A hole in the greenie's holiness

Will this be a sad outcome? Only to those (such as myself) who want to feel sad about the outcome. If there is no opera or birdcalls in one's life, then the pursuit of happiness simply follows another course - it might be passionately supporting a soccer team or religiously sharing beers with mates every Saturday afternoon. What one does not experience, one does not miss.

When it's time to go, you go

In the summer of 1972 I spent a week camped in the timeless wilderness of South-West Tasmania. That place in which I had my most spiritual feelings is no more - drowned by a vast body of deep, cold and wind-chopped water backing up behind three dams built to generate hydroelectricity.

That is 40 years ago and the wilderness throughout the whole country has shrunk further. Old growth forests and th animal life which depend on them are going with the wilderness. I am looking at a picture of one of those animals now. It is the Leadbeater's Possum. The ancestors of that animal (capable of spectacular leaps from tree to tree) lived here a long time before the first human inhabited this continent. But, for these little fellows, their time is almost up. What they need to survive, we need it more - not for our survival - it's just that we need it.

Their time is almost up! That sounds like Darwinism - and it is. Whatever happens is inevitable. One animal drives another to extinction. That's evolution in action. All talk of saving the natural environment can never be any more than talk because man, the animal weak in tooth and claw, is now armed with the technology to destroy everything. As the destructive process is gradual enough not to be noticed by the bulk of the citizenry, the point of no return will be passed unnoticed (as it already has in Tasmania's south-west). Slow change is the way evolution works. Evolution always ends in the most probable outcome.

Having said all that, I switch-off my objective self and switch-on my subjective self. As I stare at the photos from 1972, I feel an emptiness as if I was an old man looking at a photo of a long-lost love. The number of people who can remember that area as it was are now elderly. Photos will survive, but the bushwalkers who experienced this country in its pristine originality, will not - and the memory of the soaring feelings experienced will die with them.