I hate to be a Jeremiah (I’m guessing you don’t know what I mean by that – right). Well Jeremiah was a prophet of God in the Old Testament. He had some news for the Jewish state known as Judah, that had Jerusalem as its capital. They had been worshipping idols and God was pissed. They were going to be punished and God was going to use the ruler of the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar, to punish them. Whenever he opened his mouth it was bad news. Just like me.
So I’ll be as gentle as I can but the bad news is that the farmers are killing the Great Barrier Reef. That’s what the World Wildlife Fund is telling us.
The World Wildlife Fund says that Eastern Australia is one of the most dangerous deforestation fronts in the world today. Globally, it says, 177 million square kilometres of forest are lost each year. That’s the equivalent, apparently, to losing 50 football fields every minute. Staggering. WWF says that Australia ranks with the Amazon, Borneo, the Congo Basin and other threatened tropical regions as the countries most devastating their forests.
WWF tells us that tree-clearing has a major impact on the health of soil and water. Without trees to anchor soil, erosion can happen and sweep our precious soils into rivers, choking and polluting our waterways. The WWF tells us that in Australia this run off is threatening the health and resilience, and even the very survival of the Great Barrier Reef.
I’m going to dig into this story a little more closely now to find out just how critical the health of the Reef is because of our irresponsible farmers.
Tag words: GBR; Great Barrier Reef; Jeremiah; prophet of God; Old Testament; Babylonians; Nebuchadnezzar; World Wildlife Fund; WWF; Peter Ridd; Reef Heresy; Piers Larcombe; Ken Woolfe; Marine Geophysical Laboratory; Mediocre Fringing Reefs; climate change; Cyclone Yasi; Coral Sea; Trinity Bay; Brodie J Fabricius; John 9:6; pool of Siloam; One Green Planet; Matthew 6:5-6; Governor Phillip; Botany Bay; Australian Institute of Marine Science;
