In the Atherton Tablelands township of Ravenshoe, Queensland’s highest town, conservationists and traditional owners are making a final bid to the federal environment minister to reject a new windfarm that would clear almost 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) of remnant native vegetation.
The 85-turbine Chalumbin project is in its final approval stage, with the environmental minister, Tanya Plibersek, due to hand down her decision at the end of the month.
Conservationists fear that the project’s site, which is 15km south-west of Ravenshoe and borders the wet tropics world heritage area, could lead to the development of one of the most biodiverse regions in Australia.
“There are a lot of really good places to build wind projects, but along ridgelines in high conservation areas in Queensland is not it,” says Dave Copeman, director of the Queensland Conservation Council.
According to the developer, the ridgeline site was chosen for its excellent wind resource and proximity to the north Queensland coastal circuit high-voltage transmission line.
“There are much better places for a windfarm of this scale to go, like along the new transmission line west of Townsville,” Copeman says.
The proposed site is within the Northern Queensland Renewable Energy Zone, which stretches from Mackay to halfway up Cape York peninsula, north of Cairns. But Copeman says the state government should introduce stricter rules to avoid projects that would require significant land clearing.
Research by the Queensland Conservation Council shows that 2.1m hectares (5.19m acres) of woody vegetation was cleared between 2014 and 2019, with the vast majority (93%) cleared for livestock grazing.
Despite only making up a small portion of overall land clearing, a 2022 analysis by the former Queensland government’s principal botanist, Jeanette Kemp, found that land clearing associated with renewable energy projects risked causing substantial damage to the biodiversity of sensitive areas. She says the damage being done by projects such as the Chalumbin, Mount Fox and Upper Burkedin windfarms was being “overlooked” and the level of damage was “inexplicable … especially when there are alternative locations in cleared or degraded areas that could be pursued with minimal additional cost when compared to the entire project expenditure”.
‘Does it look like a wasteland to you?’
The most vocal opposition to the project is being led by Rainforest Reserves Australia, co-founded by the photographer Steven Nowakowski. The organisation is fighting against a number of windfarm developments in north Queensland and is calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of the industry on areas of high biodiversity.
“The Queensland wind industry is the wild west,” Nowakowski says.
“There are no rules, these companies can do what they like with very little in the way of legislation to stop them.”
Nowakowski has spent three decades campaigning against the destruction of forest in far-north Queensland, activism that has seen him arrested three times. In that time, he says he has never seen land clearing on this scale.
Now, alongside a coalition of Indigenous owners and locals he is determined to fight several proposed wind projects, including Andrew Forrest’s Upper Burdekin project, which was recently abandoned by Apple due to its impact on koalas and greater gliders.
Nowakowski showed Guardian Australia around the proposed Chalumbin site and the nearby Kaban windfarm, where 226m-tall turbines, as high as 50-storey skyscrapers, sat above churned, cleared earth.
The developer of the Chalumbin windfarm, the Korean-owned Ark Energy, says the proposed site, which sits on two privately owned cattle-grazing properties, is “highly degraded”.
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They say the site has visible weed infestations and feral animal activity. The weeds were visible and widespread when Guardian Australia visited the site.
However the traditional owner and Jirrbal man Tom Gertz said the site was not so degraded as to have no environmental value.
“They keep saying it’s a wasteland but does this look like a wasteland to you? Does it look like a paddock to you?” he says, standing on a ledge overlooking the heavily forested area proposed for the Chalumbin windfarm.
“Our country is still spiritual, it’s still alive.”
The total project area is 31,225 hectares (77,159 acres), of which 1,050 hectares (2,595 acres) will have to be cleared during the two stages of construction. However, in the project’s public environmental review, Ark Energy claims that once the project is completed only 107.2 hectares (265 acres), or 0.3% of the total project site, will be kept cleared, and that “ground cover establishes relatively quickly after clearing”.
The public environmental review also states that the project will impact some threatened species, namely koalas, which are listed as endangered in Queensland, as well as the northern greater glider and magnificent brood frog, both also listed as endangered.
Ark says the project, which was revised down from its original scale of 200 turbines, would provide environmental and economic benefits through a number of research grants. It also committed to rehabilitating 70% of the area of “construction disturbance”.
Lorraine Lewis, from the Friends of Chalumbin action group, says she feared the project would open the region up to mining and other industrial activity in the future.
But Lewis says despite those concerns, the offer of a $500,000-a-year community benefit program, which Ark Energy has funded, was swaying locals.
“If you come to a high unemployment and low income community like ours and you wave that type of money around, what do you think is going to happen?” she says.
The town of Ravenshoe is no stranger to environmental battles. In the 1980s the lucrative rainforest timber industry shut down after the surrounding rainforests received world heritage listing, after a bitter fight between timber workers and conservationists.
The Ravenshoe activist Ken Carey says opposition to recent windfarm proposals has united those once warring factions.
“You have farmers wondering why they can barely chop down a tree and these foreign companies clear football fields without issue,” Carey says. He spoke to Guardian Australia from underneath a 200-metre tall wind turbine at the recently completed Kaban windfarm, about 10km from Ravenshoe.
The Queensland government says windfarm projects are subject to the state planning code, which is designed to minimise the impact on the environment. Projects that involve land clearing are required to either minimise the amount of native vegetation to be cleared or avoid it altogether. Developers are also required to provide a decommissioning plan for the end of the project’s life.
However, Carey says the impact of such large projects on both the local environment and the community went beyond what was considered in state planning laws.
“At one point you had 200 trucks driving through town to put these thing up,” he says.
“We need windfarms, but surely there is a better way.”