Your conservator sounds like he has a point: should we really spend large amounts of a limited budget on preserving a small number 'museum reclic' species which will never be able to stand on their own 2 feet? Species which have no close relatives, limited genetic diversity and thus limited opportunity to adapt and adjust to the new reality of introduced predators and modified environments? Or should the same money can be spent on ecosystem restoration and protection and thus benefit a whole range of species - potentially stopping them from becoming endangered in the first place. Or have I just condemned myself as a heretic?
As for saving trampers vs protectiong wildlife: within an area these come out of different budgets and so do not compete as such. Does anyone know at which point these budgets are set (the allocation of DoC funds to recreation vs historic vs biodiversity): internally to DOC or externally by the government?
We have to give the system a chance. Lets wait for the first search initiated using that system and see how it goes.
Do we have a volunteer for this somewhat risky mission?
its been in use long enough, it sounds like it's had a very poor uptake and people are being put at risk due to being unaware of it's existance. publicity seems to have been a massive failure. more neds to be done to get the awareness up before people's lives are put at risk due to lack of logging intentions...
"Or should the same money can be spent on ecosystem restoration and protection and thus benefit a whole range of species"
It's a fair question, but I think the true context in which to consider it would still need to acknowledge that the "limited budget" is exactly what it is for artificial reasons. DoC doesn't struggle for funding of programmes because it has to balance one thing against another. It struggles for funding because we choose not to give it so much money in exchange for lower taxes, things like education and health funding and any number of others, many of which absolutely eclipse the dosh that DoC and other related organisations ever see. If you wanted to condemn yourself as a heretic, you could ask if it's worth more to preserve the Kakapo and a rare dolphin to maintain that side of diversity for future generations, or to extend the lives of another X cancer sufferers on the public health system for Y more years. That's the sort of thing that's really competing, and it's a much tougher and more emotionally charged question to answer.
depends who the cancer sufferers are? if they are smokers or heavy drinkers, or obese from poor lifestyle choices, I"m not interested in spending money on self inflicted diseases. i'd much rather the endangered animals get it.... it promotes an interest in the outdoors for young people and healthy living....
I think I know what I think but I'm not very keen to get into that debate at present. With that specific example it'd probably be really easy to find 10+ cancer sufferers who'd forego their treatment to preserve a Kakapo species, but as soon as they did it there'd be people on a waiting list arguing that they should be getting the treatment instead. 'Course, for the Kakapo specifically there are many more problems than just money and there's a fantastic overview of its problems as part of a talk by Douglas Adams from about a week before he died -- http://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_and_everything.html . Let's talk about sacrificing education in exchange for a cute carnivorous snail instead.
My main intended point though was that the $360m Conservation Vote funding could easily be doubled if the country did something like raise taxes a small amount (specifically for Conservation) or sacrifice a comparably small part of something else to compensate, because certain other things are so massive by comparison with the Conservation Vote such as the $2.7b Tertiary Education Vote or the $2.3b Defence Vote or the enormous $13.5b Health Vote. Conservation's very little by comparison, which means if people actually cared enough (and were vocal about it) it'd be feasible to reallocate large chunks of money.
There are many political barriers to that sort of thing, though, and why double Conservation if you could double something else people also seem to care about, like the $1.4b Police Vote or the $1.2b locking-people-up Corrections Vote? It's all politics.
I should have added that I think the only time we should be debating about trading off recreation versus conservation, apart from where they physically conflict, in anything other than the short term is if we've already accepted that the management of public lands should perpetually be run on a shoestring budget compared with many of the other things the government's involved with administering.
well they could get cheaper pest control if they released predators that will kill the bird predators and not the birds
Back to the original topic, I think the tourism industry (not led by DoC but maybe fostered by DoC and especially the Ministry of Tourism) should be organising its own system to provide easily available trusted contacts for all the visitors who simply don't have anyone they can trust. People who are visiting from far overseas, and so on.
It shouldn't be too hard to create one or more businesses that take commissions from people to record intentions, helping people to properly specify them, and then reliably raise an alarm when people don't report in. Or hell, pay DoC to allocate time for its knowledgeable visitor centre staff at key locations to take intentions on behalf of the business. Perhaps do something like take a deposit that gets mostly returned upon signing out by a stated panic time, to encourage people to actually sign out properly instead of leaving the intentions hanging.
i wonder if doc have the funds to reorganise themselves to provide another service, they are struggling to maintain their current level of service
