It’s as old as the dinosaurs, grows in a top-secret location and – until the early ’90s – was only known through 150 million year old remains. This is the story of the Wollemi Pine.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 6

ON a cool, clear day, in early spring 1994, David Noble rested for lunch deep in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, 130 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The meal was nothing special; he’d brought standard bushwalking fare – sandwiches, muesli bars, nuts and sultanas. But the location was extraordinary. One-in-150 million, or thereabouts. He just didn’t know that yet.

Noble was 29, fit and wiry, and renowned among local bushwalkers and canyoners for exploring uncharted, inaccessible territory.

Earlier that morning, high above the gorge, he’d slung his rope around a thin sapling that clung to the rock face, tested his weight against it, then whizzed over the ledge. It was just another weekend adventure, together with his regular exploring buddies Tony Zimmerman and Michael Casteleyn.

The three men travelled light: they wore footy shorts and t-shirts and carried no camping gear, just their ropes and harnesses. They’d scrambled down the cliff, pushed their way through bushes and ferns along a rocky creek, and abseiled again, trying to stay out of the icy water.

They stopped at the end of the canyon, and while they ate, Noble looked around. It was a dark, narrow rainforest, moist from the water dripping down the cliff walls and flowing in the nearby creek. There was no direct sunlight; even the air seemed tinged with green.

Noble peered at the trees above him, but didn’t recognise the species. He’d taken botany courses in his environmental science degree, so he knew a thing or two about plants. They were conifers, shaped like a storybook Christmas tree, but the mature trunks had a strange, bubbly bark, which looked like Coco Pops. The tallest among them stood nearly 40 metres. Noble snapped off a small branch, put it in his backpack, and promptly forgot about it.

Within months, the trio’s lunch-spot hit newspapers all over the world. It became the most sought-after and jealously guarded view in the whole country. Nearly two decades later, its location remains secret. Only dozens of people have ever been there. If all goes according to plan, few more ever will.

***

It’s a misty, prehistoric kind of morning, early in summer, and Noble is picking his way along the neatly manicured paths of the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens. He’s leading me towards a single Wollemi Pine – Wollemia nobilis – planted on a grassy hill.

The species is named for him, and for the national park in which he found it. Nearby, inside the information centre, there’s a large display about the tree, including a 150-million-year-old fossil that matches the pattern of its needles.

The Wollemi Pines are living fossils. Noble’s discovery was like a twitcher spotting a pterodactyl.

He strides ahead, arms and pack straps swinging in time with his springy, splayfooted gait. But just as I’m admiring his nimbleness, he stops abruptly. He’d gotten us lost, momentarily. “I’ll bring the map next time,” he says, with a wry smile.

Truth is, he’s much happier without paths at all. And certainly without journalists and photographers hanging around. In front of the camera, those free-swinging hands lose their rhythm and clasp one another awkwardly in front of his waist instead.

Noble is now 47, and a long-time park ranger. He’s a walker, not a talker. And nobody understands this landscape like he does. In the late 1970s at Katoomba High School in the Blue Mountains, while other kids were playing school cricket, he chose bushwalking. As the years went by, he kept exploring new corners of bushland in anyway he could: caving, canyoning, kayaking and hiking.

By the early ’90s he was working with National Parks, building walking tracks near Blackheath, the town where he grew up. On weekends he ventured into the Wollemi wilderness. A huge expanse of bush, the park traverses some of the most rugged terrain in New South Wales. No one knows for sure, but the best estimate is that there are about 500 canyons within its boundaries.

On expeditions with his friends Noble has named over 200 places previously unnamed and unexplored.

“I like to go somewhere and get to know it well,” he explains. “Most people travel the highways, but when you go off the track and have to use maps, compasses and a GPS, it’s a little bit harder. You need technical equipment to do it, so you get to go places even the Aboriginal people wouldn’t have seen.”

***

It wasn’t unusual for Noble to take a cutting of a plant he didn’t recognise. His father was a keen amateur botanist, and the two would often nut out the identification together.

If they couldn’t figure it out, he showed the plant to his friend Wyn Jones, senior naturalist with National Parks. “Usually he rattles them off pretty quick,” Noble recalls. “This time he said, ‘Leave it with me’. I thought there was something suspicious about that. And away we went: the longer it took them to identify it, the more likely it was something different.”

Jones, together with botanist Jan Allen, set about listing the characteristics of the tree. They cross-checked their findings with other species in the Araucariaceae family, including Kauri pines from New Zealand and Monkey Puzzle trees from Chile. They didn’t match. It was something new.

And something very old. The first conifers evolved more than 300 million years ago, a time when Australia was part of the ancient super-continent, Gondwana, along with Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.

The Wollemi is thought to date from between 90 and 200 million years ago, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The pine, and its close ancestors, once blanketed the landscapes of the southern hemisphere, while the Earth was hotter, wetter and steamier.

As the climate grew cooler and drier, those great conifer forests fell back, bested by flowering plants – the newer, more versatile kids on the botanical block. Epochs passed, day-by-day, and the Wollemi retreated to its one hidden crevasse.

Noble wasn’t privy to all the probing over the plant’s classification. But as snippets of the findings reached his ears, his excitement grew and grew. The buzz reached a peak with the public launch of the tree in Sydney. He was interviewed by every television station, including an “horrific” live-cross for Channel Ten news.

When the story of the tree’s existence was announced, enthusiasts around the world clamoured to know where it grew. But the authorities held fast – they would only reveal the location to scientists on genuine research projects. Even Noble hasn’t been back since 1995.

The mystery makes for an enthralling anomaly. In the era of Google maps, smart phones and satellite tracking, its location remains an otherworldly secret.

***

Why go to so much trouble? Is the tree really anything more than a curiosity?

It’s unlikely that many other critters still rely on the pines for their survival, because there have been so few of them for so long. But Noble says it’s too soon to tell. “There’s much more study to be done; these things can take years to figure out. Whether it’s a cure for cancer or a different sort of fungi that lives on the tree, we just don’t know yet.”

The extinction of an individual species has been likened to removing a rivet on an aeroplane. This one or the next might not matter, but one day, when too many have gone, the whole thing will come crashing down.

But when it comes to threatened species, there’s something beyond pragmatism at play. Scientist and author Tim Flannery argues that extinctions are a matter of morality. And, unfortunately, we feel it most keenly when the creature is cute and fluffy, or in the case of the Wollemi, towering and majestic. Other species aren’t so fortunate.

“The demise of a bat may not weight greatly in the balance of human wellbeing, but it speaks volumes about the human soul,” he wrote, in a recent Quarterly Essay. “Do we wish to be despoilers and executioners of the natural world? Or do we want our children to have the opportunity to enjoy a world as bountiful and diverse as the one our parents bequeathed to us?”

The Wollemi is listed as “critically endangered”: the second-last breath before extinction. A single bushfire could turn them to ash – but in their private rainforest, at the bottom of a wet canyon, they’ve protected themselves well.

As with so many other threatened species, the biggest threat is humanity. We’re living in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans have come to dramatically influence the Earth’s systems. By our hands, biodiversity is vanishing and the climate is transforming.

The Wollemi pines are particularly at risk, because they’re identical. One of the researchers’ most curious findings so far is that each one has the same DNA as the next. So the main reason the gorge remains secret is to protect them from us, or most likely, from our boots. The invasive plant pathogen Phytophthera, which hitchhikes on the soles of our shoes, could wipe out the lot in no time at all.

“It’s not Jurassic Park where you can get the genes from a mosquito, and bring them back,” Noble says. “Once they’re lost, they’re lost forever.”

But he isn’t so worried about the tree’s survival. After all, it has proven astonishingly resilient; it was here before us, and there’s a good chance it’ll be here after we’re gone. It waited patiently in its canyon, and now, it has taken advantage of an unusual opportunity to spread again. There are official Wollemi Pine distributors in 16 different countries. In Australia, a seedling will set you back $50.

At his place, on 100 acres of bush in the Blue Mountains, Noble is growing three – one in a pot, for a Christmas tree, and two in the ground. He was given them when the pines were first released for sale: his own trees bearing his own name.

It’s one of the few things in his life that have changed since his “lucky discovery” – that and the occasional interviews with the press. With or without it, he’d be a park ranger. And with or without it, he’d still be exploring new canyons. In 2005, he was named the Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

He swears he’s slowed down in recent years, since having a family – his two daughters, and the orchard and vegie patch having moved up the order of priorities – but the supporting evidence is scant. He still goes canyoning with his old explorers, Zimmerman and Casteleyn, though not so often. Now his regular partner is his wife, Jules. He estimates they’ve explored more than 300 canyons together.

“I didn’t make a million dollars, so maybe I went wrong somehow,” he laughs. “But it has allowed me to be an advocate for the pine, and for threatened species as well. And for adventure: for showing people that things can still be discovered.”

The word “Wollemi” derives from a word in the Darkinjung language, which means “stop and look around”.

“It’s a appropriate, because that’s what I did: stop and notice what was near me, rather than just barging on through.”

HERE it is at last, the good news climate story we’ve been waiting for: the synthetic turf industry is about to boom – a happy consequence of our inability to grow grass.

So says the Victorian government’s Climate Adaptation Plan, released last month. Sweet reprieve! Providence still smiles upon the (artificial) garden state!

Chris Simpson, from TigerTurf in Campbellfield, confirms the speculation: yes, he anticipates bumper growth in a hotter, drier future. “I would expect the industry will more than double each ten years from here on,” he says. In Victoria now, there are about 250 people working with synthetic grass at least one day per week, he estimates.

Out of town, farmers could benefit too, the government says. Where it no longer rains, those lucky landowners can take advantage of the opportunity to “switch to different enterprises or production systems”. Drought and dust bowl? Bah! Salad days!

The adaptation plan is a long document. Prudently, the government emphasises the “new opportunities” right up front. The risks? “Further details of the risks are provided in Appendix 1.”

Way back there, if you make it, you’ll find eight pages of frightening, cascading consequences: buckling train tracks, flooding of ports, algal blooms, water-borne illnesses, sewer failure, destruction of businesses’ assets, more pests and diseases in agriculture and fisheries, less farm output and income, pressure on ecosystems and threatened species, and more injuries, deaths and mental illness from bushfires, floods and heat waves. All health risks disproportionately afflict the vulnerable among us.

Never mind that. Our leaders will manifest a productive climate future by way of positive messaging: “In particular,” the plan says, “gradual changes in temperature potentially enable industries to transition and develop”.

***

On 30 November last year, only weeks before the legislated deadline for the adaptation plan, Professor Roger Jones and his colleagues held a workshop at Victoria University, in Melbourne. It was called ‘Beyond the mean: valuing adaptation under rapid change’.

Jones is a climate scientist at the university – he used to work at CSIRO, and is a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report, due in October.

His work challenges the idea that we face only gradual changes in temperature. Years ago, while studying the climate history of the crater lakes in Western Victoria, he found something puzzling. “The only way I could get the model to fit the history was to switch climate – to make the climate changes instantaneous. If I changed it gradually it wouldn’t work,” he says.

He researched past climate data from elsewhere around the world, and found similar “abrupt changes”.

Then, during the worst of the recent drought, he began analysing temperature and rainfall across south eastern Australia. After adjusting for natural variability, the temperature set showed a jump in 1997: “It took this step change,” Jones explains. Sea-surface temperatures and ocean heat content, too, tracked “like a staircase”.

A paper he published last year shows that most of Australia’s warming is anthropogenic and occurred in two blips, one around the late 1960s to early 1970s, and the other around 1997 and 1998.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that in climate modelling, smooth lines of best fit are an approximation,” he says. “They’re a good way to describe how the climate will change over a century or so. If you’re interested in shorter time scales you need to look at the variation – and the variation is not random.”

Here’s an example: at Laverton, west of Melbourne, before 1997 there were an average of 8 days per year above 35 degrees. Since then, the average has been 12. “Fire danger in Victoria over the same period has gone up by about 30 to 40 per cent,” Jones says.

The working paper for the ‘Beyond the mean’ workshop, co-written by Jones, directly contested the narrative of “gradualism”.

Step-changes, it concluded, “will produce clusters of extreme events… that are more frequent and larger than the statistics of gradual change would suggest”. In this scenario, the consequences and costs of climate change look very different: “extreme events can cause knock-on effects through several systems, leading to system failure and disaster.”

Given a jolting climate, adaptation is a matter of urgency, says Jones. “If the consequences are unknown, but you tell yourself change is gradual, then it’s ok – it makes it psychologically remote. Whereas, if it can change quickly and you need to respond, the threat is much closer.”

Most of the attendees were policy-makers, both state and federal. They discussed the other corollary of a step-changing climate: adaptation must be led by policy, not left to the market. Only policy can prepare for extremes, Jones says.

“If those increases ratchet above our critical thresholds, things change very quickly. If you have a sudden shift in heat waves, with a more exposed or growing population, the number of heat stress cases can jump significantly.

“You find what we had in the summer of 2009 – our capacity to handle the sick or the dying gets stretched to the point where we’re putting bodies in freezers.”

***

In its final months in office, the Brumby government passed the Climate Change Act 2010. It set a target for the state to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020 (from 2000 levels) and required government to take emissions and climate impacts into account when making various decisions. It also required a climate change adaptation plan be produced every four years.

Before long, the new Liberal government ordered a review of the act; based on the recommendations, it scrapped the emissions target, but kept the adaptation plan.

After delaying as long as possible, the Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Ryan Smith, finally released the plan in mid-March. The headline announcement was a re-framed agreement with the state’s 79 local councils, called the Victorian Adaptation and Sustainability Partnership. It carries the only new funding on offer: $6 million. Two days earlier, Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen had crossed the line in the Melbourne Grand Prix, a big carbon-burnout subsidised by $57 million.

I spoke to Professor Barbara Norman, chair of urban and regional planning at University of Canberra, both before and after the plan came out. Beforehand, she explained that unless planning documents are tied to budget, nothing happens. Afterwards, she noted that this plan wasn’t tied to budget.

The $6 million? “It’s going to require a lot more money than that.”

Even so, Norman praises its regional approach, its delineation of the roles of different tiers of government and its recognition of adverse health impacts. But besides the lack of money, she says, there other gaps between the rubber and the road.

The biggest: there’s no obligation to consider the climate change impacts of planning decisions.

“There are a number of acts listed where they must have regard to climate change,” Norman explains, “but notably, the one missing is the Planning and Environment Act 1987.

“This plan should also bind state government on major infrastructure developments – they must be required to demonstrate the impact in terms of climate adaptation, energy efficiency and water-sensitive urban design,” she says.

Many submissions to the review of the Climate Change Act argued the same thing: planning, infrastructure and transport decisions must be subject to climate considerations. But to no avail: the review noted that additional obligations “may impose further costs on decision makers and affected parties”. The next review will be held in 2015 – by which time billions of dollars may have been buried in the East-West Tunnel.

Smith, the environment minister, was not available to be interviewed for this article. His spokesperson said the planning system “already takes climate change into account in many ways,” such as zones and overlays.

But we already have evidence that the system isn’t doing enough. There’s an easy way to tell: the price of insurance has gone through the roof.

***

In February, The Age reported that a resident in South Caulfield had been denied insurance because of the risk of inundation and that some residents in Frankston had been asked to pay at least $5000 more for flood cover.

Throughout March and early April, the Municipal Association of Victoria has been consulting its regions: the cost of flood insurance has been a flashpoint in several meetings. “People are finding either they can’t get insurance or they’re facing massive premium increases,” says Bill McArthur, the association’s president and a councillor from Golden Plains shire, north west of Geelong.

Karl Sullivan, the risk and disaster manager at the Insurance Council of Australia, agrees: “In some regions we’ve seen some classes of insurance go up by 30 per cent or more in a year.”

This issue – the availability and affordability of insurance under climate change – is being examined by a Senate inquiry into our preparedness for extreme weather. (It will report in June.)

But in its submission, the Insurance Council said the current price hikes aren’t yet due to changing climate extremes. Largely, they are due to bad planning: most of the properties flooded in Queensland and Victoria in 2011 were located in high-risk zones on flood maps.

To limit the financial risk of a big disaster, insurance companies buy their own insurance from huge global “re-insurers”. Until recently, those rates have been low. Not anymore, Sullivan says. “The rest of the world has woken up and said, ‘Australia has a systemic problem – they’re building more expensively in more hazardous locations in a more brittle way’.

The Insurance Council argues for a national agreement on land use planning, together with better risk protection – levies or firebreaks, for example – and minimum durability standards for buildings.

Suncorp, the largest general insurance group in the country, was even more blunt: “As a basic concept, new homes and infrastructure should not be built in areas of high risk.”

“For some reason,” Sullivan says, “we lost our collective minds at some point, and started building these things in flood plains, on the ground.”

In other words, even now our planning system is allowing us to build the wrong homes in the wrong places. The extremes of climate change, abrupt and unexpected, only worsen our vulnerability.

***

Aside from the missing links to planning, infrastructure and budget, and beyond the distorted emphasis on the “opportunities” of climate change, there’s another reason it’s hard to believe the adaptation plan will beget action.

In the coming months, the state government will make an announcement about a tender for new brown coal allocations in the Latrobe Valley. In December, then Minister for Energy and Resources, Michael O’Brien, said the state had one of “the world’s great brown coal deposits” and that the government was “committed to maximising the opportunities” to develop it.

Last year, the International Energy Agency said the world must leave two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground, if we want a 50-50 chance of keeping global warming to 2 degrees. Other analysts say four-fifths must go untouched.

Mitigating global warming and adapting to it are inseparable: if we don’t reduce emissions, the World Bank warned recently, “there is no certainty that adaptation… is possible”.

Yet the adaptation plan makes only one passing reference to cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Greenhouse gas reduction is “addressed primarily through the national carbon pricing mechanism”. That’s the same mechanism the federal Liberal party has promised to repeal, if it wins the election in September.

The thing about a step-change in climate is that we don’t know when it will shift. This year our record-breaking Angry Summer continued into mad March, in which Melbourne had nine days over 32 degrees. Then the old premier lost his job.

In Denis Napthine’s ministerial reshuffle, Nick Kotsiras took over the energy portfolio. The government has said that in deciding to allocate the brown coal, it “will be guided by the potential to secure long-term economic development, investment and employment benefits”.

Before he makes up his mind, the new minister would do well to refer to Appendix 1.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

Read this related article on climate change adaptation.