| Founded | 1976, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia |
|---|---|
| Location | Hobart, Tasmania, Australia |
| Area served | Australia |
| Focus | Environmentalism, Peace |
| Method | Nonviolence, Lobbying, Research, Innovation |
| Website | www.wilderness.org.au |
The Wilderness Society (TWS) is an Australian, community-based, not-for-profit non-governmental environmental advocacy organisation. Its purpose is to protect, promote and restore wilderness and natural processes across Australia for the survival and ongoing evolution of life on Earth.[1]
It is a community-based organisation with a philosophy of non-violence and consensus decision-making. While the Wilderness Society is a politically unaligned group, it actively engages the community to lobby politicians and parties.[2]
The Wilderness Society comprises a number of separately incorporated organisations and has Campaign Centres located in all Australian capital cities (except Darwin) and a number of regional centres.
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It spent considerable energy in its first decades of existence arguing that wilderness was a specific quality in parts of Australia's environment that was vital to preserve for future generations. The political response in most states of Australia, is that there are now wilderness inventories, and acknowledgement of areas of wilderness.
The Wilderness Society's campaigns have included:
The Wilderness Society was formed initially as a protest group called The Tasmanian Wilderness Society to campaign against the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC)'s plans to build dams in many locations around Tasmania. The HEC had appeared to exert an influence over politicians and the community, justifying this stance as being in the best interest of Tasmania, specially regarding the fate of Lake Pedder.[7]
The motivation for the TWS formation was the planning and construction of the Franklin Dam on the Gordon River, in South West Tasmania by the HEC. To the TWS and many Australians, the Gordon and Franklin Rivers were seen as part of the South West Wilderness, and not as an extension of the on-going HEC expansion.
The group was originally established in 1976 from the members of the Southwest Action Committee. Along with the United Tasmania Group, they had protested against the earlier flooding of Lake Pedder. The group had established interstate branches within a short time, and was nation-wide by 1980.
Following the success of the campaign against the Franklin Dam, and the national approach being more important due to other issues interstate, it became known as The Wilderness Society.
In 2005, Tasmanian forestry business Gunns brought a litigation case against the Society in the Melbourne Supreme Court, in a case dubbed the "Gunns 20", claiming that the activities of environmental activists had damaged Gunns' profits. Gunns claimed $3.5 million from the Wilderness Society, but in March 2009, Gunns was ordered to pay the Wilderness Society $350,000 in damages and to cease the action.[8]
The Inaugural director of the Wilderness Society was Norm Sanders, who was later elected to the seat of Denison in the Tasmanian Parliament in 1980 for the political party known as the Australian Democrats - Australia's first parliamentarian to be elected on an environmental platform. By far the most prominent person amongst those who helped the Society evolve was Dr. Bob Brown, who became the director of the Wilderness Society in 1978, and with him the group greatly increased their presence in Tasmanian politics. Brown was elected to the Tasmanian parliament in 1983 to fill the vacancy left when Norm Sanders resigned his seat, and with the group of fellow conservationists elected subsequently, he went on to become part of the political party known as the Tasmanian Greens. Bob Brown was later elected to represent Tasmania and the Greens in the Senate in the Federal parliament, a position he still retains.
While The Wilderness Society has worked with them on certain campaigns, it is not affiliated with the Greens, or any other political party, and has a policy of not allowing its paid campaigners to be part of any political party either.
The Wilderness Society's long-term vision and strategy is to revolutionise conservation planning in Australia. This involves both protecting the best of what is left of Australia's natural environment and restoring important areas. The Wilderness Society's conservation framework is WildCountry, a continent-wide, long-term conservation initiative to maintain and restore connections, flows or processes that exist between Australia's ecological environments (or "landscapes"), as well as bringing understanding to the changing connections that exist between species, habitat, climate and people.[9]. The WildCountry framework was developed in collaboration with ecological scientists, and outlines a concept for a for Australia. The inspiration for WildCountry came from the Wildlands Project in the United States[10].
Traditionally fundraising was performed through their Wilderness Society Shops, which were popular for many of their calendars and posters by photographers such as Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas. But following the rise of the Internet, online shopping is now as important as well as fund raising from membership.
In November 2009 a group of members of the organising committee of the society held an AGM which has proved controversial. Advance notice of the AGM was given in a low circulation newspaper and only 14 members attended. The Tasmanian Supreme Court disallowed the election at the AGM in a ruling on 22 April 2010. A group calling themselves 'Save The Wilderness Society' engaged in a legal battle with the organising committee, with both sides taking out injunctions and giving court undertakings against motions proposed for a meeting advertised for 2 May 2010.
At a meeting convened by 'Save The Wilderness Society' on Sunday 2 May 2010 and attended by roughly 270 people a motion to sack the existing committee was carried and a new management committee appointed. Members at the meeting expected that this meeting was likely to be challenged by the pre-existing management committee, though the status of that committee itself was in doubt given the Supreme Court ruling.
On 30 June 2010, the 2009 AGM was finally re-held in Adelaide. Members attending in person and by phone voted overwhelmingly to remove the previous Management Committee and appoint a new one.[11]