It has been refreshing to read reports this week quoting leading figures in the Aboriginal community speaking out against the green movement's anti-development mantra.
Their concerns echo precisely what farmers have been arguing for years: there is a human and environmental price to the green movement's "look but don't touch" philosophy.
In today's media Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce's Warren Mundine has compared the attitude of environmentalists to that of white colonists intent on locking indigenous peoples out of their land.
"The green movement treats us like hairy-nosed wombats that need to be saved and protected. They only care about themselves - they don't care about Aboriginal people," Mr Mundine said.
His comments follow on from those of respected Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who has dropped everything in order to fight the Queensland Government's Wild Rivers legislation, which will limit development opportunities around 19 waterways.
Similarly, Mr Pearson says activists view the environment as "void of human beings".
Both Pearson and Mundine have got to the nub of what is wrong with the green philosophy with pointed one-liners in a way that has been beyond the communication skills of agricultural leaders.
In the same way that animal rights activists view humans as being separate from the animal kingdom, environmentalists view man as separate from nature, rather than man as a product of nature.
To believe this philosophy is to argue that man has no place in the natural environment except as some sort of benevolent observer, and that the human species has not evolved as other animal species have evolved (that is, exploiting nature and killing animals for its own survival).
It was this philosophy that had environmentalists opposed to backburning in Victoria, with disasterous consequences.
Unfortunately it's a belief that has insidiously permeated modern popular urban culture, the proponents of which cannot see the obvious paradox of building cities in order to leave the wilderness untouched.
It is an ideology that comes from the far left and is in obvious contradiction with those also on the left who have for years correctly argued the place of Aboriginal people in the landscape.
If we all believe that Aboriginal people have inhabited Australia for 40,000 and managed the landscape using techniques such as fire-stick farming to control vegetation, then it is ridiculous to then argue that Aboriginal people - or farmers - have no place in managing the lands they currently inhabit.
Farmers, like the Aboriginal landholders, are being prohibited from managing the natural landscape as part of their on-going business by draconian native vegetation laws. The cost is not just to the farmers' bottom line, but to the environment itself.
In covering the imposition of Queensland's land clearing legislation in 2004, I travelled to the Napranum community outside Weipa on Cape York. As part of the Labor Government's sop to the environmental movement, an blanket ban on land clearing was imposed for all of the Cape.
It was a case of "too bad, so sad" for the Napranum community, which had been negotiating with a firm to develop for agriculture a small part of its extensive land holding. The project would have created 100 jobs and a permanent source of meaningful income for a community otherwise addicted to welfare.
The added irony was that scientists and Aboriginal people with a genuine understanding of that landscape knew that locking up the Cape would also endanger native bird and grass species, as uncontrolled vegetation thickening choked them out and would eventually destroy the very wilderness the greenies were trying to protect.
But it is, as Pearson and Mundine rightly argue, the human cost of the green philosophy that the urban left will most easily understand.
While traditionally perceived as opposing forces, farmers and indigenous communities now find themselves with this one big issue in common.
The farm lobby would be wise to join with Pearson and Mundine - who both carry high profiles and are well-connected politically - in fighting the wild rivers and native vegetation legislation for the benefit of the environment and the communities which depend on it.
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