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Wild Places and the social media ‘positive feedback loop’

I have lost track of the number of times I have stumbled into one of those ‘instagram is killing the places we love’ conversations but, after a busy summer in the mountains, its hard to ignore the ever growing numbers of people out on the trails.  I saw this recently in Outside magazine:

If you’ve talked to any longtime outdoor enthusiasts in the last few years, you’ve probably heard some grumbling about how crowded the campsites are and how difficult it’s become to find trailhead parking. And they’ve probably attributed the uptick in popularity of outside activities to social media, where widely shared photos of beautiful sites draw crowds.

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BTAC gets to work on the AAWT

If you have ever wandered on a walking track in the mountains, you have enjoyed the fruits of someone else’s labour. Walking tracks are cultural artifacts that allow us to access the forests, mountains and rivers that we love. Often they follow earlier paths: settlers followed First Nations routes out of Gippsland into the high country. Miners and graziers cut rough tracks into the gold diggings. Sometimes these turned into commerce highways as large population centres grew around the diggings. Nowadays the foot tracks in the high country are all about recreation.

But with increasing fires across the mountains, many tracks can become crowded out through a mass of regrowth. And as trees killed in bushfires start to collapse, many tracks become crossed by fallen logs and the tracks become multiple braids, often ending in dead ends, making navigation difficult and increasing the likelihood of walkers becoming lost. Land management authorities have limited funds to maintain the trail network and have many demands on their time.

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Native forest logging stops in VIC high country on JAN 1!

On January 1, 2024, all native forest logging on public lands in the east of the state will end. This is a wonderful win for forests, animals, landscapes and the climate, and comes after decades of hard work by many thousands of people.

In recent years Friends of the Earth (FoE) has been campaigning to protect areas of high conservation forest in the north east of the state from logging. We are proud to have played a significant role in the long campaign to gain an end to native forest logging in the east of Victoria.

Here is a brief summary of the recent campaign in the north east and the high country.

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