PLAYING GOD OR GARDENING?
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PLANT TRANSLOCATIONS AND SUSTAINABLE RECOVERY RUTH DAVIS I work as the co-ordinator of a species conservation programme called Back from the Brink, run by the plant conservation charity, Plantlife. The programme has anything up to 35 individual species programmes operating at one time, which include vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens, stoneworts and fungi. In England, it is a partnership project with English Nature’s own Species Recovery Programme, and is jointly funded. Like anyone involved in species conservation work, I frequently ‘run into’ the issue of translocations, and their desirability as a recovery technique. This conference in fact comes at a very opportune time for me, because Plantlife is currently reviewing and updating its own policy on translocations, and so the subject is particularly fresh in my mind. There seemed to me to be various ways in which a paper on plant translocations could be written – a ‘dos and don’ts’ paper; an historical review of the subject; a ‘translocations I have known’ ramble. To another audience any of these might have been appropriate, but I was aware that the subject had been chosen today because this is an occasion which likes to provoke debate rather than to suppress it. I have therefore taken the presentation of this paper as a chance to explore a little of the ideology of translocations – and how it relates to the practicalities of rare plant conservation. I hope that isn’t too threatening a beginning! In order to do this, I am going to interweave a discussion about changing attitudes to introductions and re-introductions with references to one project in particular, that for the very rare plant starfruit (Damasonium alisma). I make no apologies for using this now familiar example; partly because it is a beautiful and charismatic plant; partly because it inspires passion in people, and I like it when people feel passionately about plants; and partly because it has been the subject of translocations in the past, and is likely to be so again in the future. Treading softly: the distaste of British natural historians for translocations In the past, there is no doubt that many naturalists and conservationists have seen translocations as a last resort; and generally an undesirable last resort at that; reflecting, I think, their dislike of radical (and hence ‘unnatural’) interventions in the ‘natural’ environment. It is funny, however, that sometimes those most passionately opposed in principle to the idea of moving plants around change their mind when its their pet plant or project that is at stake. Someone else’s translocation can always be accused of being ‘the worst kind of gardening’, creating ‘conservation dependent’ populations, blurring the patterns of historical distribution and at best putting off a well-deserved extinction. Your own, on the other hand, is a stunning plant rescue, which you are secretly gratified to see presented in the local press as ‘conservation hero saves rare plant from certain death’. Peter Marren put this particularly well (as ever) in his book on Britain’s rare plants, when he said that ‘the appeal of
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 37 (2001)