The sustainability of wilderness

At a local scale, it is indeed possible for small numbers of humans with low material demands to live in slightly-modified natural environments which provide economic services and environmental services at the same time. This is the basis for subsistence economies. As long as we have a large industrialised human population which lives in cities and eats food from intensive agricultural production, however, we cannot also occupy the wilderness areas at the same time.

In long-ago millennia, there were few humans and they all lived subsistence lifestyles. Currently, although a few people do still live subsistence lifestyles, there are very many people in total and most of them live industrial lifestyles. Under these circumstances, wilderness must be kept as wilderness for the world as a whole to remain “sustainable” in the sense of providing a place where humans can continue to live for the forseeable future. It really is that simple.

Typically, there are four different groups of people who want to use wilderness for purposes other than planetary life support. Wilderness which is not within protected areas suffers continual attrition and degradation from high-impact human uses - ranging from agricultural clearance and industrial forestry and fisheries, to mining and oil production. The global logging industry, in particular, still relies largely on continuing encroachment into new areas of previously uncut old-growth forest.

These uses are a core component of the way the world economy currently operates. They are endorsed, encouraged and often subsidised by national governments, through arrangements ranging from land tenure to publicly-funded infrastructure. That is, they are seen as normal; they are business as usual. Nonetheless, they continually reduce the world’s remaining supply of wilderness, on which we all depend for survival. The area within national parks is not enough on its own.

Even within protected areas, wilderness is still subject to some attrition, though at a lower rate.

In many developing nations, parks are protected on paper but not on the ground, and are subject to continuing illegal incursions. In both developed and developing nations, the oil and mining industries lobby continually for the rights to operate inside parks, pretending that this will not destroy their value for conservation and wilderness. For demonstration purposes, it is indeed possible to drill a shallow skinny hole with limited impact. The real-world oil and mining industries, however, create massive impacts through networks of roads and seismic lines, discharge of toxic mine tailings or drilling compounds, and the influx of people, trucks, helicopters and heavy equipment. They can’t help it, because that’s how the industry works. It relies on contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, and no matter what the top-level policy may say, when the dozer hits the dirt it’s about deadlines and cost control. That’s fine in a mine, but not in a wilderness.

At the opposite end of the scale, national parks in most countries are routinely used for recreation as well as conservation. This does produce impacts, but they are relatively minor and manageable. It has become part of the politics of modern day wilderness conservation that parks agencies must continually work to maintain political constituencies and operational funds. Opening the parks for independent recreation is one of the key approaches they use. People hiking in parks for individual recreation are manageable, and it saves on public health, hospital and aged-care costs too. Really. “Healthy Parks, Healthy People”, the slogan of Parks Victoria, is not just a marketing tag. It’s part of the State budget.

Midway between the mining industry and the individual hiker lies the commercial tourism industry. National parks, and especially World Heritage Areas and similar icon sites, are major drawcards for both domestic and international tourists. Three quarters of all overseas visitors to Australia, for example, visit at least one national park during their stay. The commercial tourism industry gains by selling these tourists their transport, accommodation and some activities. In fact, at least a quarter of the entire Australian tourism industry bases its businesses principally in natural areas, though this includes private as well as public lands.

In most of the world, tourist accommodation and commercial tourism hubs are in gateway areas outside the parks themselves, and all activities inside protected areas are controlled by the park management agency. This works well, since parks agencies can manage visitors to minimise impacts on conservation. It works well for the tourism accommodation and retail sectors too, since these are closely tied into the broader residential property sector, which is driven more by amenity migration - people moving to live somewhere they enjoy - than by short-term holiday-making. This approach works well even in very heavily-visited parks, such as those in China which receive tens of millions of visitors each year.

There are indeed private landholdings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and southern America, which are run as reserves funded by tourism, mainly wildlife tourism. In these cases, tourism accommodation is commonly built inside the reserve. But that is a very different situation from public protected areas. The landholders are running businesses using their own assets. They are not necessarily trying to contribute to global conservation, which is the goal of public protected areas. In addition, in private reserves the revenue from tourism has to cover all the costs of land and conservation management for the entire property, as well as all the tourism infrastructure and international marketing. In public parks, these costs are paid by the country’s taxpayers. It’s a very different game.

Not surprisingly, the commercial property development sector sees publicly-owned parks and wilderness areas as a plum prize, an opportunity to profit at the public expense. If property developers can build tourist accommodation inside a well-known public park, then the attraction, the infrastructure, the operational management costs, and the marketing are all publicly subsidised.

If in addition, a tourism developer can negotiate an exclusive right to provide accommodation and retail services in a particular park, then that operator also gains a monopoly rent, the opportunity to raise prices and reduce services because there are no competitors. While this generates profits for that particular property developer, it imposes inequitable costs on the parks agency, on less wealthy independent visitors, on other tourism providers and regional industry, and on the wilderness areas which support the entire human race. So it is neither affordable nor sustainable.