Introduction - The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History - page 13

combined with rapid coastal development, have also contributed increasingly
to human impacts on the ecosystem. Therefore, Chapter 4 shows that European
settlement, sugar cane farming and coastal development in Queensland have
been closely interconnected with changes in the Great Barrier Reef.
Subsequent chapters present the results of my research, arranged broadly by
theme. The Great Barrier Reef is a vast region in which a multitude of human
activities and impacts have occurred, over varying timescales. Moreover, those
activities and impacts often overlapped, both temporally and geographically, and
they are sometimes difficult to classify and categorise. Consequently, it is difficult
to write a chronological account of these many activities and their impacts, which
have instead been grouped roughly by theme (and are not strictly chronological).
One group of chapters examines different forms of exploitation of living resources
in the Great Barrier Reef. Chapter 5 describes the effects of the early European
reef fisheries, which exploited bêche-de-mer , pearl-shell and trochus. Chapter 6
examines various human impacts on marine turtles, including those due to the
tortoise-shell industry, the commercial turtle fisheries, the recreational activity
of turtle-riding, a turtle farming initiative and Indigenous hunting of turtles. In
Chapter 7, similar impacts on dugongs are considered: those due to commercial
fishing, a scheme to supply dugong products to Indigenous settlements and
Indigenous hunting of dugongs. Chapter 8 c overs some of the impacts sustained
by humpback whales, sharks and fish due to the operation of various fisheries in
the region. In Chapter 9, the effects of over-collection of corals and shells are
considered, a cumulative impact on those organisms that has been previously
little-documented. That group of chapters is followed by two chapters focusing on
the exploitation of non-living resources: the mining of guano and rock phosphate
(in Chapter 10) and of coral and coral sand (in Chapter 11) . (In the case of coral
mining, however, the distinction between 'living' and 'non-living' resources is
not always an accurate one, since both living and non-living coral was destroyed
by coral mining.) Two further chapters consider a range of other ways in which
the physical and ecological habitat of coral reefs and islands was degraded or
destroyed, respectively: by the clearance of access tracks and channels, military
target practice operations, reef-walking and infrastructure development (in
Chapter 12) , and through the modification of island vegetation and fauna (in
Chapter 13) . Finally, the topic concludes with a brief consideration of the overall
significance of these multiple, unprecedented impacts on the Great Barrier Reef
(Chapter 14) .
Taken together, this account provides evidence of sustained, extensive
damage to some coral reefs, islands and organisms of the Great Barrier Reef as a
result of the over-exploitation of resources and the degradation and destruction
of habitats. There is unequivocal evidence that some parts of the Great Barrier
Reef have experienced severe impacts - that have varied in their location and
intensity - since European settlement. Consequently, although the Great Barrier
Reef remains one of the best-protected coral reef ecosystems in the world, some
of its habitats were far from pristine at the time of the formation of the GBRMP