So many things at this conference made an impression on me – from the diversity of countries represented to the amount of effort individuals put into research projects; from the enthusiasm for nature that was being shown in so many ways to the interest in and commitment to ecosystem restoration – it has inspired me no end.
One talk in particular, in fact, one slide in particular, has stayed with me. It’s from Karen Keenleyside’s presentation. Karen, who gave an excellent keynote speech at the plenary session of the proceedings, is an Ecosystem Scientist with Parks Canada. I know cartoons are meant to make us laugh, but this one didn’t. It made me sad. Talking to people about it afterwards, I found that it had made a lot of people sad, and that that sadness had made a really big impact on us all.
Digesting the conference at Avignon
Karen’s slide, I call it ‘Polar to Panda…?’
Polar to Panda?
For me, it brought home two facts that I already knew but hadn’t thought about in a long time – first, that we are the only species on the planet that has any chance of changing the course of our shared global future, and second, that we are also the only species that is worried at an intellectual level about its or any other species’ persistence; all the other species will survive as long as they physically can and then die, one by one. But not us. Because of the way that we’ve developed our intellect, we have the option or opportunity to make changes to the things we do, and make decisions based on the results or consequences that they will deliver. The big question is, what will we ultimately do with this ‘power’?
On another note, yet still to do with the conference, I recently submitted a paper on INFFER that includes a case-study of an application that I undertook with Rangelands NRM and the Department of Environment and Conservation on the ‘Fire sensitive vegetation communities of the Hamersley Ranges’. The paper is based on the presentation that I gave and is available here.
