birding-aus

FW: Military traing areas and Conservation - Unexploded Reality

To: Birding Aus <>
Subject: FW: Military traing areas and Conservation - Unexploded Reality
From: Angus Innes <>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 22:13:16 +0000

From: 
To: 
Subject: FW: Military traing areas and Conservation - Unexploded Reality
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 08:11:37 +0000









 
 


From: Innes, Angus


Sent: 20 August 2013 09:01

To: 

Cc: 

Subject: Military traing areas and Conservation - Unexploded Reality


 
In response to Peter Shute’s comments, I would agree that some military 
land-holdings are high quality from a conservation point of view and, if they 
had survived in other hands more or less intact, may well have been prime 
candidates for national park status (as understood
 in Australia). Their survival has been due to the military status of the land. 
 Would the Shoalwater Bay area have survived the last fifty years of Queensland 
development otherwise? 
However, I wouldn’t agree with the proposition that military land tends to be
 of higher quality than  national parks.

 Nor is the natural state of the land the whole story. I point to the following 
words in the extract from the Birdlife International IBA (Important Bird Area) 
listing for Shoalwater Bay that I quoted in my earlier e-mail: “(it is) managed 
equally for the purposes of military training and nature conservation”. 
 “Management”! The reserve status of land can be illusory without appropriate 
management - even in vast tracts of land that are apparently in their natural 
state.  In Australia, I point to the management issue of feral/exotic species 
elimination or replacing the absence of traditional aboriginal fire practices 
with replicated fire practices. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy is a prime 
, non military, example of the importance of conservation grade land holding 
plus appropriate management.
 When we went to Porton Down (in the UK), as I mentioned in the earlier e-mail, 
 the Stone Curlews were nesting in a “stony” field of cultivation, especially 
managed within the military lands for their nesting purposes - and also in the 
interests of fast disappearing UK farmland birds and mammak species.The 
military when given objectives are trained to attain them. When those 
objectives include conservation, it becomes a win win situation.  Angus Innes
 
 
 
 
 
 
 




Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally privileged. 
If you have received this message by mistake, please notify the sender 
immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else.

We have checked this email and its attachments for viruses. But you should 
still check any attachment before opening it.
We may have to make this message and any reply to it public if asked to under 
the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act or for litigation.  Email 
messages and attachments sent to or from any Environment Agency address may 
also be accessed by someone other than the sender or recipient, for business 
purposes.


                                          
===============================

To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 

http://birding-aus.org
===============================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
  • FW: Military traing areas and Conservation - Unexploded Reality, Angus Innes <=
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU