A few months ago I was involved in a panel discussion entitled ‘Biodiversity begins at home’ held at the Royal Institution of Australia in Adelaide and sponsored by the Don Dunstan Foundation.
The main thrust of the evening was to have both academic (me & Andy Lowe) and on-the-ground, local conservationists (Sarah Lance, Craig Gillespie and Matt Turner) talk about what people can do to stem the tide of biodiversity loss. The video is now available, so I thought I’d reproduce it here. We talked about a lot of issues (from global to local scale), so if you have a spare hour, you might get something out of this. I did, but it certainly wasn’t long enough to discuss such big issues.
Warning – this was supposed to be more of a discussion and less of a talkfest; unfortunately, many of the panel members seemed to forget this and instead dominated the session. We really needed 4 hours to do this properly (but then, who would have watched the video?).
P.S. You can also view a larger version and skip to specific bits by clicking here.
ConservationBytes.com 
Geoff – I’ll have to check it out next time I’m down at Cape Gantheaume. Whenever that’ll be.
Your ironic last 2 sentences sound pretty close to the reality of 2 days ago. I do think more people are getting it though – it just seems to be viewed as almost taboo to speak about it.
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I’m sorry I couldn’t get to this and haven’t yet watched the video … but would I be right in
guessing that nobody mentioned the biggest cause of biodiversity loss?
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Your guess is, unfortunately, correct, Geoff.
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Ah well … Murray’s lagoon on Kangaroo Island used to have a couple of
stunning maps of the Island (might be still there!) … made about 30 years apart and showing the land clearing. Sheep and cattle. I remember being shocked that most of this went on in my lifetime. What were all the self-proclaimed conservationists doing? Me, I was writing computer software and thinking about techo type things, but the conservationists just watched it all happen … throw another lamb chop on the barbie and talk about the mysterious causes of habitat loss. What on earth can be causing it?
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I was at this event and yes, it was very frustrating that such a huge topic was attempted in such a short timeframe, although all of the speakers were great.
I’d like to kick start a dicussion by asking, how can we make biodiversity a key driver in decision-making (at all levels)?
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I’ll see if Dunstan & RiAus would like to tackle this.
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