摘要:Conservation conflicts constitute the public face of resource-management and priority setting. Analyses for conservation priority setting, often restricted to scientific merit, are incomplete without the examination of the political and economic motivations of the protagonists. In a quick overview of selected conservation issues in Australia, the drive to conserve forests is used as the basis of comparison. It is argued that the correspondence of scientific and economic significance on the one hand, and popular sentiment and activism on the other hand, varied widely across the main conservation issues examined.