Biodiversity: Integrating Conservation and Production

In June 2007, twenty years after the Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced the Decade of Landcare, 250 farmers, foresters and fishers from all states met in Launceston as guests of the community group Tamar Natural Resource Management to reflect on the question, “Is it possible to be good environmental managers and prosper in our businesses?” This book contains seventeen of their stories.

Australia’s experiment in community-based environmental repair is unique in the world, and there has been no shortage of analysis by bureaucrats, academics and environmentalists. This collection of case studies gives us the view from ground level. As well as tales of environmental hope, there are also messages about the limits of duty of care, the need to share the costs of achieving society’s expectations, and the possibility of learning from unlikely places.

Ted Lefroy trained as an agronomist, working in Queensland, Papua New Guinea and Western Australia before starting a research career focused on the environmental consequences of agriculture. In 2003 he was awarded a Eureka Prize and in 2005 he moved to the University of Tasmania as Director of the Centre for Environment.

Kay Bailey trained as a geographer and spent 25 years working in the environmental field for the Australian and Northern Territory governments in Canberra, Kakadu, Darwin and Alice Springs. In 2004 she took up her current position of Executive Officer with Tamar NRM in Launceston.

Tony Norton is Foundation Professor of Agricultural Ecology at the University of Tasmania and Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research. He is a landscape ecologist and has published over 260 scientific articles including five books on spatial information science, NRM, biodiversity conservation and environmental policy.

Greg Unwin is a forest ecologist and Senior Lecturer in Forest Ecosystems and Agroforestry in the School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania. His research interests center on the dynamics of tropical and temperate forest ecosystems and the ecophysiological processes which sustain forest diversity and productivity.