Future dilemmas for argumentative conservation biologists

Abstract

PACIFIC, meaning tending to make peace or conciliatory, is hardly a word that one associates with Harry Recher, the editor of Pacific Conservation Biology. Argumentative is far nearer the mark, and for good reason. He is tired, as he said forcefully to many friends in July this year, of the absolute futility of trying to get people and governments to wake up and change. At the time he uttered those words in July 2002 he had just returned from a trip to north-west Australia. Once you reach the cattle country, he said, it is clear that the intent of pastoralists is to convert the entire landscape into a vast paddock void of shrubs and other life forms bar introduced grass species and cattle. He also declared that what is happening to the Western Australian pastoral zone equals the destruction occurring in Queensland through land clearing. Thus in a few sentences Recher has put his finger on the central issues of environmental degradation in Australia as identified in both the Biodiversity State of the Environment Report 2001 (Williams et al. 2001) and the CSIRO Report Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia's population, technology, resources and environment by Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy, which was launched by the Immigration Minister on 6 November 2002 (www.cse.csiro.au/futuredilemmas).