Wilderness: its not the name, its the management that counts

My second concern was more critical. By downgrading bushfire management, including closure of roads and fire trails, and by imposing constraints on the use of earth-moving equipment, the Minister has unwittingly written a death warrant for this reserve. Lightning strikes are common in the southern forests, and seriously bad fire weather occurs every summer. Sooner or later a ferocious wildfire will rip through the wilderness and it will be devastated. What then of this “island of beauty”? What then of its untouched biodiversity? Both will be cooked to a cinder. A smaller, informal wilderness area established within the Walpole-Nornalup National Park some years earlier has already been subjected to this fate. It was left unburnt for many years and then finally was incinerated in a wildfire.

Any failure to provide effective fuel reduction burning in this area may well also write the death warrant for local firefighters, forced to deal with a wildfire tearing out of the wilderness area towards towns, farms and other conservation reserves, or of bushwalkers caught in the middle of the wilderness area with no means of escape.

I do not object to governments declaring wilderness areas. This is their right, and in the case of the Walpole Wilderness Area, I know why they did it (Minister Edwards happily acknowledged the assistance of The Wilderness Society in developing her policy). What I do object to is a failure to apply the sort of responsible management that will protect the beauty and biological resources of the area, and maintain regional standards of bushfire protection.

Luckily, there is nearly always a difference between what a Minister announces in a press release, and then what actually happens on the ground. The processes of strategic and operational planning expose departmental staff to the real world, including the views of local communities. People who only operate through the political system lose ground at this point.

Because of these factors, the Walpole Wilderness Area is managed much more responsibly than I feared might happen. Not all the internal roads were closed, thus allowing access for emergency services. The area is crossed by a major walking trail (the Bibbulmun Track), and the restrictions on fire suppression have been watered down. Earth moving equipment can now be used, so long as approved by the department’s Executive Director, and it is hard to imagine him refusing a request to take a bulldozer in to attack a fire on a bad day. Some prescribed burning is also carried out; it is described as “mosaic habitat creation” rather than “fuel reduction burning”, but fuel reduction occurs nevertheless. The Indigenous rightful owners are allowed unrestricted access, and can hunt and fish without restraint.

The net effect is that while an official wilderness area has been designated, and is shown proudly on maps, little has changed on the ground. From what I can determine, however, the re-badging has satisfied everyone. This includes those city-based green-sympathisers who like the philosophical concept of wilderness, and are pleased to see a wilderness area declared, but who have not the slightest intention of ever sampling its challenges on the ground.

The WA government is currently considering the declaration of a second, very large Wilderness Area in the Goldfields south of Coolgardie. This beautiful inland forest is far from being untouched by human hands - it has over a century of use by sandalwooders, prospectors, mining timber and firewood cutters and more recently, 4WD enthusiasts, and has incurred many large, intense bushfires in recent years. But there is a romance about the area, and few West Australians have ever been there. A management strategy is being prepared and it will be interesting to see how issues like recreational use and fire management are handled. Even more interesting will be to see how the strategy is later implemented.

Fire management is extremely complex in woodland ecosystems, and since it is virtually impossible to close roads, the policing of 4WD drivers and trail bikers will require a large, permanent and well-resourced staff. Yet again, I can see no on-ground advantage in declaring this a “Wilderness Area” rather than a national park, and I doubt that it will become a true wilderness in anything but name.

To the Western Australian public-at-large, this will not matter. Wilderness is a political and an urban concept; more about ideas and ideology than about what happens on the ground. The demand for wilderness areas, like the demand for national parks, is largely satisfied by the fact of their dedication and naming, and the splash they make on the map. The reality is that if you want to sustain critical values in the long term, the critical thing is not what a piece of land is called, but how it is managed.

Personally, I regard wilderness as a phony concept, and believe that we should stick to national parks, and then manage them responsibly. Management can include the dedication of trackless areas, but most importantly it must tackle the real threats to biodiversity and landscape, i.e., feral animals and large high intensity wildfires.