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by Mandatum 2202 days ago
They do at a state level, but given aboriginal sites aren't buildings protected by codes and standards - they're gigantic bits of land with scattered artfacts like stone tools, or trees with markings, or remnants of old sites.. There's nothing really left.

Think about it like this, if you were in Ireland, there might be a small hill and that was remnants of a hut. If you excavated it, you might find some stone from the walls.

But these sites are on a land mass where time doesn't bury sediment over the top of them very much, so what happens is whatever is left usually just wears away by the harsh environment.

People want to protect these sites, but none of these sites will have any visitors for years, decades in some cases. This includes people who live in the state.

To be fair, there's plenty of work that could be done preserving what's there and excavating underneath - or land moving the top few meters.. And we could make companies do that. But that will just drive organisations and land owners to hide these sites exist in the first place.

Or just move to another remote area to do the same for less profit. But good luck hurting profit in Australia. That's not a political game you've got a chance of winning during our life time in this country.

Always was, always will be..

1 comments

> And we could make companies do that. But that will just drive organisations and land owners to hide these sites exist in the first place.

That really hit home. Sometimes there really are no-win scenarios. Absolutely tragic that these sites are lost, but there's no practical solution to preserve them.

To say so fatalistically this is a no-win scenario and there's no practical solution to preserve them is a bit much, I'd say. Countries and states preserve gigantic bits of land all the time.

In Brazil for example there is a mixed model at the federal level with national parks and environment protection areas (APAs). National parks are geared for maximum preservation, the entire area is government property. APAs are delimited areas with special biologic/historic/cultural value where people can still own property, live there, and even farm, but activities in the area are supervised with preservation in mind. It's not a perfect system, but it's better than nothing, and it can always be worked on.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't Brazil currently losing huge tracts of protected rainforest in those areas, just because of Bolsonaro's politics? How is he managing to undermine these protections so totally?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/world/americas/brazil-def...

We're all learning in the past few years how quickly institutions can fail when you have bad faith actors at the highest levels. In this case he can do a great deal of damage simply by openly being against environmental causes, because it sends a message that the laws will not be enforced, even before he started actually dismantling the laws.