In Michael Crichton’s excellent State of Fear, the novelist does what he did so effortlessly well: disguising informative, in-depth lectures as engrossing stories. One such summarises over nearly 150 years of ‘management’ of Yellowstone Park.
“When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game,” Crichton notes. “Soon after that, the Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole job was to maintain the park in its original condition. Yet within 10 years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever. And the reason for this was the park managers.”
The reason, as Crichton elaborates, is not maleficence: the park managers were genuinely trying to manage the park as wilderness. The problem, though, was that a wilderness is a complex system, and humans are pretty lousy at managing such systems. Every decision the park managers made unleashed a concatenation of knock-on ecological effects. Every step to rectify those unleashed more.
Here in Tasmania, we’re seeing the same process in action. Again, in the name of ‘saving nature’. Specifically, the state’s iconic Tasmanian devils.
In 2012, 28 Tasmanian devils were brought to Maria Island off Tasmania’s east coast as an “insurance population” when facial tumour disease was severely affecting the species. The devils have since thrived, with their numbers reaching up to 90. But their success has been linked to a major decline in local wildlife, including the disappearance of a little penguin colony that once had about 3,000 breeding pairs.
Devil facial tumour disease is, it should be pointed out, an entirely natural mutation. No factory, no farm chemical, no climate graph has ever been credibly attached to it. The cancer jumped from devil to devil because that is what transmissible cancers, so rare that less than half a dozen have ever been identified, do. Officialdom abhors a policy vacuum: it had to be seen to be ‘doing something’.
Doing something, in 2012, meant shipping devils to Maria Island, where penguins and many other species had spent the last few thousand years happily living without mammalian predators.
The island had been a sanctuary precisely because nothing with teeth lived there. Ground-nesting and flightless birds treated it as a holiday: Tasmanian native hens (“turbochooks” in the local parlance), shearwaters, Cape Barren geese and a fairy penguin (I refuse to use the PC ‘little penguin’ neologism) colony estimated at about 3,000 breeding pairs. Fairy penguins are the smallest of the family. Maria gave them a nursery free of dogs and cats. Govenrnment bureaucrats gave them opportunistic carnivores with big, bitey teeth and jaws which can crush concrete.
BirdLife Tasmania’s Eric Woehler and others told the department, before the crates were opened, what every other oceanic island on Earth had already demonstrated.
“For the last 500 or more years, every time we've seen a deliberate or accidental introduction of a predator onto an oceanic island, the result has been the same- a catastrophic impact on one or more species of bird,” he said.
“We suggested that the outcome of this particular introduction on Maria would follow what has been seen without fail everywhere else in the world, and sadly we were right,” he added.
But government bureaucrats did what they do: carry on regardless of the consequences. And devils did what healthy predators do: feed and breed. Numbers quickly climbed toward 90.
The penguins did what ground-nesters do when a fast, hungry, chompy predator arrives: they vanished.
A Parks and Wildlife survey about 18 months ago found the colonies empty. All of them. Three thousand pairs, gone from a national park that was supposed to be a refuge.
The department’s line is the Yellowstone hymn in a Tasmanian accent. The Save the Devil Program is “adaptive”. Conservation “must change as scientific knowledge and priorities developed.” The island population is being “managed” to reduce its effect on the ecology. No doubt there were plenty of PowerPoint slides and much wagging of chins about KPIs and stakeholders.
Woehler’s assessment is shorter and to the point: the program has been a disaster for every wild creature on Maria but the devils. At least, so far: once they’ve eaten up the local food supply, their population will almost certainly crash in its turn.
“Losing 3,000 pairs of penguins from a national park on an island that should act as a refuge for the species is clearly a catastrophic impact,” he said. “One could only hope the devils are removed as quickly as possible.”
Clearly, he’s never dealt with a government bureaucracy before.
Then the next knock-on arrives, as Crichton said it would. Devils on the Tasmanian mainland have somewhat stabilised through captive breeding and tumour research, but a second facial-tumour type has appeared. Disease specialist Bruce Lyons argues that yanking the Maria animals would be premature because nobody yet knows what the new cancer will do. Keep them where they are. Prudent, from the devil’s point of view. From the penguins’, it is another decade of an introduced carnivore on an island that never signed up for one.
This is the management loop in miniature. A natural plague threatens an emblem. Managers move the emblem onto an ark that was already someone else’s home. The ark works so well the original tenants are erased. Managers promise to manage the managers. A second plague appears, so the first intervention cannot be unwound. Each decision is sincere. Each is ‘for nature’. Each manufactures the next problem that will require another committee, another translocation, another press release about adaptive science.
Roosevelt’s Yellowstone teemed until the people hired to freeze it in amber started ‘helping’. Maria Island had penguins until Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife pen-pushers decided the devil needed a fortress. Complex systems do not sit still for a bureaucracy’s good intentions. They cascade. The devil is real, the tumour is real and the empty burrows are real. And so is the bureaucratic conceit that the next tweak will finally make the wilderness do what the spreadsheet said it would.
