Eco-lecture

This evening S and I went with daughter J to the Royal Society of New Zealand "Rutherford Lecture" held at the Auckland (War Memorial) Museum. The Royal Society of New Zealand (150 years old this year) collaborates with the Royal Society (London) to bring a lecturer to New Zealand every four years. This year the lecturer is Dame Georgina Mace, whose lecture was entitled "How should we value nature in a human-dominated world?"

She gave an excellent talk in which she discussed the way that conservation has moved from protecting pristine environments (often remote and people-less, to recognising that nature is valuable in conjunction with humans, and that without integration not only the natural world will suffer, so will the human world.

As she warned us at the start of her lecture, some of the audience were concerned about "putting a value" (i.e. an economic worth) on nature. She responded to the inevitable question about that, by saying that the value is how much we are prepared to pay to maintain nature. Another view of this issue is what we should charge businesses and developers and so on to maintain (at the least) the environment.

Before the lecture started I looked out the windows from the function room at The Museum at the beautiful city in which we live. Set on twin harbours, and marked by multiple volcanoes. The windows noted the volcanoes visible from the function room; there were another three sets of labels. The museum is built on the highest point of the tuff ring around the lava lake which now forms the playing fields in the Auckland Domain