Why do brumbies evoke such passion? It’s all down to the high country’s cultural myth-makers

Pete Minard, La Trobe University

Brumby activists and environmentalists seem fundamentally unable to understand one another, despite having a lot in common. They share a love of the high country but are divided over the value or threat of wild horses.

Their mutual incomprehension has been fuelled by historically contested ideas about wildness, and the proper ways in which people should interact with and control the natural world.

---

Read more:
The grim story of the Snowy Mountains’ cannibal horses

---

Wild horses first appeared in Australia soon after colonisation, as horses escaped or were abandoned. According to historian Eric Rolls, brumbies may have originally got their name from the horses that Private James Brumby abandoned in 1804 when he was transferred from New South Wales to Tasmania. Alternatively, the 19th-century pastoralist E. M. Curr suggested that “brumby” may be a corruption of booramby, a Bidjara word for “wild”.

Whatever the origin of the word, pastoral expansion spread brumbies to all corners of Australia during the 19th century.

Settled colonial farmers hated brumbies, viewing them as symbols of the waste and destruction caused by the pastoral industry that the settlers were rapidly displacing. Brumbies also destroyed fences and competed with stock for grass.

Brumbies were destroyed en masse as pests, which also allowed farmers to make a profit from their hides and manes. Sometimes brumbies were even rendered for hog feed. In 1870, the Queanbeyan Age reported that wild horses were “hated and shot by all”. Five years later, it predicted that as Australia’s population increased, pastoralists would lose control of the fine country “where now the wild horse holds almost undisputed sway” to industrious settled farmers.

By the turn of the 20th century, when Banjo Paterson was writing about his pastoralist friends in the Snowy Mountains, the decline of both pastoralism and wild horses was well underway. Paterson’s work is full of a self-conscious nostalgia for a wilder, freer Australia that he knew was under threat.

In Images of Australia, Paterson wrote of remembering the transition from free-roaming pastoralism to fenced farming as the moment when “the few remaining mobs of wild horses were run down and impounded”. His idea of the Snowy Mountains as a special place reflecting a disappearing Australia, and of brumbies embodying this specialness, has become culturally important for high country locals.

Brumbies and war

The high country bush legend has been used to argue that the mountain country produced excellent mounted fighting forces during the first world war. Snowy Mountain men certainly enlisted in the Australian Light Horse Regiment and some of them may have supplied their own horses, which could conceivably have come from brumby stock.

But there was no wholesale supply of brumbies for war service. Australia did provide many horses during WWI, but they were Walers, a distinctive Australian breed that was well suited to carrying troops in hot and dry conditions. Australian breeders tasked with supplying horses for the war effort regarded brumby stallions as mongrels that should not be allowed to pollute their bloodlines. The president of the National Agricultural Association of Queensland, Ernest Baynes, went as far as to say that the only way to make brumbies useful for the war effort would be to slaughter and export them “to the countries in which people eat horse, and are glad to get it”.

After the second world war, the historian, children’s novelist and high country local Elynne Mitchell further popularised brumbies through her series of Silver Brumby novels. Her work, along with the resurgence of Paterson’s popularity and the inaccurate memorialisation of the Light Horse Brigade, led to the further romanticisation of brumbies and the forgetting of farmers’ earlier antagonistic and utilitarian views of wild horses.

The romantic brumby became a symbol of local identity, of the high country’s way of life and of resistance to state control.

---

Read more:
Hold your horses – brumby fertility control isn’t that easy

---

Gradually increasing government control of the high country led to a decline in cattle grazing in alpine areas, more tourism, scientific study, and the end of licensed brumby running in 1982. This process alienated locals who could no longer experience nature as a working landscape. Instead, state control privileged visitors who passively admired the landscape and scientists who rightly worried about the environmental degradation caused by horses.

Successive governments centralised the control of land, and could not see the local brumby culture. This blindness has led people such as fifth-generation local Leisa Caldwell to feel that the “mountain community has been kicked in the guts over and over. They’ve had their cattle taken, their towns flooded for the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme and their history destroyed. The last bit of history to show they even existed is the brumbies. If they go, what’s left?”

Pete Minard, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of the Inland, La Trobe University., La Trobe University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Advertisement

Why methane should be treated differently compared to long-lived greenhouse gases

Livestock is a significant source of methane, a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas.
from http://www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-SA

Dave Frame, Victoria University of Wellington; Adrian Henry Macey, Victoria University of Wellington, and Myles Allen, University of Oxford

New research provides a way out of a longstanding quandary in climate policy: how best to account for the warming effects of greenhouse gases that have different atmospheric lifetimes.

Carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas, whereas methane is comparatively short-lived. Long-lived “stock pollutants” remain in the atmosphere for centuries, increasing in concentration as long as their emissions continue and causing more and more warming. Short-lived “flow pollutants” disappear much more rapidly. As long as their emissions remain constant, their concentration and warming effect remain roughly constant as well.

Our research demonstrates a better way to reflect how different greenhouse gases affect global temperatures over time.

Cost of pollution

The difference between stock and flow pollutants is shown in the figure below. Flow pollutant emissions, for example of methane, do not persist. Emissions in period one, and the same emissions in period two, lead to a constant (or roughly constant) amount of the pollutant in the atmosphere (or river, lake, or sea).

With stock pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, concentrations of the pollutant accumulate as emissions continue.

Flow and stock pollutants over time. In the first period, one unit of each pollutant is emitted, leading to one unit of concentration. After each period, the flow pollutant decays, while the stock pollutant remains in the environment.
provided by author, CC BY

The economic theory of pollution suggests different approaches to greenhouse gases with long or short lifetimes in the atmosphere. The social cost (the cost society ought to pay) of flow pollution is constant over time, because the next unit of pollution is just replacing the last, recently decayed unit. This justifies a constant price on flow pollutants.

In the case of stock pollutants, the social cost increases with constant emissions as concentrations of the pollutant rise, and as damages rise, too. This justifies a rising price on stock pollutants.

---

Read more:
Cows exude lots of methane, but taxing beef won’t cut emissions

---

A brief history of greenhouse gas “equivalence”

In climate policy, we routinely encounter the idea of “CO₂-equivalence” between different sorts of gases, and many people treat it as accepted and unproblematic. Yet researchers have debated for decades about the adequacy of this approach. To summarise a long train of scientific papers and opinion pieces, there is no perfect or universal way to compare the effects of greenhouse gases with very different lifetimes.

This point was made in the first major climate report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) way back in 1990. Those early discussions were loaded with caveats: global warming potentials (GWP), which underpin the traditional practice of CO₂-equivalence, were introduced as “a simple approach … to illustrate the difficulties inherent in the concept”.

The problem with developing a concept is that people might use it. Worse, they might use it and ignore all the caveats that attended its development. This is, more or less, what happened with GWPs as used to create CO₂-equivalence.

The science caveats were there, and suggestions for alternatives or improvements have continued to appear in the literature. But policymakers needed something (or thought they did), and the international climate negotiations community grasped the first option that became available, although this has not been without challenges from some countries.

Better ways to compare stocks and flows

An explanation of the scientific issues, and how we address them, is contained in this article by Michelle Cain. The approach in our new paper shows that modifying the use of GWP to better account for the differences between short- and long-lived gases can better link emissions to warming.

Under current policies, stock and flow pollutants are treated as being equivalent and therefore interchangeable. This is a mistake, because if people make trade-offs between emissions reductions such that they allow stock pollutants to grow while reducing flow pollutants, they will ultimately leave a warmer world behind in the long term. Instead, we should develop policies that address methane and other flow pollutants in line with their effects.

Then the true impact of an emission on warming can be easily assessed. For countries with high methane emissions, for example from agriculture, this can make a huge difference to how their emissions are judged.

For a lot of countries, this issue is of secondary importance. But for some countries, particularly poor ones, it matters a lot. Countries with a relatively high share of methane in their emissions portfolios tend to be either middle-income countries with large agriculture sectors and high levels of renewables in their electricity mix (such as much of Latin America), or less developed countries where agricultural emissions dominate because their energy sector is small.

This is why we think the new research has some promise. We think we have a better way to conceive of multi-gas climate targets. This chimes with new possibilities in climate policy, because under the Paris Agreement countries are free to innovate in how they approach climate policy.

Improving the environmental integrity of climate policy

This could take several forms. For some countries, it may be that the new approach provides a better way of comparing different gases within a single-basket approach to greenhouse gases, as in an emissions trading scheme or taxation system. For others, it could be used to set separate but coherent emissions targets for long- and short-lived gases within a two-basket approach to climate policy. Either way, the new approach means countries can signal the centrality of carbon dioxide reductions in their policy mix, while limiting the warming effect of shorter-lived gases.

The new way of using global warming potentials demonstrably outperforms the traditional method in a range of emission scenarios, providing a much more accurate indication of how stock and flow pollutants affect global temperatures. This is especially so under climate mitigation scenarios.

Well designed policies would assist sectoral fairness within countries, too. Policies that reflect the different roles of stock and flow pollutants would give farmers and rice growers a more reasonable way to control their emissions and reduce their impact on the environment, while still acknowledging the primacy of carbon dioxide emissions in the climate change problem.

An ideal approach would be a policy that aimed for zero emissions of stock pollutants such as carbon dioxide and low but stable (or gently declining) emissions of flow pollutants such as methane. Achieving both goals would mean that a farm, or potentially a country, can do a better, clearer job of stopping its contribution to warming.

Dave Frame, Professor of Climate Change, Victoria University of Wellington; Adrian Henry Macey, Senior Associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies; Adjunct Professor, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute. , Victoria University of Wellington, and Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, Leader of ECI Climate Research Programme, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.