To be held at 10.30 am on Saturday 8th June 2013
At: The Totoki Room, Jubilee Building, Parnell, Auckland
Any member may attend this meeting. Please advise the NSTC Secretary if you intend to go so that we can inform our committee. NSTC Secretary: Katy Johns ph 442-1204 or 027-385-3228
I recently attended the FMC 80th anniversary conference & AGM in Wellington. Normally the AGM is a 1-day event, but this conference was a larger 2-day event. The theme of the conference was “Forever wild? Our conservation lands in the 21st century”. This reflects the new understanding that having parks protected by laws is not absolute protection. The laws can be changed allowing the parks to be attacked as we have seen recently with mining proposals.
There were more than 120 people there and I was impressed that, of my collection of tramping guide books, about half the authors were present in the room, including Rob Brown, Robin McNeill, Ann Dudley and Craig Potton who gave a slide show using real slides and a real projector, something I haven’t seen for many years.
Dr Jan Wright (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment) talked about her recent report on 1080 poison, and Kate Wilkinson (Minister of Conservation) gave the government’s position. While the government accepts that our forests are under attack from the terrible three (possums, rats and stoats), and that 1080 is the most economic way to deal with them, it has no money to fund this. The forests have to pay for their own pest control using money generated from commercial activities. The government view is that parks shouldn’t just be locked up and left – there should be value extracted from them. In a political forum discussion including National, Labour, Greens and United it became clear that National placed least importance on conservation.
On the other hand, pest control is a new form of recreation for many people!
I also learned what “stewardship land” is. (I had previously heard the term but not known what it is.) Stewardship land is land that the Crown owns, but has not decided what to do with yet. (Eg to protect in a park or to dispose of.) The Mokihinui dam proposal was on stewardship land. The stewardship lands need to be reviewed and desirable parts given appropriate protection.
At the AGM the constitution was changed to allow “partial declaration” for clubs who don’t want to declare all their members and pay the FMC fee of $10 per member. Some clubs have been doing this unofficially for some time. There will be different rates set for full and partial declaration clubs.
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Ian G Morris will be attending in Wellington 11-12th June.
