The sustainability of wilderness

The term which the tourism industry uses to push this approach is “partnership”. This is another of those misleading terms. Tour operators want to use parks resources, even to have a say in park management practices. They would not, of course, be so keen for parks agencies to use their company resources, or to give parks staff a say in managing their businesses. So it’s not really a partnership in any real business sense. Tourism property developers argue that they can make money for parks. But where tour operators have to pay parks fees already, e.g. per-person entry fees, they complain bitterly. Very, very few tour operators make donations to the parks which they use, and even fewer of those are in Australia. We can’t expect this to change.

There are several parks agencies around the world that do indeed raise most of their operating funds from tourists. For South Africa it’s about two-thirds, and for Quebec in Canada it’s about four-fifths. But they do it directly, by charging fees to individuals. They do have commercial deals with tour operators too, but these make up only about one 20th of total turnover, and those deals may not even cover costs.

There are privately run hotels in some US National Parks, but they were built in pioneer days and have presented problems ever since. There are campgrounds run by concessionaires, but under strict parks rules. The idea that a hotel inside a park instead of outside will somehow contribute to conservation is not supported by evidence. It’s just lobbying. And people actually don’t want hotels in parks. They want to be able to go to parks cheaply, and camp. When Parks Victoria wanted to build a hotel in Wilson’s Promontory National Park some years ago, there were more objections than for any previous development proposal in the State. People want wilderness the way it is.

Finally, the questions for this forum include one more dangerous assumption, namely that of continuing population growth. In fact, unless global human populations soon stabilise and shrink, all other conservation measures will ultimately prove useless. In one way or another, every year humans consume several times more than the planet can produce.

This is possible in the short term because we are consuming the accumulated natural resources of Earth’s entire history. To use a financial analysis, we are mortgaging the farm or partying with our trust funds, with no way out once current cash is gone. Everything we can do to protect the environment is just a stopgap until we can reduce human populations. Yet at present, human populations worldwide continue to grow, and as countries such as China and India become more wealthy, per capita resource consumption increases too.

Meanwhile, governments such as our own are worried only about losing their tax base as workers retire. Our current federal government wants to increase immigration so as to boost Australia’s population to almost double its current level. How anyone can be quite so blinkered is surely a mystery. And not one that holds much hope for a happy ending.

So the bottom line - and it really is a triple bottom line, social and economic as well as environmental - is an old truism from the pioneer days: “In wilderness is the hope for the world.”