Populate or perish?

I know I keep getting my stuff from the SMH, but that is all I have time to read. Besides, they do a good job covering green issue. I guess Gaia is just in the news a lot, lately.

Anyway Paul Sheehan caught the countrylink to Bathurst, hopped in the Cessna of George King who preoceeded to fly him to his two cattle properties in the Northern Territory. The parched, drought-struck country below seemed to soak up the words of King expounding the views of Allen Savoy in his book Holistic Management:

"Ecosystems function as a whole so we need to manage the whole. The role of animals in an environment like ours is critical. The Earth's surface is 70 per cent brittle-tending, and it used to support infinitely more animals than it does now. Australia has lost 94 per cent of its mega-fauna since humans have been introduced...

"In a naturally functioning ecosystem the herbivores are held in tight mobs by predators. When they get onto an area of land they graze it down heavily, trample a lot of grass, which forms a protective mulch on the soil surface; they defecate and urinate. No animal will eat fouled ground, so the plants get both fertiliser and a recovery period before being grazed again. The herbivores move on, in a tight mob for safety from predators. For millions of years, brittle environments have evolved with this herbivore-predator relationship."