We must keep plenty in reserve
Do not risk chipping away at our protected areas, writes Kevin Kiernan
TO the generations who have not had to fight to create our national parks and reserves they perhaps seem like something that has always been there, much like a mountain or a river.
But these treasured places were hard won, and at great personal cost to many.
Increasingly, we see the consequences of successive generations having assumed that the degraded environmental inheritance left to them is the norm and, having been convinced it would be unreasonable not to let just a little more slip away, hand on that inheritance just a little further depleted.
Only one outcome is possible when successive generations behave this way.
No candidate or party that aspires to leadership should want to be part of this insidious process, nor should it be permitted to part of it.
The environment affects us all and responsibility to protect it rests with all, not just those politicians who might wear it on their sleeve.
It is past time the major parties acknowledged this reality, ceased using it as a weapon against political opponents, and started honouring those among their own supporters who consider conservation to be as important as do members of the Greens.
To occasionally mouth platitudes about climate change is not enough. Climate change is obviously a big and over-arching concern that demands urgent attention, but it does not negate all the other environmental issues that confront us.
Increasingly, the burden of that global task is casting a shadow that obscures the other challenges on our doorstep, and blinds us to the adage about thinking globally and acting locally, the only place where we really can.
How long will it be before vested interests start trying to bluff us that we have a global responsibility to flood the Franklin River after all, arguing it is preferable to burning coal, as if coal was the only energy source and drowning yet more of the Earth’s green lungs need not be factored into the equation?
I bet that will happen far sooner than our leaders will acknowledge the impact on the environment of the billions of tonnes of carbon released to transport increasing multitudes of tourists here.
As prices rise to match what tourists will pay rather than what goods are really worth, our kids’ hopes that they might ever afford a house grow dimmer.
Meanwhile, a relative few benefit financially from the consumption of our communal natural inheritance and effective free use of the infrastructure for which we fool taxpayers must alone foot the bill.
Those who prosper dangle the carrot of public support and campaign funds for aspirants to new or continuing political office, provided only that they allow the doors of our national parks and other protected areas to be battered down to permit their ransacking through conversion into industrial scenery mines.
Of the more than 1000 areas around the globe now formally recognised as World Heritage Areas, most have achieved that on the basis of meeting just one of 10 possible criteria. The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage area is one of only 29 sites worldwide that have qualified under both natural heritage and cultural heritage criteria. It qualifies under an incredible seven of the 10. Only one other site on Earth meets this many criteria, and none exceeds this number.
This status is the opinion of a representative body of assessors who are able to draw on a worldwide network of specialist advisers, and who do so as a matter of course before arriving at any decision.
Hence, the TWWHA is not a trivial confection dreamt up by conservationists in a bid to frustrate developers, or some plaything conjured up by one side of politics to chase votes.
In living in Tasmania, we enjoy an extraordinary privilege that ought not be taken for granted, just because it is in our own backyard rather than in some seemingly exotic and romanticised place beyond the horizon.
Moreover, we live on an island, and in a country, that is by no means so impoverished as to be unable to properly tend this Eden with which we have been gifted.
Look beyond if you think otherwise. Much of what you will see will be a wounded, beleaguered and shell-shocked world where poverty and real human needs make all but impossible protection of such green lungs. Yet we lay waste
to those lungs to manufacture paper litter then pay rates and taxes to have it picked up, and convert our national parks into scenery mines for the benefit of tourism entrepreneurs, more out of avarice amid generalised disinterest than for any need.
Some seek to excuse our profligacy by arguing we are already leaders in conservation, because we have a larger area of intact nature in protected areas than those places where any hope of doing likewise has long ago already been eaten, overpopulated, bombed or napalmed out of existence. But we have a responsibility to safeguard our protected areas, and we can afford to live up to that responsibility — so do those who aspire to political office. The electorate has a responsibility to hold them to it.