Forests, fire and a flawed conservation culture
Paperback, 400 pages, $39.95
Publication Month: May 2018
Having a strong culture of caring for the environment is a byword for a healthy society. However, it can go too far – and in highly urbanised Australian where most of us live remote from nature, decades of alarmist environmental campaigning has fostered a misguided conservation culture that lacks perspective, is largely intolerant of human resource use and sees environmental protection in overly simplistic terms.
According to this prevailing culture, trees, fish, or any other natural resource is only ever protected when its use is prohibited by ostensibly preserving ever-more areas of land or sea in largely unmanaged national parks or other forms of reservation.
With regard to forests, such parks and reserves are presented as a vacant idyll that will magically restore itself to a natural, pre-European state. This fantasy ignores:
1) the extent to which forests have been changed by unnatural fire regimes and the introduction of an array of feral and noxious pests
2) the role played by human intervention in managing these problems
3) the extent to which this management is associated with and reliant upon renewable resource use to generate funding and employ workforces.
Over time, our conservation culture has evolved into a politically-motivated land-grab that creates an illusion of conservation gain despite damaging the complementary and superior concept of carefully managing the environment and its resources as the best form of protection.
Accordingly, resource-rich Australia, which has been a world leader in integrating sensitive, renewable forest use and active management with high standards of environmental protection, is progressively losing these skills. As a result, we are increasingly outsourcing our needs to developing countries where environmental conservation is typically far less rigorous.
This book examines the basis of our prevailing conservation culture and how it has attained a political-correctness that has permeated all levels of society with damaging consequences, not least for the environment itself.
Table of Contents
1: Forestry and the emergence of a ‘conservation culture’
2: Environmental activism: Building the culture
3: Media: Entrenching the culture
4: Conservation science: Advancing the culture
5: Politics and the bureaucracy: Implementing a cultural agenda
6: Politics and bureaucracy 1: Reserving Victoria’s river red gum forests (2005-08)
7: Politics and bureaucracy 2: Reserving Tasmanian forests (2010-14)
8: Active management or benign neglect? The burning question for forest biodiversity
9: Going ‘Green’: Conservation or preservation?