oldmanure

This weekend my wife Chris Duigan and I are celebrating our silver anniversary.

Not our wedding anniversary, but something almost as significant. On Sunday, it will be 25 years to the day since we launched NRMjobs – our family business, and also our window to a fascinating world of great-hearted people doing astonishing things in breath-taking locations around Australia.

For those who don’t know it, NRMjobs is a niche job board, which advertises vacancies in the environment, water and natural resource management in Australia.

Of course, we didn’t know when we started it in 1998 that NRMjobs was going to be a job board. Job boards hadn’t been invented yet. We made it up as we went along. There were no examples for us to follow.

I could launch here into a self-indulgent tale about the early days (you know – life was tough, we worked hard, and young people today don’t understand, do they…), but I would prefer to talk instead about that window to the world which our business has gifted to us.

Because it occurs to me (somewhat to my own surprise) that I must now be something of an expert. For 25 years I have watched Australia’s environment industry waxing and waning, and I have dabbled daily in the detail of environmental job descriptions and employment conditions.

Chris in the early days – when we ran NRMjobs with floppy disks, dial-up internet and small children.

My role in the NRMjobs business from the beginning has been receiving, editing and publishing the job advertisements. My wife’s role has been looking after the financial side of things (often while also working in other jobs).

I estimate that since 1998 we have read, edited and published something like 50,000 job advertisements on behalf of perhaps 5,000 different employers, and that we have pushed the button exactly 1,300 times to send a weekly email bulletin listing job opportunities to an ever-growing list of email subscribers.

What has 25 years taught me about the environment industry?

So what has all this taught me about the industry I serve? What is the current state of employment in the environment, water and NRM industry in Australia? What trends have I observed?

The short answer: the state of environmental employment in Australia has never been stronger. We’ve been through some bumps and curves, but in 2023 more people are employed in the industry, working for a more diverse range of employers, than at any time in the past 25 years.

There are several reasons for this.

Once has been convergence. In 1998 the silos were still breaking down. Water management, land management and biodiversity management were traditionally the realm of different government agencies, different professions and different private businesses. Each jurisdiction did things differently, and skills were often neither portable nor recognised. TAFE and university courses had yet to be designed to cover many aspects of the industry.

A second reason has been divergence. The number of employers involved in managing the natural world has grown markedly, and the number of organisations which recognise the environment as a crucial element of their business has exploded. Local government has shouldered a large burden of new natural resource management responsibilities, indigenous land management organisations have emerged as very significant employers of environmental professionals, private businesses have found new opportunities servicing the growing sector and philanthropic organisations have proliferated as conservation landholders and employers.

A third reason has been awareness. The fruits of environmental education in primary and secondary schools, though slow to ripen, are now increasingly evident, and are reflected in the concerns of taxpayers, rate-payers and voters. Community environmental volunteer groups of all kinds have helped environmental knowledge percolate throughout society at all levels. In 1998 the environment sector was no shrinking violet, but it was not ‘mainstream’ the way it is now. In the 1990s, environmental concerns were mostly relegated to the portfolios of junior ministers, and only occasionally spilled into headline political issues. Whenever I despair at the environmental ignorance of modern Australia, I remind myself what it was like when I first became involved in the landcare movement in 1989.

A fourth reason has been professionalisation. In the early 1990s I was contracted by the National Landcare Program to edit a newsletter (called ‘Decade of Landcare Update’) designed to service Australia’s new profession of ‘landcare co-ordinators’. Among other things, I interviewed landcare co-ordinators about what had brought them to this trade, and what their previous career trajectories had been.

I was struck at the time by the diversity of professional backgrounds – farmers’ spouses, former agricultural extension officers, environmental advocates, teachers, scientists, tradies, journalists, rangers, volunteer firefighters – any milieu which brought motivated people in contact with the nascent landcare movement spawned the first generation of landcare professionals. They learnt on the job, and their jobs evolved with them. In those days there were no ‘natural resource management’ courses at university. Even ‘environmental management’ was still an emerging field. Fast forward 30 years and almost every aspect of the environmental sector has a university course tailored to it, and a wealth of experience to inform it.

Me at my desk in about 1999: a hand-knitted jumper (thanks to my late Mum), and a steep learning curve.

In 2023 it is possible to look forward to – and even perhaps to plan – a career in the environmental sector which will earn you a reasonable wage, a pathway to promotion and advancement, and considerable portability of skills to new employers and locations. None of this was possible when NRMjobs started.

These are all huge positives for environmental professionals. Now is arguably the best time in Australian history to be an environmental professional.

But there is still such a long, long way to go.

In almost every jurisdiction or discipline, the hands-on practice of environmental conservation feels woefully inadequate against the tide of environmental degradation. Australia’s national parks are pitifully understaffed. Bush regeneration is fighting a losing battle against development, weeds and the climate. Biodiversity conservation is going backward almost everywhere. Small numbers of iconic species are being rescued heroically in enclosures, while the numbers of even common native species are dwindling alarmingly. Climate change is accelerating. Coral reefs are struggling. River health is in crisis. The list goes on.

All of us who work in the industry know that it is going to take at least an order of magnitude more funding, effort and staff to turn the Australian environment around. In coming years, we are going to need the sort of money and policy determination which are now directed to defence or health to reverse the threatening processes which are currently overwhelming us.

All of which means that NRMjobs’ silver anniversary leaves me with a bitter-sweet taste – unsure as I raise my glass whether I am drinking to the sector’s success, or drowning my sorrows at its failure.

Thanks for all the fish…

Thanks to all those who have helped with NRMjobs – especially Shane Gelven, who has worked with us in various capacities for more than 20 years. But also Tully, Alice, Joe and too many others to list.

And a huge shout out to all our advertisers and subscribers. Thanks for your support, patience and good humour. Truly you are an inspirational bunch.

– why closing remote Aboriginal communities is a bad idea for everyone

What if Aboriginal people did take Prime Minister Tony Abbott at his word, and abandoned their “lifestyle choices” to dwell on tiny communities in traditional lands?

The country would be heaps better off, right? It would save taxpayers a motza?

In fact, Australia might find that it is a whole lot worse off, and fairly quickly. Because – leaving aside any considerations of culture and human rights – Aboriginal communities are actually doing a great service to the nation by occupying that archipelago of remote outstations and microscopic communities.

What Aboriginal people are doing out there is managing the land. What they are doing is conserving the last vestiges of species and ecosystems which could collapse altogether in their absence. Some conservationists believe we need many more indigenous people occupying the outback, not fewer.

One such conservationist is Dr Barry Traill, from Pew Charitable Trusts. Last year, in a landmark TED talk in Sydney, he put it succinctly: “the problem for a lot of our wildlife in the outback is not too many people, but too few people.”

“In our outback there are now fewer people on the country than at any time in the last 50,000 years, on most of the outback. And by on the country I actually mean in it and managing it, dealing with fires, dealing with feral animals. We now have a situation where most of the country is simply not managed,” Dr Traill said.

He said from the 1940s, as Aboriginal people left remote areas, numbers of native animals dwindled. The pattern was repeated across Australia – Aboriginal hunting and burning disappeared from the landscape, leaving it to wildfires and feral animals.

“As the number of people declined in the desert…so did the number of some of the animals,” Dr Traill said. “We now know that this not only occurred in the Great Sandy Desert, but in many other places. The details vary, but elsewhere in Central Australia, in northern Australia as the patterns of humans changed in the outback, animals have declined.”

Dr Traill said he strongly believed that Aboriginal people needed their traditional country; that they were happier and healthier if they had attachment with it. But he said the opposite was also true – “the country needs its people”.

“Our outback is one of a tiny number of great, wild places left on our fairly crowded planet. But if we want to keep it healthy, if we want to keep our extraordinary wildlife there, we need to bring back people into all of our outback wilderness.”

Arguably the Australia’s greatest environmental success story over the past decade is one that most people know almost nothing about – the proliferation of indigenous ranger programs across much of outback Australia. These programs, the bulk of which are funded by the Federal Government, employ local Aboriginal people as rangers on their own lands.

From small beginnings, the ranger program has swelled to employ about 700 indigenous people on more than 100 teams. It is one of the few areas of environmental spending which has largely survived the successive purges of the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott Governments’ razor gangs. It is also one of the few areas of environmental policy that is supported by almost all sides in the environment debate.

Over the past decade scientists have recorded a frightening “second wave” of native mammal declines across much of northern Australia. Much of the immediate cause is thought to be the feral cat, populations of which have recently exploded and are cutting a terrible swathe through hundreds of species of mammal, birds and reptiles.

The indigenous ranger groups are the front-line battling this worrying surge toward extinction. They are resuming the hunting of cats and foxes which in the past suppressed their numbers, and reinstating the complex burning regimes which created the habitat preferred by native animals.

“The rangers have now come back, they manage the fires, they deal with feral animals like water buffalo, the bush is healthier, and wildlife which has declined … are coming back,” Dr Traill said. “And there are now dozens and dozens of Aboriginal ranger groups like this operating throughout Australia, and they’re combining traditional knowledge, western science and using modern equipment and modern technology.”