From:
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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
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