Conservation not for faint-hearted

The Castle Hill buttercup is a very special thing. We know this because the 67 examples of the tiny scree plant that grow on Castle Hill in Canterbury are at the top of Department of Conservation’s ranked list of threatened species.

For those of you who have not read L W McCaskill’s passionately detailed nine-page history of the plant – The Castle Hill buttercup; A

story of preservation – published by the Tussock Grasslands and Mountain Lands Institute in the 1980s, this ranking may surprise you.

Because not only might it be the first time you have heard of the stodgy little buttercup, but surely something that rarely grows more than 10 centimetres above ground can’t rank more highly than the remaining 149 ka¯ ka¯ po. Or any of the five species of kiwi, or the takahe¯ or the mighty kauri.

But it does, thanks to a complicated algorithm used by the Department of Conservation to rank the top 150 of our threatened species. A list that includes the stinky fish guts plant, seven types of scurvy grass and 17 snails but does not include such well-known animals as the weka, the katipo or the orange-fronted parakeet.

There is good sense in letting a data-crunching equation influence decisions around what species need to be saved and what can be allowed to go.

DOC has $376 million to spend this year, and literally thousands of species it could protect. Even if its whole budget could be dedicated to keeping them alive, most would miss out.

Were such judgments left entirely to people, it is foreseeable only the cute and cuddly would get the chance to survive. There is merit in that too. To a degree. Arguably the biggest value of the panda is as a heartstring-pulling symbol for the World Wildlife Fund.

Much the same could be said for the kiwi. Their loveability is the bait that may lure us to bite down hard on the conservation hook.

Any ranking system is going to fall short. Everything alive on this planet right now has made the same unlikely journey of survival through billions of years of catastrophe after catastrophe that has destroyed an overwhelming majority of anything that ever was.

If it is here right now, it is in an extremely select club of survivors, the membership of which makes them all arguably pretty equal.

But rank we must, because conservation on a budget requires focus. DOC can’t achieve everything, but if it’s disciplined it can achieve some things. It can save the Castle Hill buttercup. It can bring the ka¯ ka¯ po back from the brink.

Regardless of whether you agree on the relative merits of saving these species, a genuine national commitment to conservation will require that hard questions be asked of ourselves, quite outside of the list of glamorous and not-so-glamorous species pegged for protection.

Ultimately we must ask ourselves if the best we can do for the biodiversity of our country are such things as trapping and killing those cute and snuffly hedgehogs that inhabit our gardens and feast on our snails.

And then perhaps we should face up to the fact that, in a land of the flightless bird, owning a cuddly cat is harbouring a monster.

‘‘A genuine national commitment to conservation will require that hard questions be asked of ourselves, quite outside of the list of glamorous and not-so-glamorous species pegged for protection.’’