environments form the platform on which truly wealthy economies are built. The orthodox view is that to be environmentally healthy you first have to be financially wealthy. That casts environmental health as a cost, not an investment. The orthodox economic view works for a time if you adopt an ethic of passing the environmental cost on to future generations. But environmental debt is eventually no more sustainable than financial debt, as the world is discovering now. If conservationists are going to accept they are part of the solution then we must do two things; challenge the orthodox and achieve more in their efforts to protect nature. This is the challenge we are struggling with, and that is defining the future that DOC sees for itself. This is not about abandoning our core conservation work and value set. For DOC,  it does mean putting a sharper focus over our own business to ensure we maximise the amount we can do with the resource we have, and ensure the most important and urgent work is prioritised, and that we think and work differently to see more achieved for conservation. It is a disruptive and unsettling process. But we cannot pretend that we were fit for this challenge; the challenge of achieving far more for conservation through partnerships than DOC can achieve working with its own resources. By partnership I mean a relationship where both parties benefit, and the effect is to increase the conservation effort beyond that which they could achieve on