Great Barrier Reef

Yeah.

Well, that's, that's the last one before the Great Barrier Reef.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, um, uh, I think the answer to that really is that seafaring had come along such a long way, and Britain in particular was very good at exploring the world by ocean.

So in the late eighteenth century, you had the voyages of James Cook, which mapped large parts of the world, including the Northwestern Americas and, uh, the Great Barrier Reef and so on.

So there's this moment in, um, seventeen eighty-eight when the, the great and good, if you like, of the, of the, of the London scholastic world, the, the kind of leading figures of the Enlightenment are meeting in a pub in St. James's, and they're discussing geography and th- they can point to maps that really show the outlines of almost all the continents barring the, the poles.

But the interiors of these places are often very poorly understood, and Africa in particular was what they called, um, a wide extended blank.

Missouri is not, it's not a country.

The Great Barrier Reef, this is yet another one that you missed.

Trying to give you an opportunity to actually learn.

The Great Barrier Reef sits off the coast of which country?

Um, the Great Barrier Reef would sit off the country of-

By the way, for those scoring at home, a lot of these are t- he's, he's been given these questions before.

That's how pro Gene Lasker I am.

So, for example, people who live near where there's fracking and can tell you from personal experience what it's like.

So we've had a wide range of cases, some on the Great Barrier Reef and the impact of increasing coal exports.

ones about the Amazon, about water bodies throughout the world, really interesting cases.

So recently there was a hearing of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal at the FOSPA meeting, which is a Pan-Amazonian meeting in Ecuador, which declared the Amazon forest itself as a being, which is a subject of rights.

Wow.

And then this, we don't have much time for this at all, but Nellie Bowles asks in the Free Press, why the hell is the Great Barrier Reef thriving? It was pronounced dead like 20 years ago, right? The funeral dirge was being played.

It had a record year of growth.

It seems to be thriving.

Wow.

And then this, we don't have much time for this at all, but Nellie Bowles asks in the Free Press, why the hell is the Great Barrier Reef thriving? It was pronounced dead like 20 years ago, right? The funeral dirge was being played.

It had a record year of growth.

It seems to be thriving.

There is an enormous and colourful amount of life in these places that are just so out of sight, out of mind.

A good example or comparison is that the Great Barrier Reef, very well known, everyone knows what the Great Barrier Reef is.

There is... estimated to be about 9,000 species across the reef, so that's everything from fishes to corals to whales to anything in between.

Whereas estimates suggest that the Antarctic seafloor alone may be home to somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 benthic species.

But first up today...

North Queensland commercial fishers are hoping a new report will convince the state and federal government to reverse a planned ban on gillnets in the Great Barrier Reef.

Fishers commissioned a report that they say shows gillnet fishing is likely to pass international sustainability standards.

Gillnet operators in the NX fishing zone have licences allowing them to continue fishing with nets until the planned phase-out in 2027.