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Bauxite mining enjoys total freedom from green displeasure

By Roger Underwood - posted Wednesday, 15 August 2007


There was some initial opposition to the forest mining, mainly from foresters, including a campaign run by the Institute of Foresters in the 1960s. The Institute produced an excellent booklet, detailing the undesirable impacts of mining on the forest ecosystem. However, these protests were quickly snuffed out, the problem being that most foresters at that time were also public servants, and it was illegal for them to criticise government policy, even as members of their professional institute.

The “conservation movement” showed an initial flicker of interest, but this died away almost immediately. At that time and ever since, the focus of environmentalists was on the timber industry, bushfire management and forestry. Over the last 40 years, there has not been a peep of protest from any green organisation in WA (government or NGO) about bauxite mining.

In this light, it is worth looking at the mining operation in more detail. Mining eliminates the entire forest ecosystem both above and below ground. Following clearing no native plant or animal survives. Following mining the forest soil itself is irreplaceably gone. The natural landscape is greatly altered, since the best bauxite deposits are on the gravely uplands, and these disappear, leading to a landscape with less topographical variation. The post-mining revegetation is sown into well-cultivated and fertilised topsoil and comes away rapidly. Visually it resembles even-aged regeneration after clearfelling or in the gaps created by selective logging (the latter being the normal silvicultural approach in jarrah forest).

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There are many concerns however. No experienced forester would guarantee the long term viability of dense forest stands growing on a film of topsoil over highly impermeable clay and granite. Jarrah prefers deep friable gravels with excellent water-holding capacity. Where thin, heavy soils occur in the natural forest, jarrah tends to be replaced by wandoo and on shallow soils over granite it is more common to find sheoak.

The oldest mine site rehabilitation is now about 40. Some of these stands have started to look very sick as the present period of below-average rainfall persists. Ecologically, the revegetation is very different from the original forest, and some obvious niches have been eliminated. For example no “habitat” trees are retained to provide for hollow-nesting bird species, as is the case in areas from which timber is cut. Some “old growth” elements, such as grass trees, will take centuries to re-establish, or may never regrow on the new substrate.

Apart from the loss of native forest, there has been a significant loss of run-off into streams and dams in the mined-over catchment areas. Pits have been designed to retain rather than shed rainfall, so run-off to forest streams is close to zero, and in many cases old mine pits cover nearly 50 per cent of each sub-catchment. This has obvious impacts on water resources and aquatic ecosystems.

The revegetated mine pits also represent a challenge to bushfire management. Although the young rehabilitation (up to about age 4) will generally not carry a fire, litter and flammable understorey soon begin to build up and the new plantations are extremely hazardous and vulnerable to fire over the next 10 years.

There are other environmental concerns. Alumina refineries produce toxic waste (soil contaminated with caustic soda) and both the refineries and aluminium smelters are significant consumers of electricity and emitters of greenhouse gasses. Bauxite miners are exempt from the requirements of both the state’s Wildlife Conservation Act and the Clearing Control Legislation. These Acts can severely constrain landowners who wish to carry out commercial timber production in their own native forest, or to undertake prescribed burning for bushfire remediation (which the government includes within the definition of “clearing”).

Given their fierce opposition to the comparatively benign and ephemeral impacts of timber cutting and prescribed burning, it might be expected that environmentalists and green bureaucrats would be dying in their boots to oppose and hamstring bauxite mining in the jarrah forest. This has not occurred.

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For over 30 years the alumina industry has enjoyed total freedom from green displeasure and support from conservation bodies - including the Environmental Protection Authority. None of the standard features of a protest campaign against logging, for example, have ever been seen. There are no protest camps in the bush. No students or yuppy celebrities are chained to trees. Mining equipment has not been vandalised, ore trains have not been derailed, haul roads blockaded or port facilities bombed (all features of the campaign against woodchipping).

There are there no marches on parliament, no orchestrated campaigns of letters to the paper and call-ins to the talk-back stations. Senator Bob Brown does not appear to have voiced the merest concern.

The WA Greens Party has no policy about bauxite mining in the jarrah forest. They seek to prohibit mining and exploration in national parks, wilderness areas and conservation reserves, but do not extend this policy to State Forests. Nor has Janet Woollard (who was elected to the WA Parliament representing a Save-the-Forests party) taken any position on bauxite mining in the jarrah forest.

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First published in Jennifer Marohasy's blog on August 8, 2007.



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About the Author

Roger Underwood is a former General Manager of CALM in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger currently directs a consultancy practice with a focus on bushfire management. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

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