Question: If you had to change one thing about our planet what would you change?

Nathan Langford answered on 29 Jun 2012:

Hmm… Good question. It’s difficult to come up with just one thing. I guess you’re probably meaning something about the natural world, right?

Well, I guess one thing I would do is, if I could go back in time, I would try and stop people bringing sheep and cattle into Australia. They have been really destructive for the environment and are a major cause of a lot of the environmental problems we have in Australia today.

Did you know that there are no animals native to Australia that have hoofs? All of the animals native to Australia had “pads” or other type of soft feet. Because of this, none of the grasses which grew in Australia were hardy enough or had good enough root systems to be able to cope with hard hoofs stepping on them and a lot of grassland became dry and rocky.

Hoofed animals have also caused great problems with our water resources. Because Australia is a dry (and often flat) place, a lot of the natural sources of water are small lakes which spring up from the underground water tables – these are normally called “billabongs”. When cattle and sheep go to feed at the billabongs, they would trample the mud very flat and compact it down to be very dense. Then, when things dry out a little bit, the ground near these water holes becomes a bit like hard, fired clay and it shrinks and cracks. As a result, the water then falls down lower below the ground, and because there are no grasses left near the water (again because of the hoofs), there’s nothing to keep it near the surface. And as the billabong dries up and gets smaller, the same thing happens again and it dries up further.

The other problem with sheep and cattle in Australia is that huge areas of bushland, forest and rainforest were cleared in the early days of Europeans being in Australia and this is another reason why Australia is so dry these days.

And that’s a problem that we need to try and change worldwide. We’ve gotten rid of so much forest land, which is really important for getting rid of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a really important part of the world’s natural ecosystem.