The conservation challenge: how to build biodiversity but control the wild pigs and lantana
Who doesn’t feel good about donating $300 or $300,000 or much, much more to save a slice of wilderness? But the notion of rewilding country is being questioned.
For more than 30 years, two big not-for-profits, Bush Heritage Australia and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, have been buying up land from farmers to protect the country and its biodiversity. Together they own or help run millions of hectares – funded by money raised from small and large donors. Their success is no great surprise.
Who doesn’t feel good about donating $300 or $300,000 or much, much more to save a slice of the great Australian wilderness, to be part of the recovery of the native grasses and bird and marsupials threatened by development?
Since former Greens leader Bob Brown launched Bush Heritage in 1991 and in the same year West Australian philanthropist Martin Copley started AWC, the groups have thrived in an era of increased public awareness of the environment, climate change and protection of our biodiversity.
But along with our national parks, these groups face a growing challenge, one that is turning some popular assumptions about conservation on their head.
The questions include how to manage vast tracts of “empty” land so it doesn’t end up crawling with lantana and wild pigs; how to ensure protected land increases rather than reduces biodiversity; and whether we continue buybacks, given the escalating cost of land as corporations invest in massive “land banks” in farming country?
Underpinning these questions is a deeper, philosophical one: is there any such thing as wilderness anyway?
The notion of returning land to a pre-modern past, of rewilding country may stir the popular imagination, but it has been questioned in recent decades.
In a 1995 essay, The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, American conservationist William Cronon argued that “the time has come to rethink wilderness”.
Wilderness, he suggested, was “profoundly a human creation” and not a “pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilisation”.
That made Cronon unpopular among some conservationists back then, but his view resonates with many today, including sustainable or regenerative farmers, who argue Australia was never wild in the sense that it has been managed for thousands of years by First Nations people, even before graziers and croppers got into the game after 1788.
That’s the approach taken too by organisations such as Bush Heritage, which does not emphasise rewilding but uses Indigenous knowledge and science to restore the health and function of the land. in a sustainable way.
Brown says rewilding is an “honourable project” but is really possible only at the margins.
He is no longer directly involved with Bush Heritage, which began with the purchase of land in Tasmania to stop it from being logged, but pursues conservation via the Bob Brown Foundation based in Tasmania.
At a practical level, conservation-minded farmers and scientists here and overseas argue that emptying the country of humans and sheep and cattle in an effort to protect it is sometimes exactly the wrong approach, although they stress it is horses for courses, so to speak, when it comes to managing land for biodiversity.
Lorraine Gordon, one of the country’s leading regenerative agriculturalists, says: “If it’s pristine rainforest, you wouldn’t bring in a herd of cattle, but when you’re talking about Australian grasslands, and that’s 60 per cent of our country, it needs management.
“Humans can have a positive effect in that environment and there can be a massive negative effect when you take us out of that environment.”
Gordon, who set up the world’s first regenerative agriculture degree at Southern Cross University four years ago, has first-hand experience of what can go wrong. For generations her family grazed cattle in northern NSW on land that, in addition to the New England highlands Moffat Falls property, included about 450ha of gorge country adjoining the New England National Park.
“We used to take around 300 of our pregnant cows and heifers over the harsh winter months into the lower, warmer country, and walk the heifers back out in the spring,” says Gordon, who in addition to spending time on her farm now works for a company called Climate Friendly.
“We would flick a match off the back of our horses and burn the country as we left in September-October. We got a cool mosaic burn, which is what our First Nations people have been doing for thousands of years. That property was thriving with biodiversity, with some of the tallest eucalypt trees you’ve ever seen in Australia. We had dingoes walking among our cattle, peacefully, never attacking anything.”
The land was sold, then resold to the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. “Basically, they pulled out the fences and took the cattle out of that country,” Gordon says. “When I walked through in 2017, the grass was up to my neck. I could not walk through it, the kangaroos and wallabies could not hop through it. I didn’t see dingoes, I didn’t see any wildlife at all because they couldn’t manoeuvre through the long grass.
“There had not been a fire down there for years. Then we had the drought from 2017 to 2019, and then we got the worst fires in living history. It was an absolute inferno and destroyed so many species which would have been fine if there had been controlled fire reduction in that area.”
Gordon says “there is absolutely a symbiotic relationship with pasture and hoofed animals. If you take the hoofed animals away from pasture, it will struggle to regenerate, the desirable seeds in the ground will not be stirred up to germinate, and the grasses will become old and rank, with little succession (the process by which the mix of species and habitat changes over time)”. Before settlers arrived with cattle, she says, fire burning by Indigenous people played a similar role and the two practices together create the fastest regeneration of species.
Gordon stresses that hoofed animals are not suitable for all degraded or protected areas.
She continues to farm in the New England area, running about 1000 steers over 1000ha, rotating the animals through paddocks every two or three days, then spelling the paddocks as part of a planned holistic management rotation.
She says we need to increase biodiversity on agricultural land, not just in protected areas: “Apart from anything else, if you clear everything off your farm, you’re not going to get any rain because trees bring rain, and trees add to livestock and other species health because they keep the system in balance and provide shade and shelter from the elements.
“You need as much biodiversity as possible. That means biodiversity of pasture types, biodiversity of tree species … there are so many reasons to have biodiversity. It doesn’t matter what it is, it just needs to be there and it brings insects that bring bird life that bring pollinators …vital to our planet.”
For every story of a protected area that winds up reducing rather than increasing biodiversity there are great success stories.
Bush Heritage, for example, can point to the 68,000ha Charles Darwin Reserve, about 350km north of Perth in the wheat belt.
It was bought in 2002 with an inheritance given by a direct descendant of Darwin – his great-great-grandson Chris Darwin, who lives in NSW.
Formerly the White Wells Station, the property had been overgrazed and degraded by drought and fire. Today it is home to more than 230 types of animals, including mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians; and more than 680 plant species. The feral goats have gone and the plant species keep on growing.
Charles Darwin is one of 43 reserves owned and run by Bush Heritage, which also works with traditional owners and other landowners across many millions more, using a partnership model also followed by AWC. One example of Bush Heritage’s work is the Midlands Conservation Partnership, which focuses on a global biodiversity “hotspot” in Tasmania – the temperate grasslands and grassy woodlands. It works with Tasmanian Land Conservancy to provide stewardship payments to farmers to allow them to rest their land at times without losing money. Bush Heritage also works with big companies such as Hewitt Cattle to increase biodiversity on properties that at the same time continue to operate as sustainable businesses.
Bush Heritage owns 1.2 million hectares and hopes to double this by 2030. It is campaigning to fund acquisition of Evelyn Downs, a 235,000ha property in South Australia. It also works with partners, pastoral and Indigenous people across millions more hectares.
Robert Murphy, its co-interim chief executive, says the group is about conservation, not farming, but “we certainly do not believe all grazing is bad”.
“We have some instances where we use cattle to help manage properties,” he says. “One of them, up in Queensland, we use cattle to manage the buffel grass, which is quite prolific and out-competes a lot of the natural grasses and so we use cattle to reduce that fuel load. We’ve been doing that for well over 15 years now. So it’s quite an effective tool in our tool belt.”
As for managing the land: “We do a whole lot of work just like most landholders do – we do fire control, we do feral animal control. We’re doing all sorts of things to manage the land in the best way we can. I don’t think it’s an either-or scenario … it isn’t about locking up every piece of land. We’re in a pragmatic world and we need to have a balance.”
AWC chief executive Tim Allard agrees it’s not a binary debate: “We partner with pastoralist organisations across the country. We’re not anti-cattle, but there are many areas where it’s about the absence of cattle. Where we’re managing a property purely for conservation outcomes, we don’t want to introduce species like cattle, but we’re prepared to work with cattle operators who can manage their land in a manner that can support them and increase biodiversity.”
As part of its public-private partnerships, AWC also has contracts with national parks, but Allard says it can be hard to get traction with the bureaucracy that often is involved. In the end, he says, governments need to find the money to fund the parks so they can be managed, “otherwise, all they are is a vector for weeds, wild dogs and all the rest of it”.
About 70 per cent of AWC’s income, predicted to be about $36m this year, is public donations, and while people love the idea of funding the acquisition of land, the bulk of fundraising goes into the day-to-day management of land by the organisation’s 250 staff, a third of whom are ecologists carrying out research, monitoring and assessment alongside fire management and feral animal control programs.
AWC says it owns or manages or “influences” management of about 2 per cent of the continent – about 12.9 million hectares – and aims to get to 5 per cent by 2034.
Says Allard: “A large part of the future will be forming partnerships with cattle operators. Often they have large tracts of land that have got high biodiversity values, and we can work with them to propagate the values and they can still commercially manage and grow their cows.
“Indigenous Protected Areas is another big program where there are many Aboriginal corporations that may not have the capacity initially to do everything they want to do. So we’ll partner up and help provide that capacity until they’re ready to run themselves.”
Partnerships are crucial because “the cost of buying land is going through the roof”. Allard cites a Northern Territory property that AWC looked at buying for $21m a decade ago, which last year sold for $57m.
“We will always be looking to get land that we completely pay for, for conservation only,” says Allard. “But that’s not going to solve Australia’s problem. We’re losing our biodiversity rapidly; we need to have land that is used just for conservation, but we’ve got an economy that needs to be looked after, so we need to understand that and be pragmatic about it.”
From Tasmania, where his foundation does not buy land but is committed to protection of nature, Brown says “stopping the ongoing destruction (dewilding) of nature is more urgent than rewilding”.
His focus is on the “hundreds of thousands of hectares of native wildlife habitat (that) is being cleared in Australia each year” by loggers. But he says: “Rewilding is an honourable project in this UN Decade of Restoration of Nature. Restoring Lake Pedder should be a national priority here.”
Brown says: “Environmental protection of the public’s domain, as in the creation of national parks, unlocks Australia’s natural heritage from loggers, miners, energy profiteers and industrial aquaculture to ensure nature is a rich part of the nation’s future.
“The loss of wildness to commercial interests is rampant.”
As for the role of hoofed animals in reviving biodiversity, Brown says any effort to reduce damage is welcome but that “kangaroos and bandicoots always did it better”.
