The New Nature Page 5
Tasmania’s buttongrass moors are changing fast. Shrubs and trees from nearby rainforests are invading. To save the moors – the main habitat in south-west Tasmania – national park rangers burn. Fires kill the invaders but maintain the buttongrass, which sprouts anew. It is superbly adapted for fire, burning even when cold and wet. Lightning fires are rare in Tasmania, and the fires that kept out the rainforest before must have been lit by people. Early explorers down that way observed many fires. J. Goodwin, who passed near the Gordon River in 1828, saw ‘a number of native fires on the hills’ and observed that ‘the grass appeared to have been burned recently, and frequently’. Every line of evidence suggests that the buttongrass moors – covering a million hectares – were produced by human fire. The orange-bellied parrot is thus another endangered species in a humanised landscape.
In winter snow blankets the moors and the parrots retire to the mainland. Here their ways have changed over the years. Many make for South Australia, where they harvest the seeds of a beach weed from Europe – searocket (Cakile maritima). Others gather along the shores of southern Victoria, on samphire flats and shrublands, and also, say experts, ‘on grassy fairways of golf courses’, ‘sewage-filtration paddocks; grassy tracks round edges of sewage-treatment ponds or other grassy areas near saltmarsh; and occasionally in improved pasture’. I’ve seen them at Melbourne’s sewage farm. In Victoria they like the seeds of three weeds – capeweed, orache and a plantain. All this goes to show that orange-bellied parrots live a thoroughly contrived lifestyle. Half the year they spend in landscapes made by Aborigines (and maintained by park rangers); the other half in landscapes made by Europeans, often feeding on foreign weeds. That they survive at all may be owing to major fires lit by miners in the 1940s that kept large stretches of buttongrass in place. These days they depend upon incendiary devices spat out of planes.
This parrot embodies a mystery. Where did it live before people brought fire? Nowhere, says Jon Marsden-Smedley, the fire management officer for south-west Tasmania. He believes it evolved after Aborigines began burning. Accepting the theory that people reached Australia more than 100000 years ago, he suggests that it diverged since then from related parrots with different habits. Maybe. I think it’s more likely that this parrot occupied some grassland type that exists no more. Perhaps doomed to extinction by natural climate change, it won a reprieve by invading an artificial habitat. People saved it from extinction. It shares the moors with another scarce bird, the ground parrot.
Rare species all over the world use artificial habitats. Near San Diego I’ve seen endangered California gnatcatchers hopping about in roadside weeds. England’s rare scarlet malachite beetle (Malachius aeneus) does best around thatched cottages with roses by the door. In the North Sea the coral Lophelia pertusa, listed internationally as endangered, sprouts on oil rigs, creating intractable conflicts when rigs are ready for decommissioning. Unwilling to accept the conservation value of unnatural environments, Greenpeace criticised scientists who wanted to leave behind the footings of the Brent Spar, a 16000 tonne storage facility, to support the coral.
Chapter one celebrated animals that exploit us by choice. Swallows, bowerbirds and crows could get by without us if they had to. The players in this story are less fortunate: their fates are now bound to ours. If Homo sapiens packed up and left Australia some species might not survive into the future. This shows again the danger of assuming that ‘nature does not seek to make a connection with us’; that ‘nature does not care if we live or die’. Animals and plants do what they can to survive. If that means taking over a quarry or a dump, so be it. We should not judge this as ‘unnatural’. If we are surprised, it only shows that our picture of nature is faulty. We need new ways to explain what we see.
‘The only wilderness is the space between a greenie’s ears.’
Victorian bumper sticker
One cold drizzly August day, an American named Joseph Knowles shed his clothes and stepped naked into the woods north of Boston to wander in the wilderness for two months. He plucked berries and caught trout, ignited fire from sticks and fashioned himself a bearskin cloak. He recorded his progress in charcoal scrawled on slabs of bark. Knowles emerged from the wilds to be feted as a celebrity, his book Alone in the Wilderness selling 300 000 copies. He did very well from an adventure that was obviously faked. This all happened in 1913, when America was caught up in a wilderness romance that anticipated today’s love affair with wilderness by a full fifty years.
Wilderness has long held sway over the American mind. To the first pioneers it was morally repugnant, a bestial realm that sapped moral virtue, inciting barbarism. The puritans strove to bring God’s light to the desolate wilds. But after the frontier finally fell, later generations of Americans, city-bred and inspired by European romantic ideals, came to idealise wilderness. They saw in it God’s purest expression of his work, a temple for spiritual renewal far removed from the corrupting cities. Wilderness in the nineteenth century also carried the baggage of American patriotism. Americans had no great cathedrals or castles to boast of; no rich traditions of literature or art. What they owned instead was a primeval landscape, a realm of mountains and canyons that far outshone the tamed terrain of Europe. Historian Roderick Nash observed, ‘if, as many suspected, wilderness was the medium through which God spoke most clearly, then America had a distinct moral advantage over Europe, whose centuries of civilization had deposited a layer of artificiality over His works’. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau was one of many nineteenth-century Americans to imbue wilderness with a nurturing role: ‘the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muse, far in the recesses of the wilderness’.
In far-off Australia wilderness was never garbed in these meanings. The first pioneers were convicts with no virtue to protect. Australia was so removed from Europe that her colonists wanted to emphasise bonds with the motherland, not boast about differences. The ancient and eroded continent lacked dramatic vistas, and its drab grey forests disappointed English eyes. The materially simple Aborigines suggested nothing ennobling about Australian wilderness. And the fauna was quirky. North America boasted noble and familiar bison, bears, and deer, while Australia was lumbered with comical constructions like the platypus – half this, half that. Explorer Dirk Hartog summed matters up in 1616. ‘This land is cursed,’ he wrote, ‘the animals hop, not run, the birds run, not fly, and the swans are black, not white.’ If wilderness was God’s temple, then Australia must be an early, ineptly constructed effort.
In nineteenth-century art and literature America and Australia viewed their forests differently. Australia spawned great painters of landscapes, but they never bathed their scenes in religious light as the Americans did. Our counterpart to Thoreau, beachcomber E.J. Banfield, although inspired by Thoreau’s work, never portrayed his Dunk Island retreat in reverential tones. Nor did Bernard O’Reilly, much later in the 1940s, invoke the romantic idea of wilderness to describe his beloved Lamington rainforest, though wilderness it surely was. When the word came up in nineteenth-century Australia, its older, darker meaning prevailed. The creation of Australia’s first national park – Sydney’s Royal National Park – prompted prominent citizens to grumble that it was ‘mere wilderness’. In 1881 Sir Henry Parkes retorted to one critic in parliament, ‘The Honourable Member says it is a wilderness and that years must elapse before it can be of any use, but is it to remain a wilderness? . . . certainly it ought not to remain a wilderness with no effort whatever to improve it.’ Picnic grounds went in, foreign trees were planted, deer were released and the river was stocked with trout, perch and tench.
Modern ideas about wilderness in Australia date back to the walking clubs of Sydney early last century. Hikers wanted roadless tracts to walk through. When conservationist Myles Dunphy heard about the ‘primitive areas’ reserved by America’s Forest Service in the 1920s he lobbied for ‘primitive’ places to be designated
in New South Wales. Tallowa Primitive Area was declared in 1934 and Morton Primitive Area four years later. By the 1960s the ‘primitive’ area had evolved into ‘wilderness’.
But it wasn’t until the 1970s that ‘wilderness’ in Australia took a spiritual turn. In Tasmania the bulldoggedly blind Hydro-Electric Commission drowned pristine Lake Pedder to create a power source no-one needed. Then came plans to dam the remote Franklin River. Dismayed bushwalkers and conservationists found the American idea of wilderness best expressed what they wanted to save. In 1976 the South West Tasmania Action Committee renamed itself the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. Photographer Peter Dombrovskis began publishing his Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar, his sublime image of the Franklin River swirling mysteriously around Rock Island Bend doing more than anything to imbue ‘wilderness’ with meaning. A 1977 article in the CSIRO journal Search by forester Paul Smith (who rafted the Franklin with Bob Brown) defined the word by quoting chunks of the US Wilderness Act. ‘It was the American use of the word “wilderness” that we picked up over here,’ he later explained. The campaign to save the Franklin, anchored to the American idea of wilderness, proved a winner. Australian conservationists ran their first ever media-savvy campaign. Support for wilderness in the 1983 election helped bring the Labor Party to power. New prime minister Bob Hawke stopped the dam, though he never quite bought the idea of wilderness. ‘The word “wilderness” doesn’t, of itself, mean anything,’ he later told greenie Roger Green. ‘What’s important is that there are areas of our physical inheritance, our natural inheritance, which have special features about them and which, if possible, should be preserved.’
‘Wilderness’ grew nonetheless into one of the biggest buzz words in Australian history. It emboldened greenies and governments to vie for vast tracts of land, unlike the tiny parks so often deeded in the past. Its idealised view of nature spoke strongly to people disillusioned with city values. A booming wilderness industry was spawned, churning out calendars, diaries, books, posters, and eco-holidays.
The wilderness push of the seventies really grew out of the New Left movement of the sixties, when university students rebelled against the materialism, conformity and technological optimism of the times. They were influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which told horrific tales of bureaucrats pouring poisons into forests to kill moths and fire ants, splashing children by mistake. Feelings for nature were coloured by counter-culture values that urged personal liberation and ‘escape from alienation’ through exploration of sex, drugs and Eastern religions. Wilderness emerged as one avenue of spiritual transcendence. When Bob Brown, the hero of the Franklin campaign, told of his first wilderness experience (on the Franklin River), he might well have been recounting an acid trip or an ascent into religious ecstasy: ‘I lost awareness of all else – my raft, my friend, my obligations, myself.’ And then, ‘the process of thirty years which had made me a mystified and detached observer of the universe was reversed and I fused into the inexplicable mystery of nature’. Counter-culture devotees mistrusted science for the role it played in devising destructive technology. Rather than observing nature empirically by identifying and observing, as traditional naturalists had done, they imbibed nature holistically, meditating on hilltops and hugging trees. Enjoyment of nature switched from a right- to a left-brain activity. Wilderness, once a Christian temple, became a New Age shrine.
People assume today that saving wilderness means saving wildlife. But ‘wilderness’ is not an ecological term. The Wilderness Society first defined it as a large stretch of natural country ‘where one can stand with the senses entirely steeped in nature and free of the distractions of modern technology’. No mention here of ecosystems or species. Paul Smith’s defining essay stressed freedom and challenge, not biodiversity. Wilderness, like the ‘primitive area’, was invented for people to enjoy. It was grounded in a selfish idea. As social psychologist Donald Michael says, ‘we choose our social causes in terms of our own psychological needs’.
Most wilderness activists were committed eco-conservationists, despite the values implied by wilderness rhetoric. But while saving vast tracts of land does save plants and animals, it often misses those in most need. Rare things often hide in unlikely places. Tasmania’s south-west, the great wilderness mecca, is by some criteria a biodiversity desert. Diversity of mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, fish and plants is low. More reptile species (twelve) roam through my backyard than occupy south-west Tasmania, and my local creek, thick with weeds, supports many more kinds of rainforest tree, including an endangered myrtle. The glaciers that helped sculpt the Franklin’s inspiring scenery also scraped away much of its biodiversity. The area’s ancient quartzite geology and cold winters also limit diversity. If we want to be serious about plants, Tasmania’s most endangered habitat is native grassland, and the most important remnants of it lurk among sheep fields in the Midlands. Hot spots for rare herbs include the rubbish tip at Tunbridge and the cemetery at Jericho. Jericho’s cemetery, with gravestones dating from 1831, is one of two places on earth where the endangered daisy Leptorhynchos elongatus grows. But, with sheep bleating nearby, it’s no place to make a greenie swoon. Rare species tend to increase in number as wilderness values go down, especially among plants, which fare better than animals in fragmented landscapes. Botanists Jamie Kirkpatrick and Louise Gilfedder noted the ‘tendency of threatened species to be associated with the disturbances of logging, dieback, stock grazing and burning . . .’ The wilderness concept doesn’t help us understand (or protect) plants like these.
Wilderness rhetoric implies that nature has to be big and remote and pristine to really count. As American historian and nature-lover William Cronon says, ‘If it isn’t hundreds of square miles big, if it doesn’t give us God’s-eye views of grand vistas, if it doesn’t permit us the illusion that we are alone on the planet, then it really isn’t natural. It’s too small, too plain, too crowded to be authentically wild.’ The big-is-best approach bodes ill for cemeteries full of rare plants. We could learn more from England, where wilderness is not an issue and conservationists find themselves fighting on behalf of hedges. Hedgerows ‘form a wildlife habitat of major importance’, insists the Royal Society for Protection of Birds. Some date back a thousand years to Anglo-Saxon times, when they lent shelter to wolves.
The idea of wilderness has drawn heavy fire in America. William Cronon sees ‘nothing natural about the concept of wilderness’. The fantasy of primal landscapes denies the obvious truth that wilderness everywhere (except Antarctica) was inhabited and managed by people. As Kowanyama elder Colin Lawrence told me from his home on Cape York Peninsula, ‘The land was used, you know, by people. By Aboriginal people. Then everything came to a standstill. When it’s not used it’s wilderness again.’ Australia’s Wilderness Society acknowledges the problem by now defining wilderness as land unaltered by ‘modern industrial civilisation and colonial society’. In other words, land once manipulated by non-industrial people. Archaeologist Josephine Flood once described the landscape of Australia as ‘an artefact created by Aborigines with their fire sticks’, a view shared by more than a few anthropologists and ecologists, although I think it takes the point too far. Without fire management one of two things can happen. Fuel loads can accumulate until destructive infernos rage through, or habitats can change as fire-sensitive plants take over (see chapter 19). These events are causing strife in national parks all over Australia (and elsewhere in the world). Contradicting the notion of ‘the balance of nature’, wilderness is proving to be very unstable.
In two major wilderness areas – the Wet Tropics and Cape York Peninsula – endangered animals are losing out to vegetation change. Expanding rainforests in the Wet Tropics have swallowed up half the wet sclerophyll, killing off thousands of ancient eucalypts, and displacing the endangered tropical bettong. Cape York’s endangered golden-shouldered parrot is suffering as paperbarks choke the plains where it feeds. I have seen the groves of young trees rising up from fields of grass.
And in the Tasmanian wilderness, endangered orange-bellied parrots now need fires lit by people to maintain the open moors where they feed. Tasmania’s south-west wilderness has a fire officer, Jon Marsden-Smedley, whose job is not so much to put fires out as to get them going.
We are imprisoned by a paradox. Wilderness is supposed to be the one environment we let alone and don’t manipulate. But manipulate we must. We need to set fires and quell weeds and evict feral animals. Doing nothing destroys wilderness. ‘Wilderness management’ is a necessary contradiction. As American wilderness biologist David Cole admits, under the active management required ‘all wilderness ecosystems would be artificial constructs to some extent – conscious reconstructions of what humans think is natural’. Ironies abound. In Kakadu pesticide strips are hung to stop mud-daubing wasps (Sceliphron laetum) defacing Aboriginal cave art. Here are poisons used inside a national park to guard something man-made against native animals.
And what about hunting and gathering? In some national parks Aborigines exercise the right to take foods and drugs. I remember telling a Pitjantjatjara woman at Uluru about a big crop of native tobacco I’d seen on a flat near Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). Her eyes widened when I showed her a leaf, and I’m sure she organised a trip to harvest the lot. For many thousands of years Aborigines exercised significant control over numbers of koalas, wombats, kangaroos, tree kangaroos, emus, brush turkeys, goannas, crocodiles, pythons and much more. They did so in place of recently extinct predators that they’d probably helped exterminate. They also harvested vast crops of plants. You can’t bring an end to all that and then talk about wilderness. (Well, you can, but it doesn’t entirely make sense.) As Colin Lawrence said, ‘Back in the early days people been using it – hunting, gathering and burning it. But now it’s all got out of hand from people.’ Multiplying kangaroos and koalas are now stripping vegetation in many national parks, just as elephants are doing in Africa. And what about dingoes? We treat them in national parks as native animals while knowing they are really feral dogs brought from Indonesia 4000 years ago. We need them for ecological stability, but do they fit the idea of wilderness? They are much newer to Australia than Homo sapiens, who moved in tens of thousands of years ago.