It is often only when decisions are likely to significantly affect our livelihoods or our quality of life that we bother to check the facts.
Given many government environment policies are only ever likely to impact on resource uses -- foresters, farmers, fishers etc -- most of the rest of the population is unlikely to ever challenge "accepted wisdom".
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the international best seller The Sceptical Environmentalist, suggests that some fields of research have a natural tendency to become "veritable industries" defining their own reality and the accepted wisdom of the community.
This is a problem if key assumptions underpinning a field of research are flawed, but never challenged, because researchers only investigate problems within the field.
The accepted wisdom on dryland salinity in the Murray Darling Basin could be a case in point.
A recent released technical report, Salinity Mapping Methods in the Australian Context (January 2004), from the Australian Academy of Science restates the cause as "changes in the water balance of landscapes following the removal of native vegetation and the introduction of European agricultural practices" (pg. 8).
It predicts that the area affected by dryland salinity will continue to increase because of continuously rising saline water tables from the changed water balance.
This basic premise, however, was challenged by NSW government scientist Dr Christine Jones, who had articles published in The Australian Farm Journal in 2000-2001.
She contends that the "rising groundwater model" has failed us because it makes false assumptions about the nature of pre-European vegetation and the way water moves in the landscape.
Rob Gourlay and Dr Brian Tunstall of Environmental Research and Information Consortium Pty Ltd (ERIC) independently came to similar conclusions through the development of an airborne gamma radiation salinity mapping technology.
According to Gourlay, "Dryland salinity (in the Murray Darling Basin) is really a soil health issue, a symptom of soil degradation not a rising water table issue.
The Academy of Science report compares salinity mapping methods with the conclusion that the main "knowledge gap" is the location of salt at depth and whether it is likely to be mobilised by rising groundwater.
The electromagnetic (EM) mapping technique that the report advocates for plugging this knowledge gap is expensive -- up to 10 times the cost of doing the gamma ray mapping that focuses on the top metre and that Gourlay has commercialised.
The Academy of Science report was dismissive of the gamma ray technology for salinity mapping describing it as not having a scientific foundation and advising potential users of the technology to seek "independent advice on claims made by the vendors". Gourlay regards this as an attack on his "professionalism and capacity to trade". He questioned how "publicly funded scientists who compete with the private sector can get away with using taxpayer money to discredit the only technology that has delivered benefits to clients at a paddock, farm, catchment and regional scale across Australia since 1992".
One of the authors of the Academy of Science report, Brian Spies, works for the CSIRO and has been involved in the development and commercialisation of the TEMPEST electromagnetic mapping system.
CSIRO provides commercial services based around the TEMPEST technology and hence the Australian Academy of Science report could be interpreted as knocking a competing service as well as promoting the CSIRO method.
While different scientists may be motivated by different needs and interests, real science is value-free.
It is a way of understanding the world in which we live from an evidence-based perspective using observation, experimentation and tested theory.
When we are debating issues of evidence and science, the motives of those who have done the research should be largely irrelevant. Of more relevance is whether or not the findings stand up to critical examination? Can they be verified or falsified?
Thirteen new Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs) have been formed across NSW and the catchment plans or blueprints they endorse will potentially affect the livelihood of farmers.
The inland blueprints will apparently include specific catchment targets for salinity and will guide prioritisation of activities under the Federal Government's National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality.
Here is an opportunity for at least one of the CMAs to compare the relative usefulness of the two competing salinity mapping technologies at paddock, farm and catchment scales.
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