Biodiversity: Integrating Conservation and Production - Tapa blanda

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.

Ted Lefroy trained as an agronomist, working in Queensland, Papua New Guinea and Western Australia before starting a research career focused on the environmental consequences of agriculture. In 2003 he was awarded a Eureka Prize and in 2005 he moved to the University of Tasmania as Director of the Centre for Environment. Kay Bailey trained as a geographer and spent 25 years working in the environmental field for the Australian and Northern Territory governments in Canberra, Kakadu, Darwin and Alice Springs. In 2004 she took up her current position of Executive Officer with Tamar NRM in Launceston. Greg Unwin is a forest ecologist and Senior Lecturer in Forest Ecosystems and Agroforestry in the School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania. His research interests center on the dynamics of tropical and temperate forest ecosystems and the ecophysiological processes which sustain forest diversity and productivity. Tony Norton is Foundation Professor of Agricultural Ecology at the University of Tasmania and Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research. He is a landscape ecologist and has published over 260 scientific articles including five books on spatial information science, NRM, biodiversity conservation and environmental policy.