Saving Our Biodiversity

Since European settlement in Australia, more than 10 percent of our mammal species have become extinct. The two major drivers of this extinction push still operate. The first is land degradation through large-scale clearing, bad fire practices and the impact of introduced weeds. The second is predation by cats and foxes.

While governments at the state and federal level have a major responsibility to ensure that our biodiversity and the habitat it needs is protected in the long term, they often perform very poorly because of the belief that protecting the economy and ensuring its growth is far more important than protecting the natural environment. There is little if any understanding that a healthy economy depends on a healthy natural environment because of the services it provides to humanity.

As a result, we hear from politicians a great deal about the need for “balance” which usually means the natural environment misses out. It does not have the same loud voices that developers clamouring for attention from politicians have.  Protection of our biodiversity is generally poorly funded and is often poorly targeted. And, furthermore, breaches of the limited regulations which are supposed to provide protection are often ignored or lead to “slaps on the wrist” responses. An example of this has been the dealing with breaches of logging regulations in State Forests on the North Coast over recent years.

On a positive note, the growth of private not-for-profit groups investing in biodiversity protection is providing some hope for stemming the tide of extinctions of small mammals across the nation.

One of these groups is Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) which started in 1991 with the purchase of Karakamia Wildlife Sanctuary in Western Australia. AWC now owns, manages, and works in partnerships with other groups across more than 12.9 million hectares. A key part of its success is based on predator-free enclosures where foxes and cats have been removed so that threatened species such as Greater Bilbies and Greater Stick-nest Rats can be reintroduced safely to areas where they became extinct years ago.

Leonie Blain