http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/meat-ants-cane-toad-cull-australia

No scientist would ever recommend the actions taken, but scientists are rarely the ones making these decisions. A sound desire to maintain the integrity of our biosphere, and a healthy humility with regards to the scope or our knowledge are a prerequisite to responsible and positive actions

Any solution put in place that does not have these components is doomed to eventual failure. I understand the difficulties in getting people of disparate views to agree – and the real possibility that personal histories may make agreement for current actors impossible.

So much of our science seems to follow the road map of the underpants gnomes :

step 1 – do science
step 2 – ?
step 3 – sound management practices

Science’s role in this process is to develop practical (economically, socially) metrics and solutions for saving our biodiversity (step 1). But this will be so much empty writing until our populace has a broad land use ethic (step 2 ?). From this we’ll create a pool of actors who are equipped and motivated to create and implement sound, long term resource management (step 3).

1. top down by an enlightened, progressive government/dictator
2. bottom up, by and educated, involved populace

only # 2 is sustainable

We need to achieve balance across levels of governance. It’s not either/or but both. Local level management is necessary, but gets increasingly more difficult by scaling out and adding heterogeneous actors.