Cashing in on Conservation
In much of the world, environmental success stories are seen as tales of economic hard times. Here in the north, many people assume that saving species means losing jobs, and that it's impossible to preserve both ecosystems and cash flow. According to the journal New Scientist, a population biologist in another corner of the world thinks otherwise, and he's set off to make himself---and many investors---richer while he's enriching some ecosystems.
John Wamsley is an Australian scientist who was dismayed by the rapid decline in the unique native animals of his homeland. Frustrated by what he saw as governmental mismanagement of the problem, he undertook a massive experiment that was also an attempt to earn money. Wamsley founded a company called Earth Sanctuaries of Adelaide and began to buy up big tracts of land. Then he built fences and began to kill animals.
Such behavior is not exactly what one might predict from a conservationist, but therein lay the nature of Wamsley's experiment. The fences were electrified with enough current so that one shock taught creatures to avoid them. Wamsley set up the fences to enclose Earth Sanctuaries' territory, not to keep wandering animals in but to keep unwanted animals out.
The unwanted species are the introduced animals that now pervade Australia's wildlands as well as its suburbs: feral cats and goats, foxes and rabbits. Cats and foxes are predators deadly to the smaller kinds of native marsupials, and the goats and rabbits not only compete with the native animals for food but eat some food plants to the ground and cause erosion. For these alien animals, Australia is truly the happy hunting ground; one biologist at the University of Adelaide estimated that just one Australian state, New South Wales, is home to 400,000 feral cats. Those cats could easily consume 400 million native mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates every year.
Wamsley believed that Australian wildlife species could recuperate if they didn't have to deal with the deadly aliens. He also believed that Australians and others would pay for the privilege of visiting wildlife parks that looked like the Australian wilderness of 200 years ago, before European peoples introduced their pets and pests to this isolated land mass. He put his beliefs to the test when Earth Sanctuaries opened a reserve called Warrawong in the Adelaide Hills.
The reserve was fenced, the alien animals killed off, native animals reintroduced, and tourists invited to come---and pay. That was in 1982. By 1985, Earth Sanctuaries was valued at $200,000 in Australian currency. By 1993, Warrawong was earning twice that much every year, and Warrawong is now only one of the company's several sanctuaries. The firm is now valued at $12 million in Australian currency.
The economic side of the experiment looks good, and the environmental side looks better. In Warrawong sanctuary, the population of brush-tailed bettongs, Australia's rarest and smallest kangaroo, has gone from an original six to more than 300. The sanctuary has chalked up similar successes with other rare Australian mammals with wonderful names: two red-necked pademelons have become a colony of 35, four southern brown bandicoots have bred up into a population of 200, and four long-nosed potoroos have multiplied to 150. A numerically smaller but still impressive growth came about in the resident platypus population, which increased by five.
Despite the evident success of his experiment, Wamsley has critics. It won't surprise Alaskans who've watched the dances-with-dogs interaction of the Humane Society and the Iditarod to learn that a section of the animal rights movement offered the most vehement opposition. To protest the killing of the introduced animals, some of the less scrupulous members of this opposition have tossed live cats and foxes over the sanctuary fences. To counter that, the sanctuaries will soon have a second, interior fence-farther back than one can throw a cat.
