• David Bowman

07 October 2009Peter Garrett has signalled an important rethink of how we manage our fragile environment, writes David Bowman in The Australian

AUSTRALIAN conservation biologists are still digesting Environment Minister Peter Garrett's recent statement that his government is drawing a line on endangered species funding.

In an attempt to improve Australia's blighted record of species loss, the focus of Garrett's department will shift to managing broad-scale ecological process.

Garrett acknowledged the policy shift was controversial and invited conservation biologists and ecologists such as me to publicly debate the consequences of managing whole landscapes rather than endangered species. For many conservation biologists there is a clear moral imperative to conserve biodiversity and they have a simple solution: spend more money. Yet harder heads ask whether money is actually the problem; they question whether there is really any practical way to arrest the extinctions.

In the middle are those who champion the rational allocation of scarce resources to the most likely successes from the growing queue of threatened species...

Read the full article

David Bowman is professor of forest ecology at the University of Tasmania and visiting fellow at the Fenner School of the Environment and Society at the Australian National University.

Photo: Andrew Jeffrey