Inaccessible scrubland comes cheap. You don’t have to be rich to make your own nature reserve, especially if you can join forces with like-minded people. The more marginal the land, the more ‘useless’, the lower its market value, the better adapted it is for restoration and conservation. If you’re the kind of person who feels heartache when you see on a country road the bright plumage of a native bird mashed into the bitumen or a skittled koala dead on its back with its claws in the air, you will find great consolation in your mini-reserve. Once the plants are there, the animals will come. To see and hear them going about their business brings a special kind of blessedness. Making a niche for them means finding a niche for you too.
The private landholder, whether individual or corporate, has a better chance of maintaining conservation values than a public entity that has also to provide a public amenity. Private landholders can defend hotspots of endemism as public bodies cannot. Where such hotspots exist alongside public reserves, maintaining them can improve the viability of the reserve community. The fruit of the CCRRS Pigeon-berry Ash trees, for example, will be carried by the rainforest pigeons across the caldera rim to give the Camphor Laurels a run for their money and provide the fruit-eating birds with a food supply that will not kill them. Holders of quite small parcels of land can join forces in providing corridors between isolated patches of habitat. They cannot be expected to do any of these things if no one takes the trouble to inform them about the treasures that have come into their keeping. Most people if told that their muddy stream harbours platypuses would be only too happy to put energy and resources into protecting the habitat of such special and remarkable animals. Expect nothing from people and you will get nothing.
The process by which the forest is being given back to itself is complicated and drawn-out, but now that it has begun a great wrong is on its way to being righted. The stupendous phenomenon that is the forest will have time and space to come into its own again. The charity has been set up to keep the work of rehabilitation going after I have gone to be recycled. One of the workforce said to me the other day, ‘Does that mean that I could still be working here when I’m a grandfather?’
I truly hope so.
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