Moving water at Sydney Uni

Earth hour has struck again and people have switched of their lights all over the world. Does it really matter? And does it really have an impact?

This year will be my 10th year of participating and organising the annual Landcare activities at “Arthursleigh” near Marulan, NSW. The property “Arthursleigh” was bequeathed to the University around 1980 and came of a 99-year lease. The property suffers from significant erosion in many places. Students and staff, from the Faculty of Agriculture and the University have been active in revegetation for approximately 15 years funded through different grants and organisation. I quite enjoy the trip and the activities but I always wonder about the impact that we have on the actual problem of erosion.

Last Monday the newspaper reported extensively on the impact of the lack of stored water in the dams on irrigation communities in the Murray Darling Basin and on the fate of irrigator families. This basically confirms my earlier point that any restructuring of water in the Murray Darling needs to be combined with socio-economic planning. Understanding and managing water involves also making decisions on what we want with the wide open space.

It is the beginning of a new semester and that always creates a bit of a sense of excitement for me. Many students always ask me whether I had a nice holiday, but I actually don’t have many more holidays than anyone else. In fact, the time between semesters is often one of the busiest times of the year the break between semesters is a time when I tend to work quite hard on my research and writing proposals. So when the semester starts, it seems like a change of pace and focus.

Another thing that is happening is cyclone Hamish on the Queensland coast. I have put a link in here, but I doubt it will work after next week, but you can find past cyclone tracks on the Bureau of Meteorology website. I probably will talk more about this next week, but right now it brings a buzz of excitement to me and one of my PhD students, I will explain.

There were two interesting articles in last Thursday’s newspaper related to water. The first talked about how probably most of the federal government’s buybacks of water would occur in NSW and that this would strongly affect the rural economy. I have talked about this earlier and given that the article mainly presents the irrigation corporations view, I will not comment on this further. However it does strengthen the point that buybacks of water need to be combined with rural socio-economic reform.

The other article discusses the findings in a report from the group at UNSW working with Professor Richard Kingsford. I would like to use this report to talk about science. I don’t think the report is a bad report or is not good science, but it allows me to discuss some broader issues related to the way we do science.