A battle is shaping for the soul of environmentalism across the planet.
The danger to our world heritage areas worldwide comes not only from politicians who use semantics to redefine what’s wild or not, if comes from a breed of modern naturalists trying to put a human value on pristine places.
In fact some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They argue that most of these far-flung corners of the universe which somehow have escaped man’s modification of landscape in the name of mining or agriculture still have human footprints, even if they were laid before the modern industrial age, and therefore cannot be described as “wild” in the true sense of the word.
It’s an argument that fits nicely with the Tasmanian Government’s campaign to drop the term “wilderness” in defining the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, saying, among other things, it offends Aborigines by denying them the right to claim time and place within the south-west region.
There’s a recently fashionable notion in some environmentalist circles that pristine nature is an illusion. Our wilderness treasured by so many is an outdated construct that never actually existed.
The ideals of conservation are under attack by what are termed the green modernists, a group of influential mainly American thinkers who take a pragmatic stand to argue that the human species has become so dominant in its control of Mother Nature that we might as well regard the Earth as a giant garden. We live in what’s now termed the Anthropocene epoch – the age of man.
We must get over our obsession with wilderness, they state, because there’s no longer such a thing, if ever there was in the history of the human species. Wilderness is in fact “wildness” that can now merely exist in a state that is designed and managed to serve human wants. Wilderness in itself is not important.
And as for those who appreciate and respect animals and plants for their own sake, they are just being sentimental.
The division within the wildlife establishment has been highlighted in media outlets as diverse as the online environmental journal Aeon and the New York Times.
The new pragmatists are led in part by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation. He urges nature-lovers to “jettison their idealised notions of nature, parks and wilderness’’ and quit “pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake’’.
Peter Kareiva’s mantra is summarised by a writer in the New York Times as:
“Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Henry David Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.”
Kareiva is supported by eminent American science writer Emma Marris who imagines the Earth as a “half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us’’. As Marris argues in her book Rambunctious Garden, Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World: ‘‘We are already running the whole Earth.’’
An Aeon article by Brandon Keim, titled “Earth is not a garden”, points out green modernism expands on arguments that have percolated through conservation for the past couple of decades, and came to prominence with Marris’s book and Love Your Monsters: Post-environmentalism and the Anthropocene, a collection of essays produced in 2011 by the Breakthrough Institute, a green modernist-leaning think tank based in California.
Green modernists call for corporate partnerships and an emphasis on ‘‘ecosystem services’, by which nature is measured and commodified according to the benefits it provides humans. This extends to commercial activity in national parks, as proposed by the Tasmanian Government.
What I personally find frightening in this new approach by the green modernists – also called new conservationists, post-environmentalists and eco-pragmatists – is the notion that humans are pre-eminent and other forms of life do not have the same value and status.
It harks back to the Medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being, with humans and then God at the top. Life only exists in relation to us.
I felt very uncomfortable when I listened to a broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Shared Planet environment program, dealing with the notion of conservation triage which is taking hold among wildlife scientists worldwide. This involves making an assessment on what wildlife can be saved, and what can be let go. The plan is addressed at not wasting money and time on species sliding inexorably to extinction, and devoting scarce resources in a timely manner to those with a good chance of survival.
I’m not suggesting that scientists discussing conservation triage, on land and at sea, have a lesser passion for animals, birds, insects, plants and wildlife in general than people like myself who merely find poetry and not science in wild creatures and places. The wildlife professionals are merely being pragmatic in an age when the planet has lost half of its wildlife in the past 50 years. They maintain that if limited resources are spread too thin, then nothing will be saved.
But pragmatism, whether it is about saving a single species or whole habitats and environments like a wilderness area, ignores principle, and the intrinsic value of other lives. And the importance of sharing.
It is in fact hauling up the white flag, surrendering, and ignoring the fact that just a fraction of the vast wealth derived from mining and agriculture, and other human endeavour, could be diverted to saving all creatures with which we share the planet.
Both the debate about redefining the South-West wilderness area and the cost-benefit analysis of saving species – because in the jargon of the financial world that is what it is – reminds me of the furore a few years back when the state Labor environment minister of the time, David Llewellyn, stated government scientists had told him the swift parrot could not be saved.
The parrot has turned up in the flowering blue gums adjoining my garden this summer and has generated much excitement in the Waterworks Valley community. I firmly believe – with swift parrot numbers still relatively high compared with other species considered in peril – this beautiful little bird could be saved, if land was bought to preserve more of its summer bluegum breeding grounds in Tasmania, and its wintering grounds among the ironbark forests of Victoria and New South Wales.
It would require great cost, though, and how could this be justified in an increasingly anthropocentric world? And, most importantly, would there be the will?
I’ve travelled the road of pragmatism, of compromise, myself. Although I advocate conservation in the column on birdwatching I write for the Sunday Tasmanian, Hobart, I’ve been criticised by the anti-hunting and anti-fishing lobby in the past for pointing out that wildfowlers protect wetlands for other species, land that might otherwise be drained. On the now outlawed “sport” of fox hunting in Britain, I’ve made the point that the fox hunters preserved farmland with its associated hedges and copses when much of Britain had been turned into industrialised, prairie-style farmland. At a cost of about 2000 foxes killed each year, millions of other animals and birds survived (some farmland bird species like the skylark have suffered a 50 per cent decline in Britain in recent years).
I don’t fish – or hunt for that matter – but I’m aware that, again in Britain, the River Thames is the cleanest it’s been in 300 years, mainly because of the cash-backed lobbying by anglers. Conservationists could never have ensured the return of a long-vanished fish species, the shad, and dolphins and whales.
I’m revising my position now, concentrating less on balance and compromise and swaying towards hard-nosed idealism and principle. The trouble with being a realist, if you give those who want to exploit nature an inch, they’ll take a mile.
And the tyres of four-wheel drive vehicles will etch and pave the road to what was once termed “wilderness”, and the route will be decorated with beer cans and cigarette butts, as I have seen along the North-West coast in my pursuit there of the Tasmanian devil and wedge-tailed eagle.
Talking Point, the Mercury, Hobart; May 2016