Keith "So wilderness will become increasingly important to the survival of life on Earth as human populations grow and natural environments will become more fragmented, degraded and under greater stress."

Why will it become increasingly important? You don't explain that, you just say it as if its a given. If you need some wilderness as an example of how "wilderness" used to be, there are plenty of examples - we don't need to keep all of it surely? Do we need a hundred million elephants just in case? Absurd, yes but so is your argument.

"Wilderness, the ultimate self sustaining system can provide the inspiration for an ecologically sustainable society. Its undisturbed catchments supply a pure, higher, more constant water yield than disturbed catchments."

Not much bloody use to us if we can't dam them is it - so now because of the constant drone of eco mantra, we have to build desalination works everywhere and ultimately Nuclear Power plants to run them, as we can't run them on coal fired power forever can we (CO2 is bad evidently, but no one knows for sure since proof of that is difficult to find).

So self defeating all this - I love clean forests and untouched areas as well, but the reality is that we pay our taxes, and elect governments to supply us with our needs, regardless of various lobby groups, like the eco types, who don't want change or progress.

In time, there will be a backlash, because there always is a backlash against out of balance thinking like this. People will begin to vote in to power people who supply their actual needs rather than their aspirations to eco purity - it's difficult to water the garden or have a glass of "eco purity". Reality will prevail.

What effect for the World if only Australia curbs its emissions by an ETS tax while the rest of the industrial nations carry on as usual? If the C is rising in the atmosphere it requires a great deal more vegetation and preservation of the wilderness to consume it and in the process of photosynthesis provide the oxygen for life, not a tax. Over 2 billion extra souls breathing the oxygen over the next 40 years will demand that it be so.... one way or another.

Hei Yu, wilderness does not take C, or CO2, you probably mean, from the air. It simply recycles it, making it basically carbon nutral. This does not matter to me, as I don't believe in CO2 driven AGW.

If you want it out of the air, you had better start cutting down every tree on earth, on a cycle of perhaps 100 years or so, & using the timber for something lasting, regrowing the cut timber, of course.

Keith is typical of these types. Wants to lock up all his wilderness for himself, & his bushwalking mates. He wants to deny any access to those who can't walk long distances.

Then he claims ridicules age for Oz forests, denying the fact that all of it is a product of the aboriginals, & their 40,000 years here.

This then allows him to want keep fire out of these forests, turning them into time bombs. I wonder how many this kind of thinking killed last year.

To say he makes me sick, is putting it rather lightly, his stupidity is no excuse. I am just vindictive enough to wish to see this type of vandal made to pay for what they have cost others.

I appreciate your concerns Keith, but there is one big problem - you seem to have just accepted that the population will continue to grow rapidly. Well if you are not willing to tackle this issue, and our crazy continuous-expansion economic ‘philosophy’, then you may as well forget about the rest.

Bigger population – more stress on the environment, more pressure to open up wilderness areas, more money put into immediate problems and less into national parks and wilderness protection.

If you want to protect wilderness areas, and to develop a sustainable society, then the most important thing to do is to strongly push for population stabilisation and the achievement of a dynamic steady-state economy that is not predicated on never-ending rapid growth.

Try to destroy nature, wilderness and the Green Domain which was here first (upon which all of life depends)and we will destroy ourselves.

In fact that is exactly what we are doing.
Such IS the INEVITABLE outcome of the Western power drive altogether. Which is almost unstoppable because it has the momentum of 3000 years of HIS-story driving it.

http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/trees/learn_tree.php

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/bridge_to_god/index2.html

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel14.htm

Well said Ho Hum

Ludwig, agreed population is out of control, but it is only a part of the actions we need to address. We cannot destroy what little natural ecosystems are left - we, like all life on earth, depend upon the natural cycle of climate, water interacting with the flora and fauna.

The one species this planet can do without, whose extinction will not cause even a blimp in the balance of ecosystem earth is the human species. It is up to us if we want to stay here.