Pristine natural landscapes, wilderness and other urban myths

Brian Boyle challenges the concept of pristine natural areas and wilderness as it relates to national parks management and the exclusion of hunting across vast areas of Australia.

I was recently in a work meeting discussing some issues when I was blown away by a statement by an indigenous guy who was present. He was talking about some communities and language groups in the Top End who have songlines and sacred sites that go right up through the Arafura Sea and into Irian Jaya. He said ‘It’s only in the last 10,000 years that they haven’t been there but they have song and ceremony that go back thousands of years before that when they used to travel, walk and live in that area that is now covered by sea as well as Irian Jaya which they still think is part of their country!’

I thought about this over the next few days and the various land management concepts as they relate to Australia. One of these is the concept of a ‘natural landscape,’ which is often referred to these days as ‘pristine’ or a ‘wilderness.’ If you go out to Kakadu National Park in the dry season you will see tourist buses and 4WDs going in all directions on the sealed roads with ‘Pristine’ and ‘Wilderness Experiences’ emblazoned all over the vehicles crammed full of people getting their wilderness fix in air-conditioned comfort. They are making little forays off the sealed road around Jabiru and for most this may be the most remote and wild experience of their life. For the average buffalo hunter and for community people heading out east, the East Alligator crossing at the top of Kakadu is not the end of the earth, it’s just the gateway, the start of the unsealed road that leads out to remote country to the east, right though Arnhem Land down into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

If you were to ask a tourist or a visitor out there ‘What is wilderness?’ most will probably think they were in it and respond along the lines of ‘A place untouched by the hand of man.’ This is where it gets a bit amusing: for in Australia there is no such place! Aboriginal people have occupied every Australian environment before 20,000 years ago, from the arid desert to the top of Kosciusko. People have therefore been a part of all Australian environments for at least 1,000 generations, and likely many more. During this period human-kind has lived on and managed the land in various ways including, by the use of fire and by hunting.

For the past 50,000 years Australia has been a hunted and a modified landscape. Present day so-called ‘natural’ ecosystems, and the biodiversity within them, owe their very existence to humanly created ecological processes. Aboriginal land management processes have so shaped ecosystems that the abandonment of traditional land use practices is now seen as a major factor in the extinction of medium-sized mammals.

Clearly there is no such thing as a natural national park or ‘wilderness’ in the sense that it is pristine and without the influence of humans. We obviously need to reassess and redefine our current paradigm of national parks and wildernesses as untouched pristine sanctuaries and incorporate into our thinking the concept of cultural landscapes and accept that humans have shaped the very ecological systems which drive Australia's ‘wildernesses’ and that humans are a natural part of the landscape - today.

There may be an underlying factor to the wilderness concept in Australia that may surprise some of the people that promote it. It is the flawed concept that Australia was ‘terra nullius’ when European settlement began a couple of hundred years ago. Terra nullius is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning ‘nobody's land’, which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished sovereignty. Sovereignty over territory which is terra nullius may be acquired through occupation, though in some cases doing so would violate an international law or treaty. Terra nullius is derived from the 1095 papal bull, Terra Nullius, of Pope Urban II, which allowed Christian European states to claim land inhabited by non-Christians. Clearly terra nullius is a very flawed concept in today’s world.

So you see the concepts of pristine natural landscapes and wilderness are not only a selfish fiction used by some groups (which includes anti-hunting elements in many of the so-called ‘Green’ and ‘Environmental’ sector), but they may have a background that is indeed a cultural insult to many indigenous people in many parts of the world, including Australia.

The flawed concepts of wilderness and pristine natural landscapes particular relevance today for hunters and for hunting in national parks and reserved areas. When the idea of hunting, be it traditional indigenous hunting, pest control by licensed responsible hunters (not the paid so called ‘professional’ killers preferred by the antis) and recreational hunting is raised as a possibility, it creates a furore in some sectors of our community who see it as abomination and abuse of ‘their’ national parks and wilderness areas.

For 10 years in my past employment in Game Management in NSW and for nearly 20 years before that in parks and wildlife management I was right in front of the people, the organisations and the dogma and philosophies that wants to exclude humans from large parts of ‘natural areas’ so they can be conserved. So you have to ask yourself how did this situation come about?

In the past 50 years there has been an increasing urbanisation of Australia with most of the population either crammed in to the major cities or living around the coast. Most of these people would hardly ever go into the bush let alone hunt or grow their own food. Coinciding with this disconnection with the land and our food sources, there has been a rise in environmental consciousness, and a want to have a lifestyle with less of an environmental or ecological footprint. At the same time there has been a coalescing of groups with these environmental concerns with animal welfare and increasingly animal rights groups. Top this off with a few groups with other ideals, anti-firearms and god knows what else and voila you have a one-size-fits-all party: The Greens; which has a broad constituency of small groups that suddenly makes up a genuine political force with policies that appeal to their inner city constituency but have genuine and negative impacts in rural and regional Australia as well as genuine law- abiding hunters.

So what can be done about this? The first step is to begin questioning the current paradigm, philosophies and dogmas that drive parks, reserves and wildlife management policy in Australia. Recently it made the news that recreational fishing was going to be examined as a possible ‘Key Threatening Process’ for some fish species. Whether this gets any oxygen or not I do not know, but what it does indicate is that the antis are not going away and will continue chipping away at the politicians and the policy makers to try and get their way.

Hunters and hunting organisations will have to continue to increasingly engage politicians and policy makers themselves and question every step of the way any decisions that are made around public land management, wildlife management and firearms legislation and control. If we don’t we have to accept that the opposing point of view is the only one being presented to those that make decisions on our behalf.

In the same way that the antis are having a go at us we need to seriously consider putting up declaration of national parks in some states for investigation as a Key Threatening Process. Once you declare a national park or reserve, in New South Wales for instance, the fire regimes get screwed because they remove the roads for control and burn-off access. Fuel loads build up to the stage to where there are intermittent intense wildfires, which are mainly managed at the fringes of the parks where it threatens life and property. Hunting is removed so it is only pulse feral animal control and the use of poisons is instituted which affects our native animals. Because of less access, weed control is only around the boundaries. So here are some of the direct negative consequences of the flawed concept of ‘wilderness.’

As hunters have an interest in these areas it may be pertinent to look to other resource management areas for concepts that may be applied in this area. In fisheries management there is a basic fundamental precept of resource sharing and resource allocation that the resource is a ‘common property’, that is, it is jointly owned by all. If our parks and wilderness areas are jointly owned by all why is it becoming increasingly evident that the vast majority of the joint owners are excluded? You do not have to exclude people to continue ecological processes. If ecological processes stopped then the state forests, game reserves and crown land area that the antis want to exclude us from and reserve would have no biological, ecological and environmental value worth reserving in the first place.

There are no sound biological, ecological or environmental grounds for excluding hunting for game and feral animals from vast areas of reserved lands across Australia, in fact there are sound environmental, social and economic reasons to encourage hunting in these areas. It is time to begin asking what are the real reasons for excluding us and that these reasons are as unacceptable as the flawed concepts of pristine natural areas and ‘wilderness’. – Safe hunting, BB