Last week it was announced that August 1, 2018, was Earth Overshoot Day, the day we used up the year’s calculated available natural resources – like running out of fuel and food a few days before payday. Then one must borrow from anywhere to make ends meet or take stuff to get by.  

To support farmers, we could be using expert advice, collecting carbon free energy and providing investment certainty with sustainably managing our forests, farms, lakes and seas. Instead, it seems to me our governments are giving away water and fossil fuels and promoting consumption certainty as the best type of productivity and growth. Can we afford to keep doing this?

What can the residents of this beautiful Bega Valley do to strengthen our stewardship of these natural resources? Which candidates in the upcoming elections will take a stand on stewardship rather than short term profiteering and vote buying we often see.

Like Diana Gillies, I also fear for the future of our forests. I fear that people actually believe the opinions of Mr Sweeney or anyone from the NSW National Parks Association, because fear campaigns are for raising campaign funds, not providing sustainable ecological solutions.

It appears that Ms Gillies is not aware of the blackest days of January and February 2003, when 60 per cent (over 400,000 hectares) of Koscuiszko National Park was incinerated by mega fires. This area was about 13 percent of the 2,400,000 hectares of the main range, between Canberra and Myrtleford, that was incinerated during the 2002-03 mega fires.

Like Nero, Ms Gillies and her armchair activist associates fiddle about native forest harvesting, while our supposedly "protected" forests are decimated by wildfires. 

What is Mr Sweeney's solution to the biggest threats of mega fires, feral animals and predation, that are devastating our biodiversity across the whole continent?

A tiny fraction of the total native forest estate is still available for timber harvesting. But, these forests continue to be a critical fundraiser for the activist organisations that pay people like Mr Sweeney to run their scare campaigns.

The war on straws seems to be going well, with McDonald's announcing it will phase out the use of plastic straws by 2020. But, if you are concerned with keeping animals in the ocean safe, don't just look to your drinking straw, look to your dinner plate. In fact, eating fish does far more harm to our oceans than sipping your drink through a straw ever will.

Abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear is a  problem that spells catastrophe for marine life. In the Pacific Ocean, there is a floating patch of garbage twice the size of France and weighing roughly 88,000 tons. While this enormous area, like our oceans at large, is full of plastic, scientists estimate that 46 per cent of the mass of the garbage patch comes from fishing nets alone. And other types of fishing gear account for much of the rest.

So, while many people are stocking up on cloth shopping bags and signing petitions to ban single-use plastic straws to save the oceans, those who fish (or eat fish) need to re-examine their personal choices too.

Clearly, fishing is hazardous to the environment. But it’s also horrifically cruel. Commercial fishing kills hundreds of billions of animals worldwide every year – far more than any other industry. You can't eat fish and call yourself an environmentalist.