Rehabilitating the region: what a just post-mining transition looks like for the Hunter's communities and environment

Actions that have reshaped the region already this century have been driven from Sydney or the offices of multinational corporations and by the fever of present-day, short-lived opportunities.

The people who live here and live with the consequences of those decisions have had only tokenistic opportunities to participate in them and no opportunity to take control. The river hasn't had a say at all, and neither has the bush.

We live in one of the most heavily-cleared catchments on the east coast. Loss of riparian and catchment vegetation makes water move too quickly, cutting deep channels and causing erosion.

Denuded land is vulnerable to flood, wind and heat. It loses moisture quickly and loses soil to runoff.

The catchment has been altered by the mining industry: streams diverted, aquifers drawn down, bush cleared and run-off captured in large mine dams. With the loss of habitat, which is still underway, wildlife has also vanished.

Twenty years ago, the NSW Government had a "synoptic plan" for the valley after mining, but that went out the window with the mining boom.

We no longer have a Catchment Management Authority or local river or vegetation management committees.

Nor do we have the long-term Environmental Rehabilitation Fund that the state's chief scientist and auditor-general both recommended was needed to manage environmental management and risks after mining rehabilitation.

The exhaustion of Hunter coal mines will renew focus on rehabilitation. It's an opportunity for a reorientation, and a chance to restore function, beauty and autonomy to the landscape so that it can sustain itself and us.

That transformation goes hand-in-hand with a human population that sees itself as part of the landscape, taking care of it, enjoying it and adapting to climate change.

Most of the mines in the valley have rehabilitation management plans that require extensive ecological re-planting, but as the efforts of the Kooragang Wetland Rehabilitation Project show, re-growing forests is a multi-decade undertaking.

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The Hunter has no region-wide fund to ensure this work continues, as it must, long after mines have closed and rehabilitation bonds are returned.

There's ecological debt in the Hunter and social debt too. Beneath high average incomes lies social disadvantage, even before coal declines. Muswellbrook has lower education attainment than the NSW average and ranks poorly compared with other areas in break-and-enter, drug offences and domestic violence.

It is on the cusp of the lowest quintile for social disadvantage according to the Social Health Atlas of Australia. This comes at the end of a ten-fold increase in coal production in the Muswellbrook area, indicating that the extreme wealth captured by the mining companies has not benefited the community evenly.

For the post-mining transition to be just, justice must extend not only to people who have laboured in the mines, but to those who have not benefited from the wealth of coal, to human communities that will not survive more than two degrees average global warming, and to the land, wildlife, and water of the region.

It won't be a just transition if it treats the human and natural toll of catastrophic climate change as collateral damage for the benefit of a wealthy few.

Preparing for climate change means recalling our dependencies. We have stripped away the ability of environments and people to respond to disaster - reducing canopy cover and species richness, isolating people from each other and leaving them exposed.

When I imagine the Hunter region in the coming century, I don't think about glittering new technologies, but about its people, river and ecology.

I see birds, bats, and koalas thriving in restored forests and creeks with restored sinuosity and riparian vegetation to soften the impacts of flooding. I see people making a living working reasonable hours with time to spend with families and community, and towns with water and shade to protect us from heat extremes.

We're in the first years of a period of profound change for our region and the world.

If we are given autonomy to make decisions with that future in mind, we can share wealth and restore balance in our lives and the landscape.

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