Time to agree on a conservation benchmark for Australia.

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt W Hayward
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
National Park ◽  
Fire Management ◽  
Conservation Management ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Inadequate Knowledge ◽  
Sydney Harbour ◽  
The Status

WELL defined goals are critical to successfully achieve outcomes and monitor the success of achieving them, yet conservation agencies rarely explicitly state the goals of their management activities with appropriate metrics. Here I use case studies on the conflicting conservation management focus of the Sydney Harbour National Park at North Head, the legislative impediments of bridled nailtail wallaby conservation management, the planning for broadscale habitat connectivity programmes such as Habitat 141, fire management for the conservation of the quokka and the broader Kimberley landscape, and mesopredator suppression using dingoes to highlight the problems with inappropriate conservation benchmarks. I compare these issues with activities from South Africa, India, New Zealand and Poland to illustrate the benchmarks other nations have. I conclude that Australia urgently needs an explicit conservation benchmark upon which to aim our conservation efforts and excuses of inadequate knowledge can no longer be accepted for maintaining the status quo.

scholarly journals The Status Quo of Providing Information about National Park on the Website

2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 821-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manabu HASEGAWA ◽  
Akio SHIMOMURA ◽  
Hiromu ITO ◽  
Ryohei ONO
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status

scholarly journals The status of rhinoceroses in South African National Parks

Koedoe ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam M. Ferreira ◽  
Charlene Bissett ◽  
Carly R. Cowell ◽  
Angela Gaylard ◽  
Cathy Greaver ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
National Parks ◽  
National Park ◽  
Kruger National Park ◽  
The South ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Status ◽  
Annual Population ◽  
Block Based

African rhinoceroses (rhinos) experienced a poaching onslaught since 2008 with the epicentre in South Africa where most of the world’s rhinos occur. South African national parks, under the management of South African National Parks (SANParks), are custodian to 49% of South Africa’s white and 31% of the country’s black rhinos. We collated information on rhino population sizes in seven national parks from 2011 to 2015. We include and report on rhino surveys in Kruger National Park during 2014 and 2015. Southwestern black rhinos increased over the study period, which allows SANParks to achieve its contribution to South Africa’s 2020 target of 260 individuals. South-central black rhinos declined over the study period because of poaching in the Kruger National Park, making it difficult for SANParks to realise a 9% increase per annum for its expected contribution to the South African target of 2800 individuals. For southern white rhinos, SANParks requires 5% annual growth for its contribution to the South African target of 20 400 individuals. To continue to evaluate the achievement of these targets, SANParks needs annual population estimates relying on total counts, mark-recapture techniques and block-based sample counts to track trends in rhino populations. SANParks’ primary challenge in achieving its contribution to South Africa’s rhino conservation targets is associated with curbing poaching in Kruger National Park.Conservation implications: The status and trends of rhino species in SANParks highlight key challenges associated with achieving the national targets of South Africa. Conservation managers will need to improve the protection of southern white rhino, while the Department of Environmental Affairs need to be made aware of the challenges specifically associated with not achieving targets for south-central black rhino. Outcomes for south-western black rhino have already realised and the good conservation efforts should continue.

‘The status quo is not an option’: Community impacts of school closure in South Taranaki, New Zealand

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin A. Kearns ◽  
Nicolas Lewis ◽  
Tim McCreanor ◽  
Karen Witten
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
School Closure ◽  
The Status ◽  
Community Impacts

scholarly journals A Clean, Green New Zealand? An In-Depth Look at the Personal Experiences of Animal Rights Activists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Feigin ◽  
Richard Glynn Owens ◽  
Felicity Goodyear-Smith
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into

This study explored personal experiences of animal rights and environmental activists in New Zealand. The stories of participants provided insight into the challenges activists face in a country where the economy is heavily dependent on animal agriculture. A qualitative methodology was utilised and several major themes emerged: (1) emotional and psychological experiences, (2) group membership, (3) characteristics of activism and liberation, (4) the law and its agents, and (5) challenge to society. Participants of the study represent a group of individuals engaged in acts of altruistic offending triggered by exposure to the suffering of non-human animals. Their moral philosophy and conscience overrode all considerations for legal repercussions, and through their activism they not only challenged the status quo, but also called upon non-activist members of society to make meaningful contributions to the world around them.

scholarly journals Think Piece: Learning, Living and Leading into Transgression – A reflection on decolonial praxis in a neoliberal world

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Injairu Kulundu ◽  
Dylan Kenneth McGarry ◽  
Heila Lotz-Sisitka
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Sustainability Education ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
To Come ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Embodied Practice

Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a neoliberal world and its crisis times, particularly considering transgressions in the service of a decolonial future. The authors explore three questions: i) What kind of learning can help us transgress the status quo? ii) How do we extend this learning into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? iii) What does it mean to lead in ways that re-generate a transgressive ethic in a neoliberal world? In a dialogical conversation format, the authors outline nine different but interconnected perspectives on learning, living and leading into transgression, with the aim of concurrently revealing the multiple layers of work that a decolonial future depends on, while demonstrating the ambitions of a pluriversal decolonial future through their writing. The intertwined narrative is not conclusive, as the processes marked out in brief are experiences that still need to be fully practised in new relations in times to come within academia-in-society-and-the-world with human and more-than-human actors. However, they do offer a generative set of questions, concepts and metaphors to give courage to boundary-dwelling scholar activists attempting transgressive research. These reflections seek to regenerate the transgressive ‘decolonial gestures’ (decolonialfutures.net) that we can undertake in a neo-liberal world, as an important part of environment and sustainability education practices. It draws out what an embodied practice of transgressive learning can entail when we become discerning of hegemonic discourses that reproduce the status quo. We pay homage to those decolonial scholars in the field of environment and sustainability education as we traverse this terrain, recognising their imagination and the transgressive movement that has come before us, but importantly we seek to also open pathways for those yet to come.

South Africa in 1998: Trends and Developments During the Next Twenty-Five Years

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
A. M. Keppel-Jones
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Insurance Policy ◽  
The Status

Prophecy is one of the simplest ways for an historian to destroy his credit and reputation. Having been persuaded to take this risk, I shall partly cover it with one small insurance policy: I shall set forth what seem to me to be the relevant facts, but not be too dogmatic about the conclusions to be drawn from them.Where will South Africa stand twenty-five years from now? What will have happened during those years? In theory there are, I think, only four possibilities: (i) that the status quo will remain essentially unchanged; (ii) that radical changes, involving or at least leading to the abolition of all racial discrimination, will come about peacefully, by constitutional means; (iii) that the regime will be overthrown by invading foreign forces; and (iv) that it will be overthrown by revolution within the country, with or without foreign support. As there are strong reasons for believing that none of these alternatives is really possible, some factor seems to have been overlooked. Perhaps it will appear as the four alternatives are examined.

scholarly journals The contribution of fire research to fire management: a critical review of a long-term experiment in the Kruger National Park, South Africa

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian W. van Wilgen ◽  
Navashni Govender ◽  
Harry C. Biggs
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
National Park ◽  
Fire Management ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
Kruger National Park ◽  
Management Policy ◽  
Wet Season ◽  
Long Term Experiment ◽  
Faunal Communities

The present paper reviews a long-term fire experiment in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, established in 1954 to support fire management. The paper’s goals are: (1) to assess learning, with a focus on relevance for fire management; (2) to examine how findings influenced changes in fire management; and (3) to reflect on the experiment’s future. Results show that fire treatments affected vegetation structure and biomass more than species composition. Effects on vegetation were most marked in extreme treatments (annual burning, burning in the summer wet season, or long periods of fire exclusion), and were greater in areas of higher rainfall. Faunal communities and soil physiology were largely unaffected by fire. Since the inception of the experiment, paradigms in savanna ecology have changed to encompass heterogeneity and variability. The design of the experiment, reflecting the understanding of the 1950s, does not cater for variability, and as a result, the experiment had little direct influence on changes in management policy. Notwithstanding this, managers accept that basic research influences the understanding of fundamental ecosystem function, and they recognise that it promotes appropriate adaptive management by contributing to predictive understanding. This has been a major reason for maintaining the experiment for over 50 years.

scholarly journals Teaching and the Phonics Debate: What Can We Learn?

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Thompson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Teaching Practices ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Teaching Reading ◽  
Teaching Culture ◽  
The Status ◽  
Teaching Cultures

There is debate about whether New Zealand practices for teaching reading should include “more phonics”. With the focus on the first two years of school instruction, the status quo of receptive phonics and the teaching culture in which it is embedded are described and compared with the productive phonics practices of other teaching cultures. The response of New Zealand children to this practice is relatively faster reading procedures. However, there is much that remains to be learnt to sharpen New Zealand receptive phonics teaching practices to meet the successive developmental purposes of phonics; and also to reduce repetitive teaching rituals, as in practices to prompt for meaning.

scholarly journals Fledgling South African Anglicanism and the Roots of Ritualism

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew-John Bethke
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Early Generation ◽  
The Status ◽  
High Church

The early years of Anglican ministry in South Africa were primarily among English settlers. Their worship patterns, for the most part, reflected the general trends of English Anglicanism at the time, which itself was influenced theologically and materially by a moderate form of Calvinism. This article examines the ethos of the early generation of Anglicans, and highlights some of the possible reasons why a moderate Calvinistic stance seemed to suit the ordinary settler classes. However, the status quo was challenged by the arrival of Bishop Robert Gray in 1848. Thus, the article continues by exploring some of the reasons why Gray aroused such strong feelings in certain congregations. Among the most important reasons for the opposition against Gray were his Tractarian sympathies. While many historians have agreed that Gray was a high church cleric, most stop short of labelling him a Tractarian. This article critically examines Gray’s sympathies and posits that while he started out firmly within the high church party of Anglicanism, he slowly moved closer and closer to Tractarianism. Finally, the article considers aspects of Gray’s leadership which encouraged a gradual move from moderate Calvinism towards a more definite Tractarian and ritualist stance as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

scholarly journals Judicial Recusal in New Zealand: Looking to Procedure as the Principled

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 415
Author(s):  
Chamika Gajanayaka
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Civil Litigation ◽  
Process Theory ◽  
The Status ◽  
Procedural Safeguards

The well-documented Wool Board Disestablishment Co v Saxmere Co litigation thrust the often dormant issue of conflicts of interest between a judge and a litigant into the limelight. Now that the dust has settled on the controversy that culminated in Wilson J's resignation, it is pertinent to question the status quo and investigate the potential cause of these events. More importantly, it is critical to consider whether measures need to be taken to prevent, or at least to reduce the likelihood of, another such occurrence.This article takes a principled approach to analysing judicial recusal law in New Zealand, with a particular focus on procedure. In doing so, a mismatch between process theory and the reality of haphazard self-regulation highlights the procedural shortcomings of the current judicial recusal paradigm. To remedy this, the author applies aspects of process theory to reform judicial recusal procedure and bring it in line with general civil litigation practice. The proposed reform instils some fundamental practices that are presently absent in recusal procedure. To contextualise the article's findings, the author revisits the Saxmere saga first to posit that a lack of procedural safeguards may have contributed to the saga and secondly, to suggest that, had the procedural safeguards proposed by this article been in place, the controversy could have been mitigated, if not avoided.

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