Ku-ring-gai residents have been invited to comment on the public exhibition of alternative scenarios to the Transport Oriented Development (TOD) that rezones 400 metres around Roseville, Lindfield, Killara and Gordon until 17 December 2024.

Ku-ring-gai Council has based its alternative scenarios on seven principles including avoiding environmentally sensitive areas.

Yet Ku-ring-gai as a collective whole, with its wildlife corridors, canopy trees, and threatened species is one large environmentally sensitive area.

Ku-ring-gai is the ‘middle ring’ that connects wildlife from the western side of the railway line (Lane Cove National Park) to the eastern side (Lane Cove National Park). Even the bushland along the railway corridor has NSW Government signage identifying the fenced off bushland as “environmentally sensitive land”.

One of the challenges in responding to the alternative TOD scenarios is the framing of the NSW planning system that has historically refused to recognise Ku-ring-gai’s environmentally sensitivity and the cumulative damage of successive decades of habitat loss as a result of housing densification.

Knocking down one house means the loss of trees. Knocking down 30 houses along a street means the loss of perhaps 50 trees. Knocking down every house within 400 metres of Roseville, Lindfield, Killara and Gordon will be catastrophic for wildlife. It is common to see, even 30 metres from Gordon Railway Station, bush turkeys, rosellas, king parrots and king fishers and possums.

Ku-ring-gai Council’s data shows that Ku-ring-gai lost 1.4% of its tree canopy between 2020 and 2022. The Council’s Urban Forest Strategy aims to increase the canopy cover to 49% by 2036, which means planting an additional 44,000 trees. How can this achieved with an additional 23,200 dwellings to be built in the next 15 years?

Ku-ring-gai is one of the few remaining suburbs that contains houses surrounded by front and back gardens. This residential housing type across established Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane suburbs is fast disappearing, being bulldozed for ‘in-fill’ low-to-high rise apartments. To build these apartments the tree covered gardens have been felled, bulldozed, subdivided and replaced by hard surfaces. This urban densification increases population pressures on suburbs with increased traffic congestion and demands on water, sewerage and energy infrastructure. Where once wildlife was abundant. They now disappear. Their homes have been displaced by concrete. The fragmentation of habitat makes life more threatening to them.

The anthropocentric focus of our modern society prioritises human need before wildlife and the natural world. Australians are now facing a ‘housing crisis’ that is intertwined with an environmental crisis. More housing supply brings more habitat destruction.

People are utterly dependent upon wildlife, trees and the natural vegetation. Collectively they are our “ecosystem engineers” that provide us with the clean air, soil and water to stay healthy and alive.

The NSW Government appear to be willfully ecologically ignorant in relation to Sydney’s urban bushland suburbs – including Ku-ring-gai. Tim Flannery described are ecological ignorance as:

Such is the depth of public ignorance about Australia’s extinction crisis that most people are unaware it is occurring, while those who do know of it commonly believe that our national parks and reserves are safe places for threatened species. In fact, the second extinction wave is in full swing and it’s emptying our national parks and wildlife reserves as ruthlessly as other landscapes. ” 

Tim Flannery ‘After the Future’ Quarterly Essay (2012)

Like climate change, wildlife extinction is an existential crisis. By the time we are made aware of the Powerful Owls’ or the Blue Gum High Forest’s dire future it is almost impossible to reverse their extinction trajectory.

Governments are determined to focus on economic growth through more housing ‘supply’. This means deregulating the planning system, removing environmental controls and allowing developers to bypass local government rezoning controls. The current NSW Government is handing over planning controls to developers who are advocating for a tsunami of high rise to replace Sydney’s remaining garden and bushland low residential suburbs. This will decimate Sydney’s fragile urban environment on a scale never seen before.

The article below Hidden detail on road sign highlights growing ‘problem’ in Aussie suburbs: ‘Reverse domino effect’ by Michael Dahlstrom, Yahoo Environmental Editor, published on Yahoo News, 15 October 2024 highlights how new housing developments are having a devastating impact on Queensland’s urban koalas. The same could be said for Ku-ring-gai’s wildlife. Read the full article below:

While most of us were getting ready for bed on Monday night, a sad situation was unfolding in one Aussie suburb. Clinging to the back of a road sign was an iconic marsupial that belonged up a tree.

Although koalas are used to promote Australia as a wildlife-friendly tourism destination, they are facing extinction in Queensland and NSW, and are listed as endangered. Rescuer John Knights was almost asleep when a phone call came through about the displaced animal.

“It just had this ‘what do I do next’ expression on its face,” he told Yahoo News on Tuesday.

Had Knights not arrived, the animal’s prospects were not good. He was beside a major road, and close to an industrial estate in the Brisbane suburb of Mount Gravatt East. Like most of Queensland’s southeast, large backyards that once contained trees have been bulldozed and subdivided, increasing human density while forcing out koalas.

“When you decide to knock your house down, that’s one less tree and a few bushes gone. But then the bloke over the road does it, and the bloke around the corner does it,” Knights said.

“These koalas have no sanctuary when they’re trying to get from one area to another. So they’re just wandering around hopelessly lost. And people say: Isn’t it wonderful to see these urban koalas. They’re not urban koalas. They’re frightened lost animals because we put a road in where they want to live.”

Koalas a sign of a healthy ecosystem

Knights describes koalas as an umbrella species, as when they flourish, it means the rest of the environment is also healthy. And seeing so many regularly displaced is sign of a “problem” facing Australia’s suburban wildlife.

“If you create good habitat for koalas, everything that lives underneath their trees has a happy home,” he said.

“From possums, to gliders, the owls, the birds that live in the trees, the animals that live on the ground, the insects that live in the bush, the microbes that keep everything working — it’s a reverse domino effect.”

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Why are so many koalas in our suburbs?

This spring, Knight is on track to have responded to 200 callouts by the end of the month. During the season, males looking for mates, and sub-adults looking for new territory often find themselves on roads and in backyards.

That’s because the forest they once called home has been destroyed to make way for new developments. Crossing between the fragmented remnants of habitat often means traversing suburbia.

The callout to help the koala on the road sign on Monday was Knights’ second for the day. Earlier a koala climbed up a power pole at nearby Camp Hill. It was brought down safely and released into nearby bushland.


Australia’s environment laws failing to protect endangered species

Sadly, finding places to release koalas is becoming increasingly difficult, as koala habitat continues to be destroyed. An independent review of Australia’s nature protection laws under the Morrison government in 2020 found they are “ineffective”, “weak” and “tokenistic”. While there have been some reforms since the Albanese government was elected in 2022, endangered species are continuing to lose habitat at an alarming rate.

A Worldwide Fund for Nature report this week found there has been a 73 per cent decline in global wildlife populations in 50 years. While an investigation by Wilderness Society this week found 300,000 animals a year are being displaced or killed by Tasmania’s logging industry every year, including endangered species.

Yahoo News has been reporting on koala displacement since 2019, and the problem has only continued to worsen.

Two weeks ago, in Queensland’s Moreton Bay, rescuers were called to help three koalas desperately clinging to power poles over a period of just 14 hours. While on the Gold Coast the federal and state governments are building a major new freeway, the Coomera Connector, through important koala habitat.

The Queensland government has refused to release environmental reports about its impact, claiming they are “ecologically sensitive”. But rescuers say it’s routinely displacing wildlife, and because of ongoing development across the Gold Coast, they believe the city’s urban koalas face extinction.