Let me tell you about some of these "ultimate conservationists".
In the Victorian Central Highlands lives the Leadbeater's Possum, an incredibly cute native animal related to the Sugar Glider. It is currently listed as Endangered, a classification under consideration of being upgraded to Critically Endangered.
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| A Leadbeater's Possum [Photo from Healesville Sanctuary site] What kind of monster would want to hurt this animal? |
Unfortunately, this possum requires trees of a certain age to provide nesting hollows. This puts it in conflict with loggers (VicForests in this case) who wish to cut these trees down. The usual story.
However, where things become really nasty is that VicForests are not merely damaging Leadbeater's Possum habitat incidentally, but deliberately and systematically going out of their way to destroy it, in a calculated effort to wipe out the Leadbeater's Possum. The logic being that when the possum is extinct, there will no longer be any impediment to widespread logging.
One trick was bulldozing wide and unnecessary fire breaks directly through prime Leadbeater's Possum habitat (and in fact even bulldozing monitoring stations constructed for the possums in the process). This happened in 2007 and extensively in 2009. Another good trick is "accidentally" logging the wrong area; usually the damage is done before anyone notices and the remarkably compliant DPI merely shrugs their shoulders. According to an insider, regulations are regularly flouted with impunity.
MyEnvironment has specific details on much of this, but even they don't have the full story.
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ReplyDeleteHi there Richard,
DeleteCould you please contact me by email or post a followup to confirm that you are a human being.
I am a little suspicious because two different people (you and Nuno) have both made comments on different posts within 5 minutes of each other, and both comments have contained links to the same site.
While you might be a genuine person - and my sincerest apologies if you are - this looks very much like an SEO bot trying to increase the page rank of a site by spamming links to people's blogs.
I *really* don't want to discourage people from commenting on this blog. It's perfectly acceptable to comment on "old" posts like this and I don't mind people posting links to relevant sites either. However, I don't want this blog to become a junkyard full of spam or part of someone's link farm.