sharks using visual methods, so that fishers and divers can attempt to identify problem sharks by methods other than electronic tags," he said.

"In particular, the government should make it illegal to feed sharks or otherwise encourage them to be attracted to boats, as this will encourage them to interact with humans and lose their fear of people."

"Ultimately, of course, if a particular shark is shown to have attacked a human being, then culling is an unfortunate but necessary action."

"But a general cull of large Great White Sharks is not scientifically justified and the state government needs to do more than it's current level of research and investigation."

Bernie Masters
President
Busselton Naturalists Club
0408 944 242

Colin Barnett's influence within the WA Liberal Party

On June 21, I sent the following letter to the editor of The Australian. The newspaper chose not to publish it.

In 2003, while the member for Vasse in the WA Parliament, I lost Liberal Party endorsement to contest the 2005 election. Troy Buswell was selected in my place and he subsequently went on to win the 2005 and 2008 elections. Early on in his political life, he was touted as the 'great hope' of the Liberal Party, being seen by some as a future leader and premier. Since then, we have witnessed his many indiscretions and personality failings.

This history is important in understanding WA premier Colin Barnett's disappointment in not having his preferred candidate Kate Lamont chosen by the Liberal Party to stand as its candidate in the safe seat of Churchlands. Barnett was made the leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party in 2008 because then leader Buswell had committed another personal indiscretion. In desperation, the party's power brokers made Barnett leader in the expectation that then premier Alan Carpenter would win the next election, after which Barnett would retire from politics.

When Carpenter called an early election and then ran an inept election campaign, Barnett was able to win government with the support of the Nationals. However, the Liberal Party had failed to endorse enough quality candidates prior to the hastily called election, the result being that Barnett had a very limited talent pool from which to choose his cabinet. His personal qualities have been the major factor in his government retaining majority elector support. With the next election only nine months away and using his authority as the Liberal leader who won the unwinnable election, Barnett tried to get a quality candidate - Lamont - endorsed for a safe seat so that, after winning the next election, he'd have a better range of MPs from which to select his ministers.

The rebuff he has suffered as a result of Lamont's failure to win preselection is a reflection of the hold that the ABC faction - Anyone But Colin - still retains within the WA Liberal Party. Noel Crichton-Browne, Norman Moore and Senator Mathias Cormann currently control the lay party and, as they have shown in the past, they believe it is better to retain control over the party and lose government, rather than lose their control but retain government.

Lamont's failure should be viewed as nothing more than the party's power brokers retaining their control. The people of WA may see it as a deliberate slap in the face to a premier who has only moderate factional support within his own party but, in reality, it's just a reflection of the sad malaise that currently afflicts most political parties in WA and Australia.

DON'T PLANT TREES ON PLANET ARK'S NATIONAL TREE DAY

July 27 is Planet Ark's National Tree day but it's the wrong time of year to be planting trees in south west WA. A date in late July was selected by Planet Ark more than 10 years ago to best suit tree planting in eastern Australia but it's a totally inappropriate time of year for most of the south west of this state.

I make this call in my capacity as an environmental consultant based in the south west since 1976. I'm also president of one of rural WA's largest and most active conservation groups, the Busselton Naturalists Club.

The end of July is mid-winter in our Mediterranean climate and it's usually the coldest part of the year. Plants put in the ground in late July will generally just sit there and hibernate, waiting for the warmer temperatures of spring in September and October.

They then just have a few weeks of warmer spring weather to get their roots deep enough into the water table to survive our hot summers.

So the best time of year to plant is right now - June - after the first heavy winter rains have fallen and while the ground is still warm.

Planting in late July also means that seedlings miss out on the 4 to 10 weeks of root development that could have been achieved if they had been planted in the period from mid-May until the end of June. These few weeks may be the difference between life and death for the seedlings when the rains stop in spring and our hot dry summers cause water tables to drop by a metre or more.

If seedlings can get their roots down into the water table early in the growing season, they have a better chance of following the water table down into the subsoil as summer evaporation takes hold.

Spring is an important time to plant seedlings into wetlands, as the receding water levels allow plants to be placed into damp but freshly exposed soils, allowing good root development to sustain the seedlings over summer.

In heavier soils in the wheatbelt where soil moisture can persist late into the spring, plantings in late winter can make some sense.

But the sandy soils of the Swan Coastal Plain where most West Australians live dry out very quickly in springtime, so a July 27 planting is risking the loss of most seedlings.

I've previously spoken with Planet Ark about how unsuitable their National Tree Day is for much of the south west of WA. I've suggested that they should select a more suitable date in late May or June and call it WA Tree Day or similar but my pleas have been ignored.

While I was the member for Vasse, I also approached the state government and urged them to promote Arbor Day as the south west's tree planting day. The Department of Environment and Conservation's website doesn't show when Arbor Day was scheduled for 2012 but it's usually in middle to late May or early June which is often ideal for most of the south west.

I'm urging school and community groups, as well as individuals, to get out and get dirty now, with planting through to the end of June preferred.

I'm also urging people to buy local plants that are well suited to our climatic and soil conditions.

And buying from local nurseries makes a lot of sense, especially from the Geographe Community Landcare Nursery on Queen Elizabeth Avenue who specialise in seed collected locally and whose staff can provide excellent advice on the plants best suited to your garden or farm.

Western Australia’s catastrophic forest collapse

The Conversation 5 June 2012  

Western Australia’s catastrophic forest collapse

Recent, unprecedented, climate-driven forest collapses in Western Australia show us that ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic. These collapses are a clear signal that we must develop new strategies to mitigate or prevent the future effects of climate change in Australian woodlands.....

Authors
George Matusick, Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Murdoch University
Giles Hardy, Professor in Forest Pathology at Murdoch University
Katinka Ruthrof, Research Associate at Murdoch University

Recent, unprecedented, climate-driven forest collapses in Western Australia show us that ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic. These collapses are a clear signal that we must develop new strategies to mitigate or prevent the future effects of climate change in Australian woodlands and forests. But society’s view of forests is ever-changing: are we willing to understand ecosystems and adapt to changing conditions?

The south west of Western Australia has experienced a long-term climate shift since the early 1970s, resulting in dryer and hotter than average conditions. This shifted baseline, or average, has also led to more frequent extreme events. In 2010, the region experienced the driest and second hottest year on record.

These climate changes have resulted in significant decreases in stream-flow and groundwater levels. For example, formerly permanent streams now stop flowing for considerable periods. Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas. Clearly, soil water reserves have dried out substantially and will likely continue to do so; we are now starting to see the implications of this. Although most of the West Australian society, particularly those in urban environments, may be well-buffered from these changes, ecosystems are not.

The climatic changes occurring in the south west of Western Australia are contributing to deteriorating woodland and forest health. In the past 20 years, insect infestations and fungal diseases have plagued many iconic tree species, including tuart, wandoo, flooded gum, marri, and WA peppermint, increasing their mortality rates. Many of these disorders are likely triggered or incited by changing climate conditions. 


The recent climate-related deaths of tracts of Western Australian forest go beyond a green issue. George Matusick





In extreme climate conditions, woodland and forest health suffers most. For instance, during the record dry and hot period in 2010 and 2011, large patches of trees throughout the region suddenly collapsed, with little recovery in some areas. Along the coastal plain surrounding Perth, some areas of Banksia woodland suffered losses as high as 70-80%, while over 500 ha of tuart woodland collapsed and over 15,000 ha of exotic pine plantations (~70% north of Perth) were destroyed. In the northern jarrah forest, over 16,000 ha of forest suddenly collapsed, with mortality rates 10.5 times greater than normal.

In several ecosystems, species have died out and not been replaced, permanently shifting vegetation structure and ecosystem function. Some believe that species and ecosystems will transition slowly in response to climate change. But following the extreme conditions experienced in 2010-11, we now know the transition in many West Australian woodlands and forests will likely occur in sudden, catastrophic, step changes.

Many species may not have time to adapt. Other species - like Carnaby's Black Cockatoo - suffer when forests die. Ken & Nyetta/Flickr







These often sudden and dramatic shifts in vegetation health, structure and function have profound consequences on associated flora and fauna, including many critically endangered species. The Mediterranean type-ecosystems of the south west were recently named among the top 10 ecosystems most vulnerable to climate-induced tipping points and degradation by a panel of 26 leading Australian ecologists. The region is one of 35 global biodiversity hotspots, harbouring approximately 1500 plant species, most of which aren’t found anywhere else.

Among the most well known animal species is the near-extinct Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo, which relies heavily on Banksia and pine food resources made scarce by habitat conversion. Tree collapse on the coastal plain in 2010-11 likely played a role in the 34% decline in the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo population in the Greater Perth Region between 2010 and 2011.

Many more plant and animal species are susceptible to similar collapses given the current climate trajectory and future climate predictions. Indeed, many of the traditional values that forests have provided could well be under threat.

Historically, Australian forests have been valued for the resources they provide: timber, charcoal, water, recreation, sequestered carbon, and biodiversity amongst others. With failing forest health, all of these resources are affected. The threats to forests from climate change cross ideological boundaries: this isn’t just a “green” issue. The management of forests is at a crossroads, where decisions about their future need to be made.

To do this, society needs to answer some basic questions:
• Do we still value forests?
• What do we want forests to look like in the future?
• What are we doing now to preserve forest health in this period of climate change?
• Should additional strategies and methods be developed to help forests have time to adapt to these changes?

Although the recent forest collapses in WA are tragic, they are also a valuable opportunity to understand forest susceptibility, stress thresholds, interactions among stress factors (such as insect pests and fungal pathogens) and forest tipping points. Better understanding these aspects is critical if we want to prevent future collapse.

The debate on this article can be found at
https://theconversation.edu.au/western-australias-catastrophic-forest-collapse-6925#comments