Ted Lefroy – författare

Australia’s experience in community-based environmental repair is unique in the world, with no shortage of analysis by bureaucrats, academics and environmentalists. This collection of 17 case studies gives a view from ground level. It includes heroic accounts of families who changed their way of farming and their relationship to the land so significantly they found they could stop hand-feeding stock during a drought and see the bush coming back. It describes the experience with ‘bush tenders’, which were oversubscribed, as farmers competed with each other for stewardship payments to manage their grazing lands for endangered ground-nesting birds as well as beef and wool. And it tells of a group of wheat growers who plant patches of grassland for beneficial insects that save them tens of thousands of dollars a year in pesticide bills.The case studies arose from a meeting of 250 farmers, foresters and fishers from all Australian states, who 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?’ 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. Biodiversity: Integrating Conservation and Production includes the seven ‘Tamar Principles’, distilled by the delegates from the meeting for those on the front line.

In 2005, researchers from four Australian universities and CSIRO joined forces with environmental managers from three state agencies and six regional catchment management authorities to answer the question: ''Can we detect the influence of public environmental programs on the condition of our natural resources?'' This was prompted by a series of national audits of Australia''s environmental programs that could find no evidence of public investment improving the condition of waterways, soils and native vegetation, despite major public programs investing more than $4.2 billion in environmental repair over the last 20 years. Landscape Logic describes how this collaboration of 42 researchers and environmental managers went about the research. It describes what they found and what they learned about the challenge of attributing cause to environmental change. While public programs had been responsible for increase in vegetation extent, there was less evidence for improvement in vegetation condition and water quality. In many cases critical levels of intervention had not been reached, interventions were not sufficiently mature to have had any measurable impact, monitoring had not been designed to match the spatial and temporal scales of the interventions, and interventions lacked sufficiently clear objectives and metrics to ever be detectable. In the process, however, new knowledge emerged on disturbance thresholds in river condition, diagnosing sources of pollution in river systems, and the application and uptake of state-and-transition and Bayesian network models to environmental management.The findings discussed in this book provide valuable messages for environmental managers, land managers, researchers and policy makers.