Run national parks to make money, says professor

by SARAH ALLELY*

A visiting British professor says New Zealand's wilderness areas should be run as moneymaking enterprises.

Professor Ian Swingland, founder of the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology in Britain, advocates taking national parks out of the hands of the state and giving control to private interests.

The professor, a guest at Auckland's Ignite2001 festival, says that in New Zealand local communities and iwi could get together with the Department of Conservation to run national parks, with private companies paying for 50-year leases, and Government monitoring every five years.

He says this would give people a voice. "This is conservation in action - people benefiting from live conservation."

Conservation assets need to be owned by specific groups or else everybody uses them and nobody takes care of them, he says.

Professor Swingland says although New Zealand is famous for its conservation attempts, they have not been very successful.

"The government has paid for conservation as if it were a Cinderella."

He campaigns to commercialise conservation so that bio-diversity, or living organisms, are used as assets to provide wealth and jobs, while conserving plant and animal species.

Professor Swingland says conservation as we know it hasn't worked, with state control of resources and national parks failing to prevent ecological disaster.

The donation method of conservation, he says, has failed, with most of the funds going to organisational overheads.

* The author is a journalism student at Auckland University of Technology.

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