Similarly, we tend to vote for candidates that represent a worldview reflective of our own. While developing strategies that mitigate risks, enhance brand value, and increase profitability for my customers, I also get to understand how they feel on issues of conservation or sustainability, which is generally a good indicator of worldview. To be clear, these are only observations. It gained even more limelight when sustainability was made the concept of the developmental goals set by the United Nations.
Because of such popularity, sustainability was defined as a collection of processes and courses of action that people can do to minimize and avoid the consumption of natural resources so we can maintain an ecological balance and improve the quality of human life. Straightforwardly, conservation is one of the pathways to sustainability. Generally, it means taking action towards the long-term preservation of natural resources before they deplete or humans consume them until nothing is left.
According to the Cambridge English dictionary, conservation is specifically defined as the protection of plants, animals, and natural areas. Both ideas clearly suggest the strategy we need to make for us to protect the world. Both words also shed light on the role humans play in its protection, consumption, preservation in as much as its destruction.
With the above, it is quite easy to analyze and understand that conservation is a requirement. It is imperative to carry through sustainability since the preservation of resources, which includes water, soil, and fossil fuels are directly linked to ensuring the capability of the future generations to meet their own needs or simply preparedness.
Skip to main content. Toggle navigation. What's the Difference Between "Conservation" and "Preservation"? Why conservation? The word sustainability is usually used to mean sustainable production of agricultural products, that is farming the land in such a way that it stays healthy and productive and will be in as good or better shape in a hundred years time as it is now.
Landholders will use any mix of species native or exotic to achieve this ends. They generally have few ideals but many practicalities to shape their choice of species. Carting and spreading of manure from dairys and piggeries back onto the land to prevent water table pollution and to return nutrients to the soil,.
Fertilizing with trace elements that have been gradually removed from the soil after years of intensive production,. Being very careful with herbicide and pesticide use and avoiding them altogether where possible. All these things are the responsibility of individual farmers, and farmers expect to carry the cost of achieving them. Some sustainable practices such as repairing salt damage may be beyond individual farmers ability to repair completely on their own because the damage has been going on for so long before anyone realised the cause of it and even now there is still some debate about the cause In fact governments may be spending millions of dollars planting trees only to find out in the future that their assumptions were wrong.
See Dr. Christine Jone's article on salinity. Farmers will spend time and money on these issues because it is their job to produce food and fibre for the world and they want their farms to continue to be able to do so indefinitely at least as well as they are doing it now.
After all, population growth is continuing dramatically and farmers do feel some aspect of responsibility to feed the world. To quote from "Environmental Science" a current university Environmental Science text book , "If populations continue to grow at present rates, the production of food must double or triple by the first decade of the next century for all people to be adequately fed.
The word conservation is generally used to means the conserving of the diversity of plants and animals that live in the world and sometimes includes the concept of conserving the various genetic strains with-in species as well as the actual species themselves. This is of course a vitally important aim. Once a species is extinct it is gone forever and no change of mind can bring it back again so surely our society has to make every effort to maintain all species of plants and animals even the ones we don't like very much!
As a society we have to not just provide for a species for this year or this decade. We have to have a plan that will work for centuries to come which is why on the home page of this site we refer to "sustainable conservation".
People assume when they hear the word conservation that it means to "lock up" a certain area of land and "leave it in it's natural state". Supposedly the plants and animals that live and interact there will continue on indefinitely. At present when land is set aside like this few checks are done to see if the land is continuing to maintain the ecosystem that we were worried about.
As far as is possible we need to make regular checks to see if the method of conservation we have chosen is succeeding. We can not check every species in an ecosystem of course this would include creatures such as insects and micro-organisms but we can monitor plants fairly easily and we can monitor animals at the top of the food chain who would show signs of distress if anything is wrong further down the food chain and we can monitor any species we know of that are either naturally rare or threatened by some other unnatural process.
One example of where this "lock it up and leave it to nature" has failed is in so called "brittle" areas where humidity is low and rainfall irregular. Domestic stock have been removed from sections of land in these environments and the pastures and native wildlife were expected to thrive.
For the first few years they did do a bit better, but then they gradually declined and the land declined and began to desertify. By this time monitoring of the areas had stopped and only local people who governments and scientists do not often listen to know that the system is failing. We can't assume that we know everything about an environment - some small thing we over look can have a dramatic effect years later.
Of course it would be very expensive and time consuming to be constantly monitoring and adjusting management over large areas of land set aside for conservation, but if conservation is important to us then it should be done properly.
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