from the ABC Website
The New South Wales state government has recently commenced the aerial killings of 14,000 feral horses residing in Kosciuszko National Park. The goal is to meet the legislated requirement of reducing the number of horses in the park to 3,000 by 2027. This legislation was passed because NSW has the legal mandate of protecting biodiversity and because the activities of feral horses are classified as a threat to native species, such as Corroboree frogs and broad-tooth rats.
This policy illustrates the normative assumptions of conservation policy-makers, which are well-captured in Michael Soulé’s famous article, “What Is Conservation Biology?”. In that article, Soulé makes two key claims:
- that biodiversity is a synonym for “native species diversity”;
- that the protection of native species is the moral cornerstone of the discipline — and hence that sources of ethical value other than biodiversity ought to be subordinated to biodiversity.
We contend that both of these claims are problematic. Before we explain why, it is worth noting that there are alternative accounts of biodiversity which are often, if not always, ignored by policy-makers. For this reason, we are only engaging Soulé’s understanding of biodiversity, which is the one most policy-makers adopt.
