The problem grasped by far too few people and only shown by Thomas Aquinas McMahon in his pioneering book “Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges”, and three years later by Tim Flannery in the much-better-known “Future Eaters” is that the Antarctic Treaty protected entirely the wrong continent.

What McMahon showed was that the regions of the globe that needed special protection, owing to their erratic and fragile hydrological cycle which my own private studies show results from the immense age of their soils, are Australia and Africa south of the Zambezi River. This is all the more true when one considers that under a free market these extremely old and fragile soils, owing to the cheapness of the land, tend to be ploughed as much as possible for the growing of crops designed for the extremely young soils of Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand. In contrast, Antarctica (and the Arctic) are very difficult to exploit efficiently because glaciers and permafrost make building prohibitively expensive – even though they are much less fragile than Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa.

Thus, what clearly is needed is a treaty to protect as much of Australia’s diminishing native ecosystems – already critically threatened by man-made global warming – instead of the Antarctic treaty, which Flannery and McMahon show beyond reasonable doubt to be a case of protecting entirely the wrong continent.

A treaty to revegetate at least Australia’s farmland and to create a system of reserves covering most of Australia and probably a lot of sub-Zambezian Africa (where the economics are better because of the lure of big game like elephants and rhinos) was what was always needed, yet even in more ecologically-conscious countries this is not understood at all – which I attribute to the fact that people in Europe have no understanding of Australia and the economic advantages its gluts of minerals and flat, ice-free land brings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01borrell.html?th&emc=th

Thank you Tom for an interesting and well written article.