Instead of cherishing the fact this continent is home to some of the most distinctive and remarkable fauna and flora on earth, Australia's European settlers declared war on their environment early on in the piece.

This was driven by a strong desire, on the one hand, to transform the new country into a copy of what they had left behind, and, on the other, by a profit-driven push to exploit its apparently limitless resources.

The consequences of the never-ending war between the new arrivals and Australia's fragile ecosystems and vulnerable species were dramatically spelt out by Professor Graeme Samuel in his damning report on the nation's environmental laws this week.

He noted the existing laws had failed to protect the country's precious biological heritage from a wide range of threats including land-use change, habitat loss, feral animal species, invasive plant species and anthropogenic climate change.

The outcome has been an environmental disaster on a massive scale. Australia, which has been separated from the rest of the world's evolutionary development for millions of years is effectively the Galapagos Islands writ large. That is one reason it attracted the attention of Charles Darwin in the mid-19^th century.

Australian insects, animals, and plants explored evolutionary pathways that were uniquely their own and threw up such improbable species as the platypus and the echidna.

Because of that isolation most had no defences against newly introduced competitors including cats, dogs, foxes, rabbits, sheep, cattle, horses, prickly pear, and cane toads.

The European reaction to this rich abundance of diversity could not have been more different to the original inhabitants who had lived successfully with the land for up to 60,000 years. And global climate change is now compounding our lack of care.

"The impact of climate change on the environment will exacerbate pressures and contribute to further decline," Professor Samuel said.

"In its current state, the environment is not sufficiently resilient to withstand these threats. The current environmental trajectory is unsustainable". In other words, unless there is a serious commitment to turn this ship around we may well make this continent unfit for habitation by any species, including humans.

Large cracks have already appeared, with the Australian Conservation Foundation's nature campaign manager, Basha Stasak, noting entire eco-systems, including the Murray Darling Basin and the Great Barrier Reef, were collapsing and that the country had one of the worst extinction records on earth.

Professor Samuel's recommendations, which have been met with a marked lack of enthusiasm by the Environment Minister, Sussan Ley, who said the government would "canvass them", are sensible and wide ranging.

They include the formation of an independent environmental watchdog and tighter control over the development approval process which is currently being devolved down to individual states and territories. He has also called for an end to special exemptions from environmental controls for the logging industry.

Australia cannot keep on burning the furniture in order to keep its house warm. It is time to stop in the interest of our own self-preservation.