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Among Australia’s many innovative private initiatives to address environmental problems are several that I encountered while visiting a former sheep and farm property of nearly 1,000 square miles near the Murray River, called Calperum Station. First leased for grazing in 1851, it fell victim to the usual panoply of Australian environmental problems: deforestation, foxes, land clearance by chaining and burning, overirrigation, overstocking, rabbits, salinization, weeds, wind erosion, and so on. In 1993 it was bought by the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Chicago Zoological Society, the latter (despite being U.S.-based) already attracted by Australia’s pioneering efforts in developing ecologically sustainable land practices. For some years after that purchase, government managers applied top-down control and gave orders to local community volunteers, who became increasingly frustrated, until in 1998 control was turned over to the private Australian Landscape Trust mobilizing 400 local volunteers for bottom-up community management. The trust is funded in large degree by Australia’s largest private philanthropic organization, The Potter Foundation, which is expressly concerned with reversing the degradation of Australia’s farmland.

Under the trust’s management, local volunteers at Calperum threw themselves into whatever projects appealed to each volunteer’s own interest. By thus enlisting volunteers, this private initiative has been able to accomplish far more than would have been possible with the limited available government funds alone. Volunteers trained at Calperum have then gone on to use those skills to undertake other conservation projects elsewhere. Among the projects that I saw, one volunteer was devoting herself to a small endangered kangaroo species whose population she was trying to restore; another volunteer preferred to poison foxes, one of the area’s most damaging introduced pest species; and still other volunteers were attacking the ubiquitous problem of rabbits, seeking ways to control introduced carp in the Murray River, perfecting a strategy for non-chemical control of insect pests of citrus trees, restoring lakes that had become sterile, revegetating overgrazed land, and developing markets for growing and selling local wildflowers and plants controlling erosion. These efforts deserve a prize for imagination and enthusiasm. Literally tens of thousands of other such private initiatives are operating around Australia: for instance, another organization that also grew in part out of The Potter Foundation’s Potter Farmland Plan, called Landcare, is helping 15,000 individual farmers wanting to help themselves to pass on their farms in decent condition to their children.

Complementing these imaginative private initiatives are government initiatives that include a radical rethinking of Australian agriculture, in response to growing awareness of the seriousness of Australia’s problems. It is too early to guess whether any of these radical plans will be adopted, but the fact that salaried government employees are being permitted and even paid to develop them is remarkable. The proposals are not coming from idealistic bird-loving environmentalists but from hard-nosed economists, who are asking themselves: would Australia be better off economically without much of its present agricultural enterprise?

The background to this rethinking is the realization that only tiny areas of Australian land currently being used for agriculture are productive and suitable for sustained agricultural operations. While 60% of Australia’s land area and 80% of its human water use are dedicated to agriculture, the value of agriculture relative to other sectors of the Australian economy has been shrinking to the point where it now contributes less than 3% of the gross national product. That’s a huge allocation of land and scarce water to an enterprise of such low value. Furthermore, it is astonishing to realize that over 99% of that agricultural