Of all the different genres of nature and landscape photographers, I admire the wilderness photographers the most. They really suffer for their art as they leave the comfort of society and head out into the bush for extended periods (followed closely by those hardy wildlife photographers stuck in their hide for days on end).
These photographers head off to explore the wild and untouched landscapes of exotic locations. Places like Tasmania (I have described the work of two Tasmanian wilderness photography previously – Olegas Truchanas and Martin Hawes), the south island of New Zealand, Patagonia, Alaska, the Amazon.
Most weeks I spend some time in the “wild” with my camera and do a couple of extended trips into the bush each year. But if I wanted to go to photograph the “wilderness”, then the obvious question is where do I need to go? What exactly is wilderness? It turns out this is not a straightforward question.
The US Wilderness Act 1964 was the world’s first legislation enacted specifically to protect wilderness. The definition of an area of wilderness, quoted in part below, focuses on land removed from the impact of modern man and the opportunities this land has for solitude and recreation.
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
……
(1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable;
(2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation;
(3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and
(4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific educational, scenic, or historical value.
There are other definitions. For example, the European Commission has Guidelines on Wilderness in Natura 2000 (2013)1. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines wilderness as a protected area (category Ib) whose primary objective is:
To protect the long-term ecological integrity of natural areas that are undisturbed by significant human activity, free of modern infrastructure and where natural forces and processes predominate, so that current and future generations have the opportunity to experience such areas.
The detailed guidelines2 includes criteria such as: free of modern infrastructure and intrusions (“preferably with highly restricted or no motorised access”); high degree of intactness; sufficient size to protect biodiversity; opportunities for solitude; free of inappropriate or excessive human use or presence. I particularly like “visitor use is more limited and confined to those with the skills and equipment to survive unaided.”
There are also other measures that provide a proxy for wilderness, in the sense that they describe large untouched landscapes. One such measure is the Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL)3, which was proposed by Greenpeace in 2001 as a way to measure forest degradation at a global scale. The IFLs are defined as large unbroken expanses of natural forest ecosystems without signs of significant human activity sufficiently large to provide refuge for wide-ranging animal species. For the global IFL analyses, the criteria are: (1) minimum area of 50,000 hectares; (2) minimum IFL patch width of 10 km; and (3) minimum corridor/appendage width of 2 km.
The map below shows IFLs in Tasmania in 2020. There is not much point showing you the map for my home state of Victoria – there are no forests that meet the IFL criteria here.
All of these definitions relate to large, relatively untouched tracts of land. The specifics of these definitions of wilderness reflect the values that their authors consider of primary importance – recreation and park management in the case of the US Wilderness Act, ecological conservation in other, more recent definitions. These definitions can have important implications for how areas of relatively natural landscapes are delineated and managed to maintain a particular set of values into the future.
I then asked myself, where do I go to find wilderness in my home state of Victoria, Australia? Much of the current approach to wilderness protection in Victoria was developed following the 1991 Wilderness Special Investigation by the Land Conservation Council (LCC, now Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, VAEC) and a series of legislative changes to the National Park Act 1975. The LCC recommended some 786,000 hectares to be protected as wilderness areas.
The LCC noted the common themes in most definitions of wilderness included “a distinct environmental setting characterised by being remote and, more particularly, natural and essentially unmodified”. They settled on “a large area with landforms and native plant and animal communities relatively unaltered or unaffected by the influence of the European settlement of Australia” (note remoteness was not included).
As of 2022, Victoria contained 5,081 separate protected areas with a total land area of just over 4 million hectares (17.64% of the state). This protected land has different designations and use limitations as defined in the National Park Act 1975.
National parks provide the highest level of protection to diverse natural areas. They usually contain the best and most unique examples of our natural values and biodiversity. There are 45 national parks in Victoria, totalling 2.9 million hectares (72.5% of the state's protected areas).
There are three designations of interest in managing large untouched areas of wilderness.
Reference areas are tracts of public land containing viable samples of one or more land types that are relatively undisturbed. There are 144 reference areas in Victoria, totalling 112,628 ha (2.8% of the state's protected areas). All human interference is kept to the essential minimum and, as far as practicable, the only long-term change results from natural processes.
Wilderness parks are large areas with native plant and animal communities that are relatively unaffected by humans. They are managed for conservation, with no facilities provided for visitors and no vehicles permitted. There are 3 wilderness parks in Victoria, totalling 200,699 ha (5% of the state's protected areas).
There are 19 wilderness zones in Victoria, totalling 641,441 ha (16% of the state's protected areas). These areas provide for the preservation and protection of natural environment including indigenous flora and fauna and features of ecological significance, among other things. One objective is to maximise the extent to which these areas are undisturbed by the influences of the European settlement of Australia.
In addition to the ecological values or “naturalness” of wilderness, there are also the experiential values of wilderness. For me, as a landscape photographer, it is this special experience that distinguishes a wilderness from a beautiful but less wild location.
The experiential elements are discussed at length in “Refining the Definition of Wilderness” by three great Tasmanian photographers, Martin Hawes, Grant Dixon and Chris Bell. I would recommend their paper for those interested4. They
define wilderness to be land (including inland water bodies) that is characterised by a high degree of biophysical naturalness, linear remoteness from infrastructure and landscape disturbances, and time-remoteness from points of mechanised access, as well as having minimal evidence of modern technological society. In short, wilderness is land which is natural, remote and primitive.
Hawes et al make the important point that specifying that an area be large does not guarantee that any part of it will be remote. For example, a park along a river or mountain ridge line may be long but narrow, so that no part is far removed from a road. These linear reserves are often important areas of biodiversity and are worthy of protection but they are not wilderness.
To meet this definition of wilderness, a wilderness needs to be surrounded by a “remoting buffer” that makes it remote from mechanised transport and other signs of human activity. The authors recommend a linear remoteness from infrastructure and landscape disturbances of at least 5km (typically half a day’s walking).
A wilderness area and its remoting buffer are complementary parts of an inseparable whole, and the management of a remoting buffer is integral to the management of the wilderness with which it is associated. As a result, wilderness regions are by definition large – at least 7800 hectares (i.e. the area of a circle of 5 km radius) and frequently much larger.
Victoria has few large tracts of natural and remote wilderness. There are three wilderness parks that include some remote areas and the 19 wilderness zones are embedded in national parks to varying degrees of remoteness.
Defining wilderness is important to appropriately manage land that maximises the ecological and experiential benefits. A less rigorous definition as used by the LCC and Victoria’s National Parks Act has the advantage of designating a larger area as wilderness, thereby providing increased protection from human intrusion (effectively the remote wilderness and the remoting buffer).
However, including the idea of remoteness from any human intrusion as outlined by Hawes et al demonstrates how precious and vulnerable wilderness is to loss. The addition of a road or human infrastructure such as a hut or helipad into or adjacent to a wilderness areas (even well intentioned) can remove large areas of remote wilderness as shown in the theoretical example below (from Hawes et al).
Now that we have a sense of what wilderness is, my next post will explore how the wild character of an area impacts my experience as a visitor and a photographer.
See Guidelines for Applying Protected Area Management Categories (edited by Dudley 2008)
See Intact Forest Landscapes website
See Martin Hawes, Grant Dixon and Chris Bell (2018) Refining the Definition of Wilderness https://tnpa.org.au/refining-wilderness/
This is very interesting! Here in the Southeast US there are many areas designated 'wilderness.' I haven't looked into the specifics of what qualifies them as that. They are within national forests, but truly they are never THAT remote or removed from civilization. However, their protected status still makes them very special places to visit!
Nice photos, particularly the last two.