What a refreshing and interestng change.

I have read (and have on my desk right now) Michaels 1994 book World War III : Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millenium.
His current project is obviously an extension of, and an attempt to remedy,the dismal situation described in that book.Highly recommended

Great article.

Indeed very interesting.
What we need is a population that will not only note the stats but will change their life outlook enough to reverse some of those trends.
A society that will care more about life as the purpose of existence rather than accumulation of 'stuff' most of which we don't need.

All problems today begin in one way or another with our search of for some ultimate meaning yet we have that meaning now, life. We should simply enable it or at least not impede the collective existence that supports our lives.

Remember regardless of your life style nature intended that sufficiency is enough beyond that we needlessly jeopardise our continuing existence.

There are a lot of good things being done to protect our biodiversity in Australia:

The national park estate has grown greatly and continues to expand, there are several other wildlife protection tenures from world heritage to nature refuge, and the private conservation reserve network is well-established and growing (eg http://www.awc.org.au/).

A lot of research and recovery effort has been put into saving a host of threatened species and our understanding of the taxonomy and ecology of species and ecosystems continues to improve.

However, there are still huge holes in our knowledge, and some really baffling lack of progress in areas that should be of a high priority.

For example, some sections of the flora, especially across northern Australia, are still very poorly understood. There is still considerable scope for the discovery of new rare and/or threatened species. This is true even within some of our most common and conspicuous plants such as the ironbarks, which are the dominant trees over enormous areas of Queensland and New South Wales and extend into the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia. A number of officially rare or threatened species have been described in this group, several years ago, but great confusion still exists about the true identity of ironbark trees over huge areas.

Ironbarks form vast woodlands and are the diagnostic species of many regional ecosystems in Queensland. It is absolutely extraordinary that confusion in their identity still exists, nearly a decade after the implementation of statewide regional ecosystem mapping, which is the basis for restrictions to tree-clearing and the conservation of restricted ecosystems under the Vegetation Management Act... especially with the prospect of rare or threatened taxa existing within this species complex and accordingly, rare or threatened regional ecosystems.

continued

There is also a pretty poor correlation between officially rare and/or threatened plant species, which have special conservation statuses, and actual R & T species. Many official R & T species were very poorly known when they were put on this list of species requiring special conservation measures, but are now known to be much more common and safe….but remain on the list. Many species that pretty obviously need R & T status based on what we know about them, don’t have any special protection.

On recent surveys of a privately owned conservation reserve, I discovered no less than four completely new species, all being large conspicuous woody bushes (in the genera Hibbertia, Emmenosperma, Corchorus and Homoranthus). All deserve rare and quite possibly threatened status.

So with all this uncertainty about the biodiversity and rare or threatened status of species, within our highly conspicuous ‘megaflora’, the declaration of reserves or conservation measures designed to protect them becomes fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.

And this is the state of affairs with the big obvious highly conspicuous organisms! Once we start looking at the lower plants; the mosses, algae and lichens, or the fungi kingdom or the lower animals; the insects and other invertebrates….well… we know next to nothing!! !!

Hmmm, well that double post went down like a lead balloon.

Yeah well, I expected as much (:>\