For years, conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More has been corporatised with the perpetrators of extinction often given a leading role. The Tasmanian salmon farming industry are among stakeholders in the national recovery plan for Maugean Skate. Even though CSIRO says salmon farming is the latest in a series of industries responsible for the skate’s demise. Salmon farming chokes coastal lake systems of oxygen. What will it take to make the Maugean Skate the means for economic resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More rather than ecosystem decline?
Taking an animal from its environment
Fish Focus reports that conservation groups are ‘celebrating the success’ of subsequent captive breeding. The Labor government has even budgeted an additional $3 million to the efforts.
To what end do we take an animal from its environment? The Maugean Skate is, after all, a living and functioning component of the landscape. Elsewhere, skates and rays are an integral part of the trophic (energy and food) structure of estuaries. There is no affordable replacement for species like the Maugean Skate. They evolved to serve a living function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More over millions of years.
The natural processes it creates made Tasmania’s coastal economy thrive enough to support the salmon industry. It’s cynical, therefore, to extract a living component of that economy. To put it in a breeding tank and think everything is going to be okay is delusional.
The estuarine beds they help maintain support the livelihoods and lifestyles of all local people. I doubt anyone has ever measured this. But it can be done.
Transforming community values
Community values and the economy are strongly connected to ecosystem features that rely on animals for their integrity. As a 2012 paper in Nature found, there is evidence loss of species has already had a greater impact on our lives than most of the pollution issues we commonly take for granted.
It is this understanding that’s driving a global shift towards nature-centred societies. The logic is simple. In the past 50 years we have drawn down the $7-$30 of value that nature was providing to our lives. For every dollar we spend on engineering responses to environmental loss today, it costs society more (this is why cost of living is increasing).
If you fish, walk, sightsee, swim, visit the beach or go camping, do you reminisce about the old days? It’s not just nostalgia. Back then, the physical and mental health benefits of being outdoors made us better, happier and more resilient in work, play and family life. The loss of ecosystem function in your neighbourhood isn’t a conservation problem, it’s causing the disintegration of your community. Your sense of belonging. Ability to adapt. The way you come together as a society to solve problem nature throws at you.
Your clubs, societies, fishing, four-wheel driving, photography, birding, swimming, dog-walking, cafe-going, farming, dancing and history … everything you value is at stake when you allow your neighbourhood to be polluted.
What preserves those values and makes your community strong is maintaining the healthy ecosystem you share with the Maugean Skate.
Home grown successes and engineering failures
The government and salmon industry have partnered to trial technology to pump dissolved oxygen into the harbours. At a cost of $7 million for two years, it’s like a huge aquarium pump. For this reason, the industry claims they are the only ones doing something. Salmon Tasmania CEO Luke Martin told SalmonBusiness.com ‘We are the one industry that is showing leadership in responding to the threats’. But that misses the point.
Doing nothing might be a more lucrative economic option. Or more accurately, doing something local people want and helped design, because it benefits their values. Local people and their values have been excluded from any cost-benefit analysis so far, so how would anyone know? With the right leadership, however, we could restore the heady days of the past and restrengthen our local communities. This will only enable home-grown industries to be stronger.
For this, Australia must be one of the luckiest countries. We still have extraordinary and abundant wildlife. But we’re also on notice as one of the highest at-risk for economic decline due to biodiversity loss. It’s why insurance premiums and cost of living are rising faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. The Insurance Council of Australia identifies nature loss as a key issue for insurability, adding ‘Australian insurers must take action to … accelerate the transition toward a … society that exists in harmony with nature’.
The corporatisation of conservation
Here is the positive twist. It’s impossible to unlock nature-based benefits unless you are asked to help co-design and co-manage your own living environment.
Unless actions we take are a social priority and help us live more nature-centred lives, they fail. It’s the primary reason why most conservation failed to reverse extinction for the last 50 years. It’s why the aforementioned oxygenation technology is high risk. It doesn’t stop pollutants entering the estuaries and eventually will become too expensive and be turned off. This will create a sudden and catastrophic toxic shock to the ecosystem, leaving the local community isolated, long after profits nature-negative profits were channelled overseas.
These types of over-engineered responses to more nuanced nature-based options are why your community feels disenfranchised and angry. As a community member, you’re not given a fair go to see where you fit in.
If you think conservation doesn’t matter, ask yourself this. Why is the power to decide the fate of your landscape suddenly in the hands of the most influential people? Our society already accepts that our future pivots around decisions about ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More and wildlife. This is why money flows to government-backed scientists via policymakers with steering committees comprising conservation groups and industry. They want to do the right thing but their floundering, like a Maugean Skate in a tank. They can’t make the right decisions without you.
This corporatised conservation economy benefits few. If local people are consulted, it must begin by giving everyone the means to understand alternative opportunities. It means making decisions that maintain livelihoods and values.
Community co-design is the only way
We live good lives because of our past actions. It’s just decision-makers are using old-fashioned methods that aren’t not working now. For change to happen; for nature-based solutions to become a remedy, requires true and wholesome involvement of communities in decisions that affect their own future. Resilient landscapes cannot be created without their requisite wildlife and people are the most significant animal in the landscape.
As I listen to conversations unfold regarding the skate’s future, I can become disillusioned by the lack of regard for social and ecosystem-based science. But I’m also buoyed by the increasingly sophisticated response by communities themselves. When communities come together to celebrate their values, amazing things happen.
The Toondah Alliance had community art events, Mother’s Day marches, art exhibitions, postcards and quilt making, people emailing MPs and so on. We changed a trickle to a river and then a tidal wave. The momentum resulted in people staying the course and when the time came to do their formal submission, by God they did! – from How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature
Academics, conservationists, politicians – and therefore community groups – are barely made aware of any species’ place in the ecosystem, let alone their own relationship to nature, society and the economy at large. There is this then this unfortunate collusion that occurs around increasingly dormant ideas such as captive breeding. This steals opportunity from local communities, denying us chance to learn how to restore natural processes and rebuild stronger local economies.
Do we have leaders wise enough to understand this? What if the Maugean Skate was to become an opportunity for local economic growth rather than its demise? Our luckiest country finds itself at a crossroads. What we do next – how we treat nature today – will define our prosperity in the near future.
