◆ JOB-READY GRADUATES
Clear-felling environmental expertise 'This year’s pandemic, and the bushfires in January, have shown that our need for science has never been greater, and the payoff from our investment has never been more obvious than in this difficult year.' These comments were made by the former Australian Chief Scientist, Prof. Alan Finkel on the back of a devastating summer of fires which started in June 2019 and continued through until March 2020. These fires saw eight million hectares of land in south-eastern Australia burnt, an area larger than Tasmania. Increased frequency and intesity of bushfire, coronavirus, global warming and human induced climate change, drought and water resource pressure, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, pollution, food insecurity – these problems are real. We need investment in science because science is an effective solution to these problems now, and into the future.
Dr Perpetua Turner, University of Tasmania NTEU Tasmanian Division Secretary
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ADVOCATE VOL. 27 NO. 3 ◆ NOV 2020
For over 20 years I have practiced as an ecologist. In that time I have witnessed substantial, detrimental changes to our environment, changes that I would never have thought possible during my undergraduate years. As I stood on the shoreline of Stephenson Lagoon on Heard Island in 2003, I found it hard to fathom that had I been standing on that spot 56 years before, I would have been standing on a glacier. I mapped vegetation in the Australian Alps in 1998; returning just months later I was greeted by a burnt landscape not adapted to burning. I thought that with the last most recent burn being in 1934 another gap of more than 64 years would facilitate regeneration. These landscapes have now been burnt 2-3 times in the last 20 years with fire regime changes occurring too fast for even our fire adapted flora to survive. These changes, within such short timeframes, demonstrate that there has never been a more pressing time for investment in science jobs to help generate practical solutions.
