Dr Tony Parkes, co-founder and president of Big Scrub Landcare, has won the prestigious Banksia Award for Community Environmental Leadership at a special ceremony at the University of Sydney this week.
The Federal Minister for the Environment & Energy Josh Frydenberg, each year awards an Australian who has shown inspirational leadership in caring for and nurturing our environment.
Dr Parkes said the award reflected the commitment of ‘so many people including the regenerators, stakeholders, and landowners who strive to protect what’s left of our region’s critically endangered lowland subtropical rainforest and its magnificent biodiversity’.
In other news, Big Scrub Landcare also received first place in the highly regarded Society of Ecological Restoration Australasia (SERA) awards for Excellence in Ecological Restoration Practice.
The award acknowledges Big Scrub Landcare’s significant and enduring contribution to the practice of ecological restoration over it’s 24 year long Big Scrub Rainforest Restoration Program – aimed to save our region’s critically endangered lowland subtropical rainforest and its magnificent biodiversity. The recognition has a strong science and environmental outcomes based focus.
Nice to see but are we kidding ourselves? The State government has introduced new biodiversity laws which threaten all or any of our precious environment outside of national parks. Basically nothing is safe given that threatened and endangered species are often outside of national parks. Offsets which is offered as one way to compensate the impact of farming or development is a joke and when offsets do not even try to pretend that its a swap of likes for likes then what is safe?
All the good work by so many people including our award winning Dr Parkes could just fall victim to insatiable investors who have such a tight grip on our government.
I am not by any means belittling the work of dedicated landcare people who give so much of themselves but i think that we have to organise ourselves so we can have more of an impact on todays governemnts.
The path both federal and state governments are leading us onto has made it a matter of survival or extinction for so many of our threatened species it is therefore imperative that we must become a political force to be reckoned with otherwise we are just burying our heads in the sand. Awards for environmental work by a government prepared to support the likes of Adani are nothing but shams dirty tricks.