Dreams that can come true

Having worked all my life to improve river and catchment health,  I know that panic attacks don't work and recent ones  by the Wentworth group will not work either  .The contrasting scales of their ambitions  ( large territory - tiny focus - water flora )says everything a decent practical ecologist needs to know ---that they do not know what they are doing. Effective ecological action is system wide and wise which means paradoxically its usually small scale.

Even if Prof Pittock gets another 5 billion he won't make any difference to the on ground situation.
He is a follower not a leader and he's looking after a lot of dumb misled and incompetent followers who are looking into the water but not really into the big picture . . yes it  maybe  in a good cause but we all know about good intentions and where they can lead ;




 I can tell hes not sure where he is going  because he sells survey and stats like it was the be all end all - it is NOT and not enough to spend 5 billion on.
 Pittock effectively says nothing --they will tell you things you want to hear or what we want you to hear - but of course !
 .What desperate drip feeders ( and the press )don't want to hear is that we have (as the MDG chairman said also last night)  - we have been improving things .
The poor old cynics at the ABC and in the Big Green corridor would not have anything to talk about  with such non devastating news.
 So here we get  joint complicity in stupidity ; when both parties believe that stats will lead us to science and nirvana itself. As any good practical scientist knows , stats rightly canvassed  might tell you about a problem or give you insight  ( cf solution ) but only if we are not looking too hard for one existing one.

You see all this attention to so called big problems and big catchments is all wrong , Just as wrong and misguided as  all this monitoring of the complex beast;This  is no way to get a handle on living systems and their complex dealings with dynamic environments without dissecting the substance in a deliberately professional and deep way . see recent book on over prescription in monitoring in medicine  "Snowballs in a blizzard" .
The Opposition could win government by turning OFF all the stupid ignorant and wasteful monitoring surveys that substitute for real professionals who know what health in a living system looks like (usually at a glance )
To be effective in keeping the resilient beast alive you have to UNDERSTAND the beast (eg  soils water, physiology) . Only then do you have some idea of whether the living systems are  interacting in a healthy way --are well on the way or on the edge .
This job is not hard provided government supports proper study of the locally interacting systems and provides application of the study to work together (with say farmers) who are the target of so much patronage and false projection here .
Targeting  effective targeting . You see not everyone in the catchment is behaving badly , When our leaders properly supported conservation,  we would hunt out and find the risk factors and talk to them;   about ways to improve their contribution -- and it worked .
The problem with what followed here , is it doesn't work .Not only doesn't the new coercion focus work, but its falling over big time .
 Conservation costs and only by bringing the payers with us can we continue to win .
The end of popular public conservation pressure in nigh . And you can't just blame Trump . The true cost of all the hypocritical games played in the good name of conservation is coming home to roost in a big way .
If you want to know HOW to make the dream come true,  read more about my experience in river and catchment  management here