The title of David Eastburn’s Human Ecology forum discussion was The Price of pre-ecological policy inertia: 10,000 hectares of dead Red Gums? And what we got from David was an emphatic removal of the question mark in his title and, sadly, its replacement by an exclamation mark…The kernel of David’s story is this: on the lower Murrumbidgee Floodplain, between Hay and Balranald in the west of NSW, lays a major wetland area called the Lowbidgee. This wetland system, largest on the Murrumbidgee with the second largest Red Gum forests in Australia and also an area contributing a significant amount of organic food to market has, through a set of policy and practical histories, been sorely neglected in terms of its socio-ecological health. Parts of the landscape are now ‘stranded’ (essentially dried out) leading to the deaths of thousands of native Red Gums and the stressing of local communities by the failures in governance and engagement that propagated these strandings. The Lowbidgee has been treated as a ‘bank’ by the State and professional/economic groups and from which water could be extracted (upstream) or shifted around as dictated by needs external to the Lowbidgee. Further, local communities, adept at utilising the landscape with some degree of sensitivity, have been treated poorly due to the perception that they where backward at developing the Lowbidgee. The locals, by carefully allocating their agricultural practices and by spreading out their own extractive activities, had found some ways of both maintaining the ecological health of the Lowbidgee and supporting their own lives. This all in a far more effective manner than the one that is being steadily propagated through policy inertia and poor management decisions largely imposed from elsewhere. The struggle between more externally orientated forces (like the State) and locals, in part lead since 1899 by the Wetland Defenders League (now the Lowbidgee League), has reduced but not ameliorated the loss of wetland. David made the plea for recognising the importance of local people’s knowledges and economic practices alongside the inadvisability of dismissing the importance of unique ecosystems for the sake of developments elsewhere (this was neatly summed up in this roughly reproduced statement of John Monash’s, active in the area in the early 1900s, …the life of spoonbills through to the local shop assistant are dependent on the sustainability of the wetlands). All of this points to the continued need for us to reconstitute our ideals of the governance of socio-ecological systems and, as David pointed out, well exemplified by Biosphere reserves as one effort to do just that. All in all a sobering, sad but yet hopeful discussion lead by David into one of the great conundrums of our time; how can we live meaningfully without severely altering the very foundations upon which life is founded.