Era of the ‘blackboot’ brigade

THE Tyson family has lived on, and loved, the land for six generations.
“We were just living a quiet life as graziers. You have your dramas with seasons and so on, but they are things we understand,” says Mr Tyson, 61.
What they don’t understand is how an international mining company based in a place they’ve never heard of called Zug 16,000km away in Switzerland can suddenly move in and turn a century of family history upside down, along with their hopes and plans.

Fertile plains under frack attack

Durum wheat is going head-to-head with coal seam gas in a battle over the state’s top agricultural region.

Group plans to fight mining exploration

The Federal Govt. has been put on notice of a new environmental battlefront, to save our water, agricultural land and urban areas.

Greens and farmers fight mining land grab

Governments — state and federal — have operated under a covert two-speed morality for years and have two separate laws in place. The first insists that the landholder promote the sustainable use of natural resources, while the other allows CSG and coal companies to damage and obliterate natural resources without proper governance or penalty.

The environmental argument is brutal: coalmining moves into fertile farmland and leaves a slag heap behind, while coal seam gas extraction pollutes and poisons the underground water system, the most important natural resource in the world’s most arid nation.

Gates shut in the gas lands

Cotton growers, eco-tourists, crack-of-dawn dairy workers, lifestyle hippies, mango growers, corporate drop-out tree changers and outback cattle runners are speaking with a single voice: “Stop the madness.”

EPA investigates coal seam gas leak in Sydney

The Environmental Protection Authority is investigating, after a white, frothy liquid was filmed spurting from a coal seam gas mining site in Camden in south-west Sydney, a few hundred metres from an open drinking water channel.

Fracking’s toxic recipe

“But a seam of black rock lies nearly a mile beneath the topsoil he has so scrupulously nurtured, and the deposit contains enormous quantities of natural gas. Profit-hungry energy companies — and the politicians that their campaign donations support — are determined to exploit that resource, even though it could destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers like Jaffe.”

Gas well blowout causes massive fluid spill

A gas well blowout spilled thousands of gallons of hydraulic fracking drilling fluid water in the US state of Pennsylvania, state and local regulators said.

Australia’s agriculture under threat from mining

Alan Jones talks with Fiona Simson (of NSW Farmers) and Senator Bill Heffernan, about Australian food security, and says this is the gravest issue he has ever addressed. He talks of how our governments are virtually turning Australia into a giant mine, with no thought at all for the future.

Coal seam gas: a sleight of hand?

The methane escape is only one of three major CSG cost externalities which will be paid for by the community whilst the companies bank their profits; the other two are health and water contamination.