[Extract] Rural land degradation has never enjoyed the status, attention and emotive appeal of other environmental issues. Next to rainforest destruction, reef development and koala disease, the problems of soil erosion, salinity and acidification simply haven't been 'sexy' enough to capture the public or political consciousness. In 1989, however, the Commonwealth Government responded to a joint submission by the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) and the "Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) by establishing the National Landcare Program (NLP) and declaring the 1990s the 'Decade of Landcare'. At the heart of the Landcare Program was the promotion and support of a nation-wide network of community Landcare groups, each oriented towards tackling local land degradation problems to help ensure the sustainability of agriculture and rural communities. Although the impact of the Landcare Program on the Australian landscape is very much open to debate, Landcare has been widely heralded as an extraordinary success. Importantly -and despite the biophysical and techno-scientific bias of most resource management programs and agencies in Australia - this perceived success rests very much on the social impact of Landcare.
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Critical Landcare
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978-1-875781-40-9
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7
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Charles Sturt University
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Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia
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