Kangaroo Island resident Lara Tillbrook has provided this information to KIpolis.net :
Hands across the Sand is happening on Saturday 18th May 2013 at Stokes Bay (Kangaroo Island) to say NO to offshore oil and gas mining off the west coast of Kangaroo Island – please help by sharing with the Kangaroo Island community and help get the word out and about it.
Contacts:
– Lara Tillbrook, Wilderness Society, Kangaroo Island, laratilbrookATgmailDOTcom, ph. 0438 623 742
– Tammy-Jo Sutton, Wilderness Society, tammy-joDOTsuttonATwildernessDOTorgDOTau
– Josh Coates, Community Campaigner, Wilderness Society SA, Adelaide, joshDOTcoatesATwildernessDOTorgDOTau, ph. 08 8231 6586, 0438 805 284
Here are two links for your information:
Kangaroo Island threatened by oil drills (with a map)
Wilderness Society: Hands Across The Sand
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Note from the webmaster:
BP (British Petroleum) seems very interested in the area’s possible oil and gas reserves. As a reminder, this oil giant has destroyed the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which has not recovered and will not. See:
“Degradation and resilience in Louisiana salt marshes after the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill”
Obviously, this planned exploitation of offshore oil and gas is the biggest threat to Kangaroo Island’s ecosystem and community. What’s the use of exploration if the intent is not exploitation ? And exploitation means a very high risk of disaster for the island environment, and for its tourism-based economy.
The federal ministers who are making the decision to sell out this wilderness area need to know that many people, both islanders and mainlanders, will not just say amen to their preposterous decisions.
Dr Gabriel Bittar, Kangaroo Island
Thank you for the link to the article: “Degradation and resilience in Louisiana salt marshes after the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill”
It is an interesting read, and as indicated in the title all is not lost. – eg :
“Ecosystem Resilience and Degredation. Despite the deleterious effects of the oil spill on marsh vegetation and erosion rates, we found clear evidence for recovery processes.”
“This finding suggests that marshes are intrinsically resilient to (i.e., able to recover from) oil-induced perturbation . . .”
Sure Rosalie, there is some resilience in nature… but there was a full bottle of a rare wine before the catastrophe, and now half of it has been wasted… so this loss is irreversible. It’s worth reading the whole article and pondering it.
Here’s a part from the abstract (highlighting by me):
“Here we report on not only rapid salt-marsh recovery (high resilience) but also permanent marsh area loss after the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (…) oil-driven plant death on the edges of these marshes more than doubled rates of shoreline erosion, further driving marsh platform loss that is likely to be permanent (…) This paper highlights that heavy oil coverage on the shorelines of Louisiana marshes, already experiencing elevated retreat because of intense human activities, induced a geomorphic feedback that amplified this erosion and thereby set limits to the recovery of otherwise resilient vegetation. It thus warns of the enhanced vulnerability of already degraded marshes to heavy oil coverage and provides a clear example of how multiple human-induced stressors can interact to hasten ecosystem decline.
“Hands across the sands” is a bunch of two sided people dreamers. I admit to enjoying all the good outcomes from destructive mining, theres no magic fairy wand available to produce the products I enjoy. These people will be using mining products to reach their protest protest sites. If people moved into caves and lit fires to keep warm some people would still protest about unrepairable damage. Finding future workable alternate solutions is more saner.Volcanoes earthquakes, and tidal waves dont care about devastion in their wake.
Linda, as I see it it’s a matter of cost/benefit balance between the usefulness of production and the socio-economic costs if/when there is a problem, including in the balance an assessment of the probability of things going wrong.
In all likelihood, accessible gas/oil reserves off Kangaroo Island represent only a few years of world consumption, with economic benefits to the island practically nil.
Drilling at the bottom of the ocean is NOT the same thing as mining in a desert. Many more chances for all sorts of trouble: difficult access to the platform and also down there on the ocean floor, storms, fires harder to control (a platform is just like a ship), water is a much more difficult working environment for engineers and for humans generally than an air environment (try to pour concrete under water into a gushing oil-hole) — etc.
So chances of trouble are much higher than in usual mining situations, but that’s not all: once you spill it, the pollution doesn’t stay located in situ, ocean currents powerfully will disseminate it… and the direction is Kangaroo Island, where only the eastern coast would have a chance of being spared.
An oil spill has chemical and biological consequences, it pollutes and poisons the shores and the ocean bottom irreversibly, with oil droplets staying in suspension in the waters practically for ever — while an earthquake or a tidal wave only have physical consequences which nature can address in the long term. The island community would be devastated economically in addition to morally, tourism and the exploitation of the sea’s ressources being important to it.
So on the whole, objectively, the matter at hand is not so much a matter of personal inclination and philosophical vision of life, it’s a very practical one: offshore drilling would bring no advantage whatsoever to the island, only too high a probability of impending catastrophe.
Look i dont like pollution either but enjoy modern things, if this was a seemingly useless 2 day wonder pit why would they bother. Unless its being secured for a future benefits as a safeguard in cause of stifling future NRM policies