Friday, March 13, 2009

Thinking about the environment ....

The King River and the delta which has been created.


The King River
The Queen River

We had planned to go on the Pieman River cruise today, but decided to give it a miss - it meant driving 80km North to Corinna, getting the ferry across the Pieman River, and back this afternoon - sorry to miss it tho, we'd had glowing reports from another couple in the Park - the boat is built of Huon pine, back in the 1930s .... Very different to the huge, hi tech 'Eagle' which took us to the Gordon River.

Have been thinking about the terrible damage to the environment that mining has caused over here - how greedy we have been, how very long overdue our newly developed conscience is. How arrogant humans have been - and still are. How hard it is to balance our needs as humans with the impact on the environment - how it seems that it is impossible for our society to live in harmony with nature, the way the original inhabitants of this country did. Imagine, they lived in this land for 30 or so thousand years, without any detriment to the environment - mind, I'm not advocating we adopt their way of life! I like my comforts as well as the next person, I just hope we can find a way of having our cake and eating it too.

The King River is a tragedy on a mammoth scale - here is a pic of the Queen River, which feeds into the King (the King River's banks have been built up with the tailings, see pic) - the Queen was used as an industrial drain for all the mining tailings, containing all sorts of terrible things, and that is how the King and Queen River have both become dead rivers - nothing lives in them. The tailings have created an enormous delta where the King River enters Macquarie Harbour - see picture.






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