Farmers did not create this problem, in the sense that society cleared this land and society has a role to play in restoring it and protecting it. There's going to have to be a different view taken to land management overall. It is big change compared to practices of the past. And yet, the clearing goes on today at the rate of at least 100,000 hectares a year. Given the doubts and fears held by some of our most senior scientists, such action seems astonishingly reckless.
Environmental problems have a habit of coming and going.
Whether we have the brain power and the financial power to really hold this problem and make a difference I think is the challenge in front of us, but the alternative is to have that land get destroyed, those people go broke and that land wiped out for perhaps a pretty long period. Yes, I certainly am, certainly hundred years.