The Australian Landscape Trust was established by The Ian Potter Foundation in 1996 to help in addressing major issues in the rural sector.  These issues ultimately derive from a legacy of unsustainable uses of natural resources over the course of the past century and a half.  Europeans settling here knew only production methodologies from their cultural heritage developed in deep, fertile soils with predictable climates.  It has taken decades to understand the legacy of past management.  The climate, soils and biota of Australia are different from those of the northern hemisphere.  Australians need to embrace changes that must be made to maintain a landscape so that it is capable of supporting people, production systems and the natural world on which these ultimately are based. 

Not only is Australia coming to terms with major environmental changes that necessitate a redevelopment of primary production, it is also facing significant shifts in the role of government, changes in relationships between rural and urban populations and economies and increased demands for knowledge.  Government policy has responded to many of these changes, but Australia, as well as most of the rest of the world, lacks social structures to ensure the effective transfer of knowledge to those who must apply it to natural resource management and leadership to enable participatory democracy to serve communities.  The role embraced by ALT is about conservation achieved through building community capacity.

The Australian Landscape Trust is part of a series of social and farming experiments starting with the Potter Farmland Plan.  The Plan developed in response to the declining productivity of farms in western Victoria and the fraying of the social fabric of its towns and communities.  The Plan focused on the unit of a single farm and the farming family, seeking out thoughtful and engaged farmers who provided leadership through redesigning their farms in harmony with soils and topography, water resources and the needs of production systems.  The Ian Potter Foundation provided the professional support for these farmer-driven transformations.  Much of the transformation of farms involved revegetating the landscape and managing the water table.  The LANDCARE movement came next, taking these principles to the scale of a district with many individual farming families participating in redesigning the landscape along the principles of sustainable production.  The Australian Landscape Trust extends these social experiments to the scale of the whole landscape engaging with multiple land tenures of both public and private land, integration of conservation and development, above all building capacity in the rural communities to provide leadership, stewardship and a learning community dedicated to long term social, economic and environmental sustainability.

Australian Landscape Trust is committed to backing individuals within communities who are committed to leadership and whose vision is compatible with the values of the Trust.  The professional staff provided by the Trust (land managers, biologists and communicators) support the goals of individuals who seek out the Trust for assistance with programs in conservation, restoration and the pursuit of sustainable production.  These members of communities then work within their established and newly acquired networks to foster cultural change. 

The Trust recognises that conservation and farming are the same in this highly fragmented world in which the impacts of development are everywhere.  Conservation land must be ?¬®farmed??Ü for conservation outcomes just as developed land must be managed for sustainable production.  Therefore, the Trust assumes responsibility for managing properties as a means toward the end of capacity building, not as an end in itself.  Properties become the campus for the multi-partnered academy dedicated to supporting and developing community capacity. No community is an island. The Trust recognises that the world in which it works is becoming ever more complex: knowledge, networks, regulation and policy are constantly changing in response to the drivers of environmental, technological, economic and social changes at regional and global scales. The management of farm properties and development of regional communities must be cognisant of the forces of global climate change, environmental degradation, competition and globalisation. These forces of change impact on the Trust itself as much as on the communities it serves.

The Trust works within degraded landscapes targeted as high priority areas for remediation by the Australian government.  The Trust partners with individuals in the resident communities who have sought the assistance of the Trust.  The Trust collaborates with government in seeking to deliver practical demonstrations on the ground of effective applications of environmental policies.  These generally require cultural change, new knowledge, public education and empowered local leadership.  This is an area of endeavour that is difficult for government to implement, outside the scope of most academic research and teaching programs and vital to the future of communities experiencing environmental change.  The Trust measures its success through that of its core community participants as they succeed in realising their individual goals.  These goals are often ultimately expressed as new programs that grow and become independent of the support of the Trust.

The Trust works in the Riverland of South Australia in an area that faces most of the problems that characterise the environmental degradation of the lower Murray Darling Basin.  The major partners of the Trust are members of the Riverland community and the Australian Government Department of Environment and Heritage.  The Trust and the community deliver the services required to research, restore and manage approximately 350,000 ha of Australian government conservation land in Calperum and Taylorville Stations that is the subject of a management contract between government and the Trust.  The community regularly provides 14,000 volunteer hours in a year to invest their stewardship for this land and its wildlife and to develop related programs that link the natural areas with developed land in primary production..  The contractual arrangement between the Trust and the government has been operating since 1998..

The Trust also works in east Gippsland in Victoria in an area that was occupied early in Australia??s period of European settlement.  Today this area is subject to a range of environmental changes that are the result of unsustainable uses of natural resources.  These include loss of native vegetation, intrusion of saline ground water, subsidence, declining productivity of farms and undesirable changes in the condition of the Gippsland Lakes.   In addition, the area may be experiencing a decline in its rainfall.  The Trust and members of the farming community are exploring areas of new knowledge required by farmers to manage better their resources in the pursuit of regional sustainability.  The Trust has assumed responsibility for Strathfieldsaye Estate, an historic farm with manifestations of the environmental issues that characterise the farms of the region.  In partnership with the farming community, the Trust is providing support for leaders who seek changes in farming practices that will enable their farms and ultimately the farms in the region to be more productive, more resilient and able to benefit from and contribute to essential ecosystem services.

All images courtesy of Italo Vardaro.