(5) Some obstacles

Salvage doesn't happen for a variety of reasons. Many field biologists just don't like the idea, or can't see how it fits in with their research. (See http://www.ibcc2007.org/salvage.htm, where I list arguments compiled for an invertebrate biodiversity and conservation conference in December 2007.)

Others are worried that to do salvage is to admit defeat in the battle to Save the Planet. Worse, it might send a message to the destroyers of natural habitats that it’s OK, you can wipe the habitats, just stop for a moment so we can salvage specimens, then you can go ahead.

I’ve recently hit yet another obstacle in my own salvage work: a government bureaucracy. The story is Tasmanian but will probably sound familiar to readers everywhere.

A farmer wanted to raise the level of a dam wall on a stream on his property. More of the land behind the dam would be flooded, and the free-flowing part of the stream would be pushed further upstream.

The farmer applied to the appropriate government agency for approval. The agency consulted the nature conservation bureaucracy, which decided that no species or habitats would be threatened by expanding the dam.

The agency also advertised for public comment. I wrote to propose salvaging terrestrial invertebrates from the area to be flooded. The dam site met all my criteria for priority salvage: it wasn’t close to a reserve, it was in an area whose fauna was poorly known and sparsely sampled, and the flooding would happen in the near future. I emphasised in my proposal that the salvage sampling would not interfere with the flooding or stop it happening. I offered to pay sampling costs myself, including sorting and curating of specimens at the museum with which I'm affiliated.

Months of disappointing correspondence followed. In the end, the agency refused to recommend salvage and refused to allow its reasons to be made public.

It’s been suggested to me that the agency was thinking “If we recommend salvage we’re admitting that we’ve approved habitat destruction. We can’t admit that.”

The saddest part of this story is that if I’d ignored the agency and gone straight to the farmer, the specimens would now be in a museum. As I said in my 2004 paper, I’ve been knocking on farmers’ doors for 30 years and never been refused access to private property for bug collecting.

Which is another way of saying that governments may be a bigger obstacle to salvage than landowners.