Save the Fruit Bats = Save the Planet

First published March 4

A couple of weeks ago south-eastern Australia was the hottest place on earth with temperatures nearing 50 degrees centigrade. Every successive year all across our nation high-temperature records are broken, yet back in the halls of parliament it’s business as usual with more coal-mines on the drawing board. So what will it take for the Liberals to wake up?

Perished Fruit Bats fell from the trees from the extreme heat conditions in NSW

All across eastern Australia the scorching temperatures imposed havoc across the landscape with numerous accounts of fauna succumbing to the elements, and catastrophic wildfires out of control.

As scorching summer conditions blasted over the weekend, thousands of Fruit Bats including the threatened Grey-headed Flying Foxes have dropped dead in the heat as they ultimately fell from the trees.

Such events are a clear sign of an impending ecological collapse, a collapse caused by human ignorance as the planet continues to heat up through our over-use of fossil fuels.

The President of the Australasian Bat Society, Dr Justin Welbergen said “the extent of the weekend’s weather on bat populations was still unclear. Initial data, however, suggested thousands of bats had died in at least seven locations on the weekend from Sydney up into south-eastern Queensland”

“Extreme heat events have a very serious impact on bat species, and those impacts then reverberate through the Australian forest ecosystems.

If we lose our flying foxes, then there’s no pollen and seed dispersal of plants that are reliant on these creatures services”.

Without question, global warming and its extreme consequences are here now!

How many more signs do we need to see before we begin to act?

Climate change alone is expected to threaten with extinction approximately one quarter or more of all species on land by the year 2050, surpassing even habitat loss as the biggest threat to life on land.

The International Plant Protection Convention: IPPC has predicted that by 2100, assuming that current trends in burning fossil fuels continue, the surface of the Earth will warm on average by as much as 6 degrees Celsius.

No government more than the current Australian Liberal one, continues to display a blatant disregard for our planet’s health.

Australians need to wake up, depose the present government, and take responsibility for the stewardship of our precious environment.

*Ted Mead was born in the Latrobe Valley Victoria, and is more than familiar with the smoke-choked skies from the ubiquitous Coal-fired power stations. Ted laments over the past practice of burning fossil fuels as we didn’t realize what the consequences were then. However, and alarmingly, we now know the ramifications of our past but inexplicably we refuse to act.