Excellent article and deserving to be read by every urban greenie (and politician).
Two additional points. The most serious concern about the Walpole Wilderness Area is that, if it is managed in the way that former environment minister Judy Edwards wanted, then a bushfire on a hot windy summer's day will burn not just 5000 or 10000 hectares but potentially could take out the entire 366,000 hectares of the amalgamated parks and reserves. Such a fire would guarantee the localised extinction of many species of fauna, with several decades or generations required before recolonisation occurs. In other words, because of the creation of a wilderness area without adequate fire management strategies in place, the environmental consequences of a wildfire will be severe.
As for the Great Western Woodland wilderness proposal, most people don't realise that vast stretches of this area were clearfelled for mine timber and for firewood around the turn of last century, shortly after gold was discovered in Kalgoorlie in 1896. The unofficial best estimate of timber removal is 30 million tonnes over a 20 to 30 year period. The amazing thing is that, in spite of what the green movement would describe as devastating clear-felling, nature has returned the woodland and its biodiversity in less than 100 years. This strikes me as a powerful argument in support of continued human use of a sustainable timber resource.

Bliss.
Two of my favourite forestry resources.
Roger Underwood and Bernie Masters.
Readers might note that, in Victoria, the Avon Wilderness was a concern for many years due to inadequate fuel reduction measures. Two CFA friends swore that if fire hit it they would not be available to fight it.
The problem was resolved in 2006/07 when a lightning strike started a high intensity fire that, in effect, sterilised it. Its no longer a case that animals fleeing from fire will recolonise it one day. The flora, fauna and the soil that was their habitat was burned to a dust.
Wind and rain has washed the dust away. In many places there is no habitat to recolonise.
Fire is part of bio diversity. Ignore it at your peril.

The opportunity now exists to Educate people about Management of Wilderness areas , we need a philosophy that requires seamless media attention to propagating the message of Human intervention in Forestry / Wilderness management ; the public should be encouraged to assist .

Catastrophic fires are are not good for Forrest's or wilderness and if CO2 is real no good for GW either and of course we must not forget the Fauna .

We need to Photograph the Hiroshima look alike Forests right now and combine Healthy Managed Forrest with them on TV with a Presenter (Current Guv. Gen. would be terrific)asking; What do you want our Forrest's to look like , like this Chard or Lush and beautiful like this ? Then flash "Forest Floor Hazard Reduction" with adults and Boy Scouts and Basket Ball Girls with Diesel Fire wick Sticks igniting the detritus and an iconic Firee saying "Bit a' Backburnin sure beats gettin Toasted but hay!"

Hit the airwaves with this every second month to make a difference , to return Sanity to Forrest and Parks management.

The "Greens" will go mental but they have now indelibly Prooven to be hopeless Risk Managers with faulty ideas on the value of the four boys we recently lost added to the Human Carnage in Victorian Fires .

Phoenix did you know that wattle will recover topsoil faster than carting it in with a truck . Wattle is a legume so it will replace nitrogen burnt out of the soil , the wattle seed pods will carpet the soil helping it to recover it is a remarkable plant in forestry recovery , Cheers

Wilderness manages itself quite well, thank you very much. What is not needed are the two-legged mutts with insufficient grey matter between the ears interfering all the time. Nature is fine, it's people who need managing.

individual: it seems you haven't been out into the Australian wilderness for some time. It doesn't manage itself at all; instead, if left to their own devices, foxes, feral pigs, feral cats, dieback disease, weeds and (in dryer country) feral horses, donkeys, goats and camels would quickly destroy many environmental values. In fact, one can argue that wilderness hasn't managed itself at all since Aboriginal people arrived here some 50,000 years ago. Their influence has been persuasive and today, with little Indigenous land management being practiced in national parks and nature reserves, we are losing many of the 'natural' values that were in fact a result of long-term Indigenous management actions prior to European settlement.
I assume you're not calling Aboriginal people two-legged mutts so I'd be interested in your opinion on what role Indigenous people have in managing wilderness in Australia.

I invite any of you to contact me at jmcribbes@bigpond.com so that I can fwd photos to you.
This forest was incinerated (sic) on December 16th 2006. Then in June 2007 a reasonably heavy rainfall washed the burnt soil into the valleys where it eliminated the aquatic life.
Three years after the fires there is no regrowth except for ferns. There never were any middle story plants to re seed and regrow. This is ex Mountain Ash forest. The seeds were obviously destroyed in the fires that would have reached about 1200 C.
It is very unfortunate that my invitations to visit this area to examine the damage are never taken up.
Perhaps all the city/university experts don't want to face the truth. No forest can withstand the attack of wildfire at such temperatures.
I challenge you to email me so that I can send you photos taken two years after the fires.

Bernie masters,
you just confirmed my argument. Feral animals are running wild because bureaucrats have taken away peoples' rifles to cull feral animals. Policies & legislations prohibit people from doing something towards this problem. It is people who let animals run wild. It is people who prevent annual burning. It is people who ruin habitats & so on. the Aboriginals used fire as a weapon to hunt for food & this in turn kept the brush fire danger low. it wasn't "management" as such. The mutts I'm referring to are those half-baked academic type bureaucrats who have never been out of a supermarket parking lot & buy dirt in a spray can for their 4 wheel drives.
What a lot of people see as wilderness is quite often nothing more than a part of the country that is not developed. A lot of this wilderness is affected not by peoples' direct presence but by jetsam & flotsam from other parts of the planet. You just have to walk the "remote" beaches of Cape York to see this disgusting phenomenon. I call it "The last great Wildermess". Take a dinghy up a river & see the damage done by pigs. Why doesn't the Army use the feral pigs as a training enemy ? It would be very beneficial to the ecology of Cape York & for far less cost than another "Study".

Individual ; I am having difficulty , are you for or against Human Intervention in our forests ?

Your two posts seem to suggest you might have two conflicting Philosophy's.

Perhaps a Ritalin tablet with your Wheat Bix might help ?

PS;
Did you know they actually train Pigs to shoot Guns .
You should be careful what you advocate .

The problems the article describes are widespread in Australia.As always the politicians will do what they can to snow the public and their public service mandarins will facilitate this.

Pity help the old school,hands on park rangers and foresters who can see what is happening but have no voice in the system.

When tracks are allowed to overgrow in heavily vegetated areas not only does it make management generally and fire management in particular much more difficult it also keeps bush walkers out.Getting people walking,responsibly,in the bush should be encouraged,not made impossible by impenetrable,fire prone vegetation.

Roger,
You are spot on in your comments for manufacturing wilderness for political purposes, mainly in seedy backroom deals to get green preferences from urban based lobby groups.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in North West Tasmania when the Tasmanian Conservation Trust nominated the Mt Vero and Savage River areas to be added to the National estate in 1989. The trust was given $120,000.00 by the Government to document the values.

They managed to find only 73,000 of wilderness in the region between the Arthur and Pieman Rivers, yet for the next twenty years this region called the Tarkine by lobbyists has been a political battlefield with massive reserves created by the Regional Forest Agreement and the 2004 Federal election.

Only last year the Minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett, made a decision to emergency list 447,606.71 ha as the Tarkine wilderness area. Not a bad emergency when the wilderness has increased from 73,000 ha to 448,000 in 20 years.

Now imagine how an eco tourist will feel when they enter this ‘wilderness’ to find the State’s largest open cut mine, as well as a 200 year mining history, with old mines and old towns scattered through the region, with a network of roads and tracks. Not to mention 150 years of logging history, the region once supporting over 40 sawmills, to say nothing of the farms and other non wilderness activity.

Then there is the aboriginal history with coastal area home of a number of family groups of the NW maritime tribe, only one of which was known as the Tarkinener. These groups used a ‘road’ though the region to access inland ochre mines, with the road kept clear by annual fire. Much of today’s forest is the result of the altered fire regimes, when the indigenous people were removed.

As can be seen by the wilderness society’s annual budget of $15 million, the term wilderness is a great marketing tool to create a sellable image; however the reality is often very different than the carefully created photo essay of the political brochure.

ShazBaz001,
i'm not at all against human intervention unless of course you put bureaucrats & greenies in that category.
As for pigs & guns, I think that is highly offensive & I think you're the one who should exercise caution.

OK Individual , I apologies .
Did you avail yourself with the Photos from jmcribbes@bigpond.com ?
To manage the dead forest adequately all those dead trees will have to be cut down or burnt out in cooler times if they are just left there the next fire that comes thru will kill any regrowth .
I don't know much about JMC's locality and the fungal situation down there , fungus can be encouraged using water infused with chook manure or just plain milk and applied with a knapsack sprayer , fungus works well if temperature and moisture is available obviously this will work better if the trees are cut down.

The fungus (Dry Rot) in ideal conditions grows 23 ft in 24 hrs and (my memory is not good)the temp needs to be 75 deg F , ONCE IT GETS STARTED the rotted bit is like blotting paper soaking up water and storing it until the Temp triggers the fungus and off it goes again
I am not a fungus expert I mentioned the Dry Rot Fungus because I know about it , I am sure there are many Fungi that eat wood .

We need to do a check back on forestation our views need readjusting to relate to our times , the desire to lock up forests to "Save" them for future Generations is very short sighted .
Much better to make them Commercial , plant , care and service them , random plant them have other species interspersed to exit the Gulag look .
Plant to the contour and where possible ditch the inside of the contour where possible , equalize the water supply .

License Shepherds to run Goats in the forests they can supplement their income by shooting the Inbred Alsatians that kill nearly all the Fauna .

ShazBaz001,
Thank you. I always wonder why people see natural destruction as not natural. Nature has it's ups & downs & just because impatient humans can't wait around for a few hundred or thousand years doesn't mean natural destruction is wrong. Earthquakes, tidal waves, rain & wind & fire as destructive as they may be ARE in fact natural. All humans should worry about managing is how much less rubbish & pollution we can live with. The environment manages itself, just hang around a millennia.

We are a strange lot when it come to forests. They represent an enormously valuable renewable resource that we are happy to let self destruct but not to maintain. All forests and parks need managing and the French evolved simple management protocols, over the last 140 years,that have seen their forests double in area. They now supply 70 per cent of the timber requirement for 60 million people.

Dear Individual,
You have got to be kidding havn't you. Four years ago I had a massive stroke that limited what I can do. Wouldn't it be wonderful if my household managed itself. I am sorry but things don't happen that way. Three weeks after the stroke cyclone Larry devistated our area and turned it into a wilderness. As I am now handicaped it has taken me four years to clean up the mess and now I have to turn to routine maintaince to keep this place habitable. Common sense should tell you that with the passing of time all things deteroriate. Only someone with a twisted mindset would think that without planing and effort the garden blooms. I have an an indiginous friend who tells me that he is a woolworths murray as his prefered hunting tool is money not a spear and that he doesn't want to go back to the good old days of his ancestors. So Individual splash some cold water on your face and wake up.

Individual

It is very important to understand the past when managing for the future. When it comes to eucalypt forests, particularly those in Roger's article, it is important to realise that they are disclimax communities. That is, they rely on disturbance to survive. In our case, that disturbance has been fire.

We know that aborigines used fire to manipulate the environment to provide hunting grounds, easier access etc. In NW Tasmania (in support of Cinders), which for the last 10,000 years has supported a cold wet stable environment, eminently suitable for a climax rainforest community, a complex mosaic of disclimax and sclerophyll communities occurred on 53% of the land mass at European settlement. This was because of Aboriginal fire. They created the disclimax communities of grasslands, moorlands, shrublands and woodlands interspered with the rainforest so that they could survive in the area. So, we are far beyond leaving the vegetation to nature - it demands our attention. To ignore this is to invite the Black Saturdays to our backyards.

The only thing saving NW Tasmania (as we watch the fuel levels raise each year) is that we are not blessed with severe fire weather during the sumnmer months. But just as there are two certainties in life, we can add a third when it comes to the Australian bush - it will eventually burn. What we need to endsure is that it is a fire we want; not what nature wants.