The Value of Our Last Wild Places

The Value of Our Last Wild Places

The complexities of modern conservation in Tasmania’s Tarkine

by Meaghen Brown

Timber extraction is acutely sensory. Blue flagging tape flaps in the wind, marking the boundaries of future logging coups. Yellow gates block the entrances to dirt roads cut through the trees. There are enormous muddy tire marks and slivers of old growth that look like matted hair. Wind whistles through the splinters. The clearfell is a fresh wound through the existing rainforest. There’s no warning: forest and then nothing. It’s like that feeling of walking down a set of stairs in complete darkness and miscounting the last one, so that you actually find yourself stepping into empty space instead of solid ground.

The island of Tasmania is home to one of the last Gondwanan rainforests in the world, meaning it’s remained largely intact since a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. This area, known as the Tarkine, or takayna in the aboriginal language palawa kani, sweeps across 447,000 hectares in the northwestern corner of the island. Mist eddies through the canopies like the first drops of milk in a cup of coffee. There are mushrooms that look like transparent jellyfish and others the color of safety cones, and everything smells wet and alive. There are pepper berries that taste like cloves and a cadence of names—myrtle, blackwood, sassafras, leatherwood, celery-topped pine. More than 60 rare, vulnerable or endangered species live here.

Tasmania’s forests aren’t just remarkable for their age and biodiversity, they’re also the foundation of an entrenched and complicated timber industry that’s been active on the island since the mid-1800s. The practice of clearfelling is perhaps the most obvious illustration of the vulnerability of these primordial trees. Clearfelling starts with chainsaws and ends with neatly maintained monoculture plantations and forests managed like nurseries. Massive old-growth trees are cut into sawlogs, which get bought by mills across the state and turned into building materials or plywood. The surplus is sold to exporters and added to the global pulpwood supply as wood chips or pulp for tissue paper.

Industrial-scale logging in the Tarkine poses a serious threat to more than 60 rare and endangered species.

Krystle Wright

In drier eucalyptus forests, sections of trees are cut and harvested in a pattern designed to mimic the way a forest would naturally regenerate. In wet forests, which have thicker understories, the entire ecosystem is felled, bombed with napalm, burned and replanted with species that germinate quickly. Stories circulate of industry personnel leaving carrots soaked in poison around the perimeter of these newly planted areas to kill wallabies and wombats who graze on the seedlings.

The Tasmanian government recently reversed a moratorium on logging old-growth forests, making places previously earmarked as reserves, including the Tarkine, now available for extraction. Conservationists, including an organization called the Bob Brown Foundation, have fought since the 1960s for enhanced protection of the Tarkine—ideally as a World Heritage site—but the government continues to push back.

Yet, forestry is struggling. “It’s a dying industry,” said a man in the small town of Marrawah, just on the fringe of the Tarkine. He does contract work for the government logging company Sustainable Timber Tasmania, but cares deeply about the land where he’s spent his entire life. “I’ll retire in 10 years, and I reckon there won’t be any forestry left.”

This conversation is part of a familiar conflict that plays out in different regions around the globe—one that pits rural communities against environmentalists, and economic self-interest against a more sustainable future, despite the fact that the shared values between these distinct groups are often greater than the divisions. But trees are indisputable markers of time, fires and floods—before humans and after. As circumstances evolve, the future of this place will be recounted in tree rings.

For more on the efforts to protect takayna / Tarkine as a World Heritage area, visit patagonia.com/takayna.

See the takayna film

Weaving together the conflicting narratives of activists, locals and aboriginal communities—and told through the experience of a trail running doctor—takayna unpacks the complexities of modern conservation and challenges us to consider the importance of our last truly wild places. Visit patagonia.com/takayna for film release dates and screenings.