This paper will argue that the rival political discourses contained in the push for export woodchipping and the associated spectre of new pulp and paper mills based on Australia's native forests, and the "green" campaigns for the return of old growth native forests to "wilderness" status, are both elite imperatives.

The native forest estate has become a highly contested political field which has dominated the environmental politics agenda over the past 25 years. It is characterised by fundamentalist opposed interests and discourses; it is a `ritualised environmental conflict' which has `forestalled any win-win resolution, where the stakes have developed around only total victory' (Kirkpatrick cited in Hay 1987:7).

This conflict is about the wood industry's (the woodchip and pulp and paper interests in particular) struggle to maintain its hold on native forests, in what has amounted to a highly polished and well funded resistance against a mostly urban based and middle class environment movement which has pursued the total eviction of the industry and the locking up of the remaining old growth forests in national parks, wilderness areas, national estate and World Heritige areas.

Governments have sought solutions, but failed to reach beyond serving both interests in this ritualised conflict. So-called balanced policy solutions are well illustrated by the actions of the Cain-Kirner Labor Government in Victoria, which after the Timber Industry Strategy (1986) was able to simultaneously and from the same forest region of East Gippsland, enact the transfer of forests to extensive new National park status. At the same time it moved an increased volume of Victorian woodchips for export via Harris-Daishowa at Eden and also called for international expressions of interest for a pulp and paper mill development. One has to ask whether such policies represent skillful resource management, a case of successful and novel multiple use programming (by seperation of use into defined resource areas), or was it the case of political compromise, of serving both conflicting elite interest groups, by offering them "positional packages" [2]

Both rival discourses and Government solutions socially and ecologically inappropriate to the forests and the Australian working class, and by extension, to the Third world. They represent development and management scenarios which are elitist and founded in more recent forms of Western imperialism.

The conflict over native forests reflects the "politisation of nature", part of what Eder has theorised as the new field of class struggle. He suggests that a `...new type of society is emerging in which class conflict will be centred around the problem of the exploitation of nature' (Eder 1990:22). Eder maintains that the central social conflicts in the West are now based on `...what type of development modern societies should engage in' (Eder 1990:21). These conflicts are displacing traditional conflicts between labour and capital which dominated the political agenda since the 19th century. They are more pervasive than those of the past and are based on the negative results of modernisation in which the relation of society to nature is now seen by substantial social groups as one of exploitation. Eder outlines three basic propositions:

Today the problem of "nature" is viewed in different ways by varying social classes. The environmental crisis as perceived by what Eder calls the new middle class, with its counter-cultural politics, has placed "nature" and social relationships to "nature" at the base of contemporary class conflict (Eder 1990:25).

For Eder, it is on this expanded new middle class that the ecological crisis has the greatest impact, due to the centrality that nature has always had in the life-world and life style of this class, revealed for Eder in its `...leisure patterns, walking, climbing, excursions into the countryside, all forms of tourism...' (Eder 1990:38). In what Eder describes as the emerging middle class society, "nature" itself, our relationships with "nature" and particularly patterns of development based on nature, will continue to occupy centre stage in class conflict and political struggles. Thus issues of "nature" will have reformulated the basis of traditional class struggle (Eder 1990:38-43).

Watson's (1990) study of forest conflict in Australia has shown how the conflicts between timber workers and conservationists revolve around radically different views of "nature", where the life experience of each group reveals a different consciousness of "nature". I would add that different social and economic interests determine the radically different ideologies of "nature" that are held by competing interest groups. These ideologies and their associated knowledge interests shape and inform the content and the claims of the discourses that pervade the wilderness - woodchip conflict. To understand the social and economic interests in forest use conflict one can profitably use the concepts of "social limits of growth" and "positional goods" developed by Hirsch (1976).

The "social limits of growth" represent a fundamental contradiction in advanced industrial societies, `...its inability to absorb an increase in production levels beyond a certain point without a concomitant deterioration in the quality of use at the level of the consumer' (Jones 1987:39). This "social limits to growth", intensifies the distributional struggles over "positional goods" which are often density dependent goods and increasingly reflective of non-material needs and/or aspirations (Eckersley 1989:220). If we relate this conceptual schema to the wilderness - woodchip conflict we can see that pristine countryside and wilderness regions represent a "positional good" where the increased and/or unrestricted access especially for extractive purposes often results in a marked decrease in the value of such assets to others (Redclift 1988:42).

The explanation of much of the loci of modern environmental politics, using an approach adapted from Hirsch's concepts, suggests that much of the conflict is related to the distributional and access struggle over wilderness as environmental "positional goods". Eckersley offers a counter argument to such a perspective, while she recognises for instance that `...there is a sense in which wilderness may be understood as a "positional good", in which case spiritual renewal, aesthetic satisfaction and recreational pleasure that comes from the wilderness experience may be described as fulfilling post-material needs' (Eckersley 1989:220). She regards these arguments as restricted by `...the utilitarian calculus' (Eckersley 1989:220) on which they are based, as she argues, `...it is restricted in its focus to the relative satisfaction of material and post-material needs by the two competing classes - the new class and the working class - in the short term" (Eckersley 1989:220). Eckersley argues that radical environmentalists are motivated by "positional goods" in a secondary or subsidiary way as their central argument is a `...moral one: that the non-human world deserves protection for its own sake' (Eckersley 1989:220).

The rejoiner to Eckersley's argument can be seen in Luke's position. He argues that this moral position argument, derived from deep ecology which informs much in radical environmental politics, contains a concept of justice which is post-distributional (Luke 1988:91) In other words it attempts to elevate environmental politics and the wilderness discourse to a realm above the everyday distributive struggles of utilitarian individuals and groups. Luke, following Marxist ideas on the social not individual determination of consciouness and interests, poses the question, `...what sort of social existence or class position has determined the shape of deep ecological consciousness?' (Luke 1988:85).

We now turn to the social basis of constructions of versions of "nature". Along with others (Jeans 1983:180, Smith 1984:15, Redchift 1989:178, Stankey 1989:10), the position argued here is that wilderness is a social and cultural construction, an ideology the content and meaning of which has undergone significant historical change. Stankey puts it simply `...wilderness is a cultural construct rather than an intrinsic biophysical reality' (Stankey 1989:10); further Smith (1984:9-13) argues that particular views of wilderness serve particular socio-economic, political and ideological functions.

 The establishment of colonial societies in America, Canada and Australia required extensive clearing of the dense forest and woodland cover. This necessitated an ideology based on a hostility to wilderness which was regarded as a barrier to settlement and progress. For frontier people, wilderness was barren, sinister, something to be conquered. Smith argues that the 19th century romanticisation of wilderness reflected in the "back to nature" movements (which are the precursers of the recent political ideologies of wilderness), were certainly not the social constructs of frontier people, but rather the social ideology of urbanites:

This point is also made in the Australian case by Davison (1978) on the Australian Myth and by Birrell (1987). Smith further suggests that such romanticism was not possible until wild nature had been substantially subdued; while colonial settlement was fighting to establish itself and survive, any dominance of a romantic view of wild nature, he suggests, would have been suicidal:

The central point here is that the social constructions of versions of "nature" can be related to particular interests, produced under particular social, cultural and historical conditions. As Grundmann has argued, `The nature of nature, therefore, is a social construction of every single existing historical culture' (Grundmann 1991:285).

This brings us directly to what I mean by the history in wilderness and woodchips. I am referring not to the history of the conflict, nor the concepts. Rather to the use made of history and historical analysis within the conflict and its discourses, to the politicisation of history.

Head (1988:37) poses the question, `To what extent were Australian vegetation patterns in 1788 a product of human activity'. Were the first white colonialists seeing the primeval forests and woodlands of an unoccupied landmass or one massively changed by Aboriginal use and systematic alteration?

Answers to these questions have found their way into contemporary land use and conservation politics. Competing interest groups make use of differing historical perspectives in their positions on various conservation and land use practices. This is particularly so in the wilderness-woodchip political conflict, where the exact use of and the impacts of Aboriginal fire use, has been the subject of considerable debate.

It was argued that Aboriginal fire regimes had substantial effects on the shape of the Australian landscape, discovered at the time of the colonial invasion. In this argument, the concept of a vast virgin land is a myth in those Aboriginals had dramatically altered the distribution of the vegetation from forest to open grassy areas.

Flannery accepts the fire stick farming thesis, (developed by Tindale, Hallam and Jones, see Horton 1982:237, Gell and Stuart 1989:28-34, Pyne 1992:ch 6), suggesting that Aboriginal fire regimes took over the functions of the mega fauna. He provides a provocative argument:

The fire stick farming model has been questioned (Horton 1982, Head 1988). The alternative model suggests that there is a `natural potential fire regime in Australia which Aboriginals observed and made use of'(Horton 1982:249). In contrast to the fire stick farming model, where Aboriginals used fire to modify the landscape, Horton suggests their role was simply to provide an alternative source of fire, a supplement to natural ignition. Had Aboriginals not inhabited Australia, the distribution of vegetation would have been identical to that found at the time of the white colonial invasion (Horton 1982:249).

There is potential for a political use of differing historical perspectives within contemporary land use and management conflicts. A reading of Pyne's Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1992), provides an impressive but politically difficult thesis, that what is left of Australia's contested forest regime is a creation of human agency. In an early article Pyne suggests:

Pyne's thesis can be politicised in rival land use and management conflicts and discourses. For instance the Greens discourse on wilderness contains a call to struggle against the extractive wood industries. This is depicted as a struggle to save direct examples of "pristine nature", which can be seen (thus the strong visual potential in such campaigns), that can be touched and experienced, and where what is saved offers an immediate and dramatic antithesis of the human experience of the modern industrial state. Such campaigns are protrayed by the environment movement as campaigns to save the last remnant of "pristine nature", examples of "nature" prior to humans. Yet if Pyne is correct, then what is being protrayed as the last of "pre-human nature" might in fact be the result of massive human agency, an agency however that was pre-European. This is not an argument for or against its destruction; what I am attempting to illustrate is the possible politicisation of historical analysis. The green discourse can be challenged with an alternative politicisation of history, by interests that could use Pyne's thesis to argue that forestry and woodchipping is just one of many alternative uses, with the use of fire by the wood industry for regeneration (human agency), of an already altered resource base.

The major contention here has been that the discourses of wilderness and woodchips represent elite imperatives; why is this so? Both discourses are part of the First world and both serve the interests of elites within the First world. Both discourses are about objects of consumption that should be rejected as social and political models. To borrow the words of Martinez-Alier, `Veblen produced the theory of ostentatious consumption, which may operate in reverse: when poor people know that they cannot consume certain products, they may decide that they do not need them' (Martinez-Alier 1987:232).

It is necessary to briefly outline the central elitist components of these discourses.

The woodchip industry is an extractive one. It is a low capital cost component of a high capital cost, internationally market driven pulp and paper industry. It produces a range of products which are marginal in their social usefulness. At its extractive stage, the industry is part of the front line so necessary to modern industrialism. This front line is about searching out, claiming, or buying, a legal right to raw materials and then mining the resource. Of late the industry uses the word "farming" to empower its discourse. This is expressed in Australia under the banner "Growth and Regrowth". It fails to explain its conversion of old-growth mixed aged forest stands into single aged, often single species dominated regrowth stands. Its ongoing staged harvesting is seen and promoted by the industry's discourse as legimate, as an orderly use of a renewable resource. This discourse is highly successful within the century's old discourse of machine technology (see Grundmann 1991:ch 3) and the ideology of nature as the site of conversion `...into a standing reserve possessing market value' (Oelschlaeger 1991:96). What externalities are produced in this extractive stage are underpriced, if priced at all, and promoted as manageable.

The pulp and paper manufacturing stage is based on high energy inputs and toxic chemical additives. The externalities are immense, and by definition socially subsidised. Part of its discourse is based on the fact that it is a large employer, hence its resort to job blackmail of governments and environmentalists. The discourse is clothed in the ideology of the "market" and its component the "sovereign individual consumer" (see Abercombie et al 1986). Its product range and especially its need for toxic chemical inputs for fine white papers, its discourse maintains, is driven by impersonal market forces. The industry is responding to demand (Gismondi and Richardson 1991). This market demand discourse is also used to suggest that the total industry is but one bidder among others for scarce resources (the forests) and the market will decide.

This discourse can be disputed:

This comment equally applies to the use of contigent valuation techniques which have been used recently in Australia to support wilderness claims.

Turning now to the contemporary wilderness discourse which, as outlined above, is a social construct of the First world's newly emergent environmental consciousness. I believe we can see the push to control social access to so-called "external nature", as symbolised in wilderness areas, as a form of appropriatation (defining wilderness in legal and management terms (Birch 1990) and consumption (establishing these as specialised institutions within industrial society, Guha 1989:78) that provide relief from the daily bounding of production and social reproduction based on profit. As Redclift points out, this latter requirement may explain the sociological significance of "conservation" (Redclift 1987:178).

Useful critiques of the wilderness discourse are offered by Guha (1989) and Birch (1990) in the pages of the central ecophilosophical journal, Environmental Ethics. One draws the conclusion from Birch's discussion in his essay titled The Incarceration of Wildlands: Wilderness Areas As Prisons (1990) that there are strong elitist imperatives within Western based campaigns for the preservation of vast land areas of Third world countries. This imperative derives from the demand that this land be defined, protected and managed as wilderness in Western terms. This dominant imperative for preservation within the Western environment movement led Birch to conclude that:

A permutation of this recently surfaced in Queensland where environmental organisations are deeply divided over legislation that would allow Aboriginal groups to make land and management claims over national parks. Some groups support this policy while others bitterly oppose these moves (Age 1991:12 Nov). This threat of cultural imperialism has been raised in Australia by leading green activists who commented that:

Hecht and Cockburn (1990) raise the equity issues of evictions of indigenous peoples from such proclaimed areas in South America. The strongest international elitist ascription to Western environmentalism is Guha's (1989) contention of negative equity implications of the Western wilderness imperative when applied to the Third World. Guha, citing the work of Mumford, and Runte's study of the monumentalism in America's early national park movement (Runte 1979), suggests this wilderness imperative is also driven by monumentalism (Guha 1991: 89-90 note 54), as he points out the `...wilderness movement itself began as a nationalist crusade to preserve "monuments" of nature not found in Europe...'(Guha 1991:89).

In recent times, according to Guha `...the international conservation elite is using the philosophical, moral, and scientific arguments used by deep ecologists in advancing their wilderness crusade' (Guha 1989:75). Guha cites the actions of organisations such as the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. In his native India and in Africa Guha claims:

Guha's [3] targeting of the influencial knowledge interests generated by moral extensionism and deep ecology informing the wilderness discourse is an accurate one. As Oelschlaeger (1991:ch 9) has demonstrated, there has been a gradual displacement within the national parks and wilderness movement of both romantic preservationism and ulititalian resourcism by moral extensionism and deep ecology. The latter two ideologies, Eckersley argues, are the primary motivation for recent wilderness campaigns.

What needs to be researched are the actual class equity and social justice implications of wilderness victories. Gerritsen has initiated discussion about the complex factors involved in considering distributional implications of forest and wilderness conservation in Australia. He suggests that redistributions occur in the following areas:

Mercer (1991:130-131) has critised Gerritsen for his narrow anthropocentric approach and his concentration on `...direct -consumption of wilderness through recreational use' (Mercer 1991:131) which be claims neglects the rights of the biosphere and a range of other indirect benefits people gain from wilderness areas. Mercer does not propose how any distributional impacts could be empirically measured and does seem to concur with Eckersley's position that the wilderness discourse is primarily above simple distributional issues. The evidence is simply not in, but if total victory is achieved for many of the wilderness type claims currently on the agenda in Australia, examples of regions de-industralised at the expense of low income timber workers and their families may result.

I suggest that the potency of wilderness in environmental action and as a site for political struggle, is the visiblity of the wood industry's clearing of forest areas. This represents the front line of an extractive industry (derived from Benton 1989:85) so central to modern industrialism; as such, to fight this industry is to directly engage the "Other", the appropriator and destroyer of "nature", the modern industrial state. The users of the timber and paper products, especially the fine white papers, would represent a more diffuse enemy and in some sense might could the fight too close to home.

In order to paint summary sketches of the rival discourses and the government, we borrow from Merchant's (1990) taxonomy of environmental worldview's.

First, the egocentric extractive wood product industry saw the last remaining native hardwood forests and the forthcoming regrowth stands as so many sawlogs to be converted into multiple housing, fencing and pallet lots. This is the sawmiller's mental vision, and the more powerful pulp and paper companies with their army of clearfelling tractor and log carting drivers who see the forests as so many tonnes of woodchips to feed their "high tech" plants for white-as-white papers and pulped packaging products. An industry attempting to trade under the banner "Growth and Regrowth".

Ranged against these users of "nature", we have the highly educated and urban living ecocentists, mostly non-manual intellectual workers, who, inspired by the ideas of the ecological sciences and the secular religious ideology of deep ecology, (viewed in Naess's thinking that wilderness has value independant of whether humans have access to it), see the remaining old growth forests of Australia as ancient, spiritual wonderlands represnting the last vestige of "real nature", as standing against the modern industrial state and its destructive technology and consumerism, as representing a hopeful link between humanity and ecological pacificism. These ecocentists are ready and very able to fight to save these remnants of "nature". The movement's war cry is "wilderness not woodchips".

The other major actor, the state, represents predominantly the homocentric role. As planner, manager and arbitrator, and as target of intense lobbying, the state attempts, via rational methodologies, balanced strategies and mediating negotiations, to make equitable decisions and reconciliations between the two opposing interests.

I have pointed to the hopeless failure of the Government's responses to the wilderness - woodchip conflict, its attempts to serve both elite imperatives, imperatives which seek monopolies over forests with such power that alternative scenarios have not been considered nor adequately developed. I believe that what is required in the Australian case is alternative scenerios and I conclude with one such.

A political scenario needs to be developed based on a simultaneous moratorium on any new additional State transfer of native hardwood forests into environmental protected status, and any State licencing of long term, large volume and/or forest resource concessions for wood product developments. Such a scenario in the case of East Gippsland would suggest how its existing industrial base and social fabric can be protected from either de-industrialisation, caused by a "green" policy victory, or its present dominance by large national and/or foreign wood interests with their local compliant social elites, who work on the basis, either of a cut-out and get-out policy or establishing, on the basis of market dictates, a dominant regional monolopy over forest resource use.

This needs to be followed by the development of new and more democratic conflict resolution processes [4] and opportunities for decision making that provide for social justice for the regional workforce, environmental protection and enhancement of non-commercial forest values and sustainable [5] forest based industrial development.

This latter issue will involve the development of policies for the cessation of export woodchips, a rejection of large volume pulp and paper mill development, alternative silvicultural directions and the emphasis on increased value adding to logging material and the alterative use of sawmilling waste. Central to these development scenerios are proposals for new sawing and marketing strategies, cogeneration and production of briquetted domestic heating fuels.

The rival discourses must be broken by practical policy and commercial developments that democratically link social justice with ecological justice. Green jobs don't come simply from critique.

[1] Paper presented at the Ecopolitics Conference, RMIT, 25 September 1992.

[2] "Positional packages" is an adaption of a concept developed by Hirsch (1978) and will be introduced later in this paper.

[3] For a critique of Guha see Johns 1990.

[4] For a discussion of discursive democracy see Dryzek 1992.

[5] For a discussion of what sustainable forestry means and its possible implementation see Perry 1988.

Age (1991), 12 Nov.

Abercombie, N, S. Hill and B. Turner. (1986) Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism, London: Allen and Unwin.

Benton, T. (1989) `Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction', New Left Review, 178, 51-86.

Birch, T. (1990) `The Incarceration of Wilderness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons', Environmental Ethics, 12, 3-26.

Birrell, R. (1987) `The Social Origin of Australia's Conservation Movement', Journal of Intercultural Studies, 8:2, 22-39.

Davison, G. (1978) `Sydney and the Bush: The Urban Context of the Australian Legend', Historical Studies, xviii.

Dryzek, J. (1992) `Ecology and Discursive Democracy: Beyond Liberal Capitalism and the Administrative State', Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, 3:2,18-42.

Eckersley, R. (1989) `Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?', Political Studies, 37, 205-223.

Eder, K. (1990) `The Rise of Counter-culture Movements Against Modernity: Nature as a New Field of Class Struggle', Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 21-47.

Flanney, T. (1989) `Australian Wilderness: An Impossible Dream?', Australian Natural History, 23:2, 180.

Gell, P and I. Stuart. (1989) Human Settlement History and Environmental Impact: The Delegate River Catchment-East Gippsland, Monash Publications in Geography No 36, Melbourne: Monash University.

Gerritsen, R. (1990) `Informing Wilderness Policy: The Distributional Implications of Wilderness Conservation' Australian Journal of Public Administration, 49.1, 51-62.

Gismondi, M and M. Richardson. (1991) `Discourse and Power in Environmental Politics: Public Hearings on a Bleached Kraft Pulp Mill in Alberta Canada', Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, 2:3, 43-66.

Grundmann, R. (1991) Marxism and Ecology, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Guha, R. (1989) `Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique', Environmental Ethics, 11, 71-83.

Hay, P. (1987) `Will the "Tasmanian Disease" spread to the Mainland ?: The Politics of Land Use Conflict', Current Affairs Bulletin, 64:3, 4-12.

Held, L. (1989) `Prehistoric Aboriginal Impacts On Australian Vegetation: An Assessment Of The Evidence', Australian Geographer, 20:1, 37-46.

Hecht, S and Cockburn, A. (1990) The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon, Penguin: London.

Hirsch, F. (1976) Social Limits of Growth, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Horton, D. (1982) `The Burning Question: Aborigines, Fire and Australian Ecosystems', Mankind, 13, 237-251.

Jeans, D. (1983) `Wilderness, Nature and Society: Contributions to the History of an Environmental Attitude', Australian Geographical Studies, 21, 170-182.

Johns, D. (1990) `The Relevance of Deep Ecology to the Third World: Some Preliminary Comments', Environmental Ethics, 12, 233-252.

Jones, A. (1987) `The Violence of Materialism in Advanced Industrial Society: An Eco-sociological approach', Sociological Review, 35:1, 19-47.

Luke, T. (1988) `The Dreams of Deep Ecology', Telos, 76, 65- 92.

Martinez-Alier, J. (1987) Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Mercer, D. (1991) A Question of Balance: Natural Resources Conflict Issues in Australia, Sydney: Federation Press.

Merchant, C. (1990) `Environmental Ethics and Political Conflict: A View from California', Environmental Ethics, 12, 45-68.

Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Perry, D. (1988) `An Overview of Sustainable Forestry', Journal of Pesticide Reform, 8:3, 8-12.

Pyne, S. (1990) `Firestick History', Journal of American History, 76:4, 1132-1141.

Pyne, S. (1992) Burninng Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Redclift, M. (1989) Sustainable Development:Exploring the Contradictions. London: Routledge.

Runte, A. (1979) National Parks: The American Experience, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Stankey, G. (1989) `Beyond the Campfire Light: Historical Roots of the Wilderness Concept', Natural Resources Journal, 29, 9-23.

Timber Industry Strategy. (1986), Government Statement No 9. Melbourne: Government Printer.

Toyne, P and R. Johnston. (1991) `Reconciliation, Or The New Dispossession?: Aboriginal Land Rights and Nature Conservation, Habitat, 19:3, 8-10.

 Watson, I. (1990) Fighting over the forests. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Research Studies & Papers I Top I Home