There are those who, after having accumulated a great fortune, dream of a yacht or a postcard villa. An Australian couple, instead, decided to buy something much more rare: thousands of hectares of forest to return to nature.
Mike Gregg, among the first investors of the technology company WiseTech Global, and his wife Sue Gregg have earmarked about $10 million in Australia to purchase over 7,000 hectares of land in New South Wales. For decades those areas had been exploited by breeding and deforestation, leaving behind a deeply degraded ecosystem.
Their choice is not born from the idea of creating a new business. On the contrary, the objective is to stop all commercial exploitation and allow nature to recover its spaces.
As Mike Gregg told, when they realized they had gained much more than they ever imagined possible, they felt that wealth also involved responsibility. For this reason they preferred to invest in the future of the environment instead of in luxury goods.
Through the Great Southern Land Conservancy foundation, created along with the conservative Atticus Fleming, they purchased six neighboring properties in the south-western area of Port Macquarie. The aim is to achieve one of the most extensive private sanctuaries for the conservation of biodiversity of the entire state.
The project is already operational. The removal of invasive plant species, the control of wild animals, the recovery of the most damaged areas and targeted interventions to reduce the risk of fire, favouring the regrowth of the original forest.
Another fundamental result will be the creation of a large ecological corridor connected to other protected areas. This will allow animals to move more easily, to find new habitats after fires and to face with greater chances of survival the effects of climate change.
In these woods live some of Australia's most vulnerable species, including koala, southern giant petauro, quoll from the tail maculata and the rare black cacatua from the polished tail. To monitor the fauna will be installed 280 phototraps and a scientific study will try to check if this guest reserve the largest population of koala ever documented on private land in New South Wales.
This story shows that the value of a wealth is not only measured by what it allows to possess, but also by what makes it possible to protect. In this case, thousands of hectares of forest and a safer future for a natural heritage that was likely to be lost.