The Age of Weeds: Let's declare war before it is too late

Aesop taught us that every good story has a moral, and here it's pretty plain: If you don't understand the effing problem, then stand it on its head. If we can't control weeds, then perhaps we should try controlling humans. Not literally, of course. Too Malthusian. But controlling them in the elevated sense of influencing them towards a more rational course of behaviour. This technique is known as science communication.
 
Humans are the vectors of weeds. It is our failure of stewardship, our failure even to see what is going on before our very eyes that is the cause of this problem. For example, of the 6,600 plant species, which are presently permitted to be imported into Australia, over 4,000 are known agricultural or environmental weeds. They include beauties like bridal creeper, Parkinsonia, and - wait for it - no fewer than 69 strains of blackberry! All perfectly legit.

Roughly one-in-ten of all the plants introduced into Australia eventually turn out to be a serious weed. Collectively, they now smother about 20 million hectares - which is 25 per cent more than the total predicted area of dry land salinity. Today it takes the entire export earnings of the gold industry just to pay for the damage weeds inflict on the economy. And this is only the start.

In 200 years Australia will have ceased to exist. There will still be a large rock with a recognisably Australian outline, but it will be submerged beneath a green tide of alien botanical life forms that will, in the course of their conquest, have eliminated every hairy-nosed wombat, koala, corroboree frog, wollemi pine, Richmond birdwing and bellbird on the planet. Australians will be a race of transplants in a transplanted land. Unless we learn to see now what is taking place right now in the bush landscape our grandchildren will never behold.

The average Aussie does not think weeds are a problem.

The very word implies something feeble and inconsiderable - a nuisance - not the Agent Orange of ecosystem obliteration, which some of them become. Yet they are our gravest environmental threat, and we invest only a fraction of the effort in controlling them, compared with tackling salinity, a less widespread problem.

As a science communicator I can only say that if we hope to control the "Green Death" - the wholesale landscape destruction which weeds cause - we must first muster the Australian people to the cause. Currently weeds are rated about 20th in a list of our environmental problems, which is another way of saying: They’re not on the public or political radar. Raising awareness will require long and repetitive discussion of the threat, its nature, its extent and its consequences. And its ultimate costs - financial, social and environmental.

It will involve engaging the public’s interest and enthusiasm. It will require their willing partnership, their sense of ownership of the issue. It took an Ian Kiernan to call the children of Australia to compel the adults to "Clean Up Australia". Who is the Kiernan of Weeds? Who is to lead the children of Australia on a campaign to root out and destroy every pestiferous patch that threatens our sacred landscape?

When will the politicians in their first-class airline seats and comfy air-conditioned limousines, who seldom in a lifetime set Gucci-shod foot in the real Bush, realise that they are presiding over the irreversible ruin of our land? Who is to tell them?

I hereby anoint every reader an Evangelist of Weeds. Whatever else you may do in your profession, you are now a Chosen One, and you must win one convert a day for the rest of your lives. On your deathbed, convert the padre who comes to give you final unction.

On a more serious note, arousing the Australian people and their governments to the imminence and magnitude of this threat is our most pressing task. Only when we have succeeded will there be the resources to do the science that checks the weeds. I end by declaring, not so much a War on Terror, as a War on Weeds.