Hi all
I've been away a few days and have been catching up with the debate on
public vs private acquisition of land for conservation. It has made for
good reading - lots of food for thought. I'm not going to go over what's
been said because it's been pretty thoroughly explored. Instead, here's
a different twist:
The state-owned conservation estate in Australia covers something like
5% of the country (I'll conveniently leave out marine parks). In recent
ads for his Earth Sanctuaries, John Walmsley stated that the aim of that
private company was to have reserves over 1% of Australia in the future.
Birds Australia is negotiating its second large acquisition and is
arousing a lot of debate - the area represented is infinitesmal on a
national scale, though I certainly acknowledge its value for protection
of local biodiversity.
By way of contrast, compare this with the amount of land controlled by
farmers and graziers. I don't have national figures to hand but in
Queensland, this is about 70% of the State. Most of our wildlife is on
farming and grazing land. If we want a cost-effective system to protect
this biodiversity, it had better involve these people!
What I would like to hear from Birding -Aus'ers is: would you be
prepared to pay a levy through the taxation system, along the lines of
the Medicare levy, to assist farmers and graziers to manage a
significant part of their properties for conservation purposes? How does
an extra 0.5 % sound?
Here I envisage retention of vegetation, replanting where required,
removal of production from some areas, strategic fencing, stock
exclusion and/or access restriction, ongoing management of weeds and
feral animals and so on. There would be overlaps between production and
conservation to address e.g. how much should they be doing in their own
long-term interests vs what should be compensated as being over and
above this level. And of course, we'd want a guarantee that the levy was
going where it was meant to. But these details could be worked out. What
I'd like to know is what you all think of the principle. Would you see
this as a cost-effective way to guarantee the persistence of our birds
across the landscape as a whole?
Richard
--
+----------------------------------------+
Richard Johnson
Roma District
Tel: (07) 4622 4266 Fax: (07) 46 22 4151
E-mail:
To unsubscribe from this list, please send a message to
Include ONLY "unsubscribe birding-aus"
in the message body (without the quotes)
|
