5 out of the 6 most recent posts on the F&B Green Room are about pest control. This week the PCE report on 1080 sought more widespread use of 1080 to save native biodiversity. It is therefore a real puzzle that pest control is nowhere on the F&B AGM Agenda for the forthcoming 24-25 June meeting (see F&B website for the agenda)
There is a line up at the AGM of all sorts of important NZ politicians and conservation shakers and movers. Yes Freshwater conservation is important but so too right now (and always) is saving our native forests and birds, the reason why F&B came into being in the first place.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has this week given the green light to widespread aerial 1080 pest control by DOC as a last ditch tool to save our critically endangered native biodiversity.
DOC is managing to control pests on a "limited" (it calls it "sustainable") basis over about 1 million hectares of the 6 million hectares of forested conservation land that it manages for the people of NZ. This means that pest control is occuring on a mere 17% of the forested land it controls and 13% of DOC's total land management area.
What about the rest of NZ's protected Conservation Lands managed (or perhaps mismanaged? ) by DOC
We need to ask the tough questions. If DOC is not going to save native biodiversity should they not be sacked and an organisation committed to actually saving wild and natural NZ (not just talking about it) be appointed in DOC's place?
For example, in 2010, DOC Canterbury announced publicly (and through its CMS planning process) that it was determined to save the critically endangered and remote Halls totara and NZ cedar forest of the Upper Rakaia-Wilberforce valleys in mid Canterbury. These have been ravaged by uncontrolled possum browsing. DOC announced in 2010 that this would be done by aerial 1080 operations and Forest and Bird publicly welcomed this DOC announcement.
Then some deerstalkers complained because they didn't like 1080. In 2011 DOC abandoned the aerial 1080 operations in favour of currying friendship with these deerstalkers. A gutsy Director General of Conservation would have sacked the Canterbury Conservator. Instead the Conservator is probably being rewarded by the DOC system for avoiding any public controversy.
Tough luck if you are a totara or a cedar on your last legs being ravaged by possums. It seems that these days, conservation is all about becoming popular and snuggling up to business not about saving NZ's natural heritage. Remember that DOC's new motto is "Conservation for Prosperity" not what the Conservation Act 1986 says it is; "Conservation - Saving our Threatened Natural Heritage"
Come on Forest and Bird. It is our job to save NZ's threatened birds and native forests. We need to call DOC to account for its abandonment of the Rakaia native forests and birds and the abandonment of the 83% of our NZ protected native forests where it is doing no suustained pest control nor is it planning to do any.
Those tough questions must be asked at the 2011 F&B AGM and if we don't ask them we too should get the sack!.
We need to give urgent feedback to the F&B Executive on this issue and get pest control on the AGM Agenda at the forthcoming meeting.