Wildlife conservation in Australia: State of the Nation

How many people fully appreciate the environmental problems which Australia faces as it enters the final decade of the century? As put by an increasingly large number of the world's ecologists, ten years is the time remaining for the world to avert global ecological catastrophe. if Australians fully appreciated the seriousness of the planet's environmental problems and could understand that Australia was part of a global ecosystem, we would hear less about saving individual species or reserving small parcels of land as national parks and more about habitat conservation and ecosystem management on a national and global scale. There is the risk that emphasizing the conservation of individual species diverts attention and resources (time, money, and people) from understanding and correcting the causes of species decline and extinction. This can leave species that are common to become scarce, then rare, and finally to become extinct. It is a view I have argued in various forms for nearly 20 years (Recher 1971, 1976, 1985; Recher and Rohan-Jones 1981).