Keeping wilderness wild

The protection of wild character and the opportunity for visitors to experience wilderness underpins a great deal of our work.

Concerns about wilderness protection have been the context for nature conservation campaigns in Tasmania for over 50 years. In recent times, much of the public debate about the 2014 draft management plan for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area related to the downplaying of the importance of wilderness. Public outcry resulted in the reinstatement of the name of the “wilderness zone” in the 2016 plan but it includes minimal recognition and protection of wilderness compared to the 1999 plan.

 

Western Arthur Range in the Southwest National Park. Photo: Grant Dixon
Western Arthur Range in the Southwest National Park. Photo: Grant Dixon

“We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us.

Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real.

We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense.

………………….

In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817 - 1862), AMERICAN AUTHOR