Tasmanian Activists Challenge Mining in The Tarkine

Two female activists from envi­ron­men­tal direct action group Groundswell have tak­en peace­ful action to high­light the detri­men­tal impacts that min­ing in the Tarkine will have on healthy dev­il pop

Two female activists from envi­ron­men­tal direct action group Groundswell have tak­en peace­ful action to high­light the detri­men­tal impacts that min­ing in the Tarkine will have on healthy dev­il pop­u­la­tions liv­ing in the region.

At 10AM on Sat­ur­day, Feb. 2, Groundswell activists deployed a ban­ner read­ing “FOR DEVILS SAKE, DON’T MINE THE TARKINE” from the Alexan­dra Sus­pen­sion Bridge, in Launceston’s Cataract Gorge.  The two climbers– a local law stu­dent and a doc­tor- remained sus­pend­ed from the bridge for two hours until 12pm.

“The Tarkine region of North West Tas­ma­nia con­tains the last wild pop­u­la­tions of dis­ease free dev­ils.   Min­ing and asso­ci­at­ed activ­i­ties are of sig­nif­i­cant threat to the dev­ils of this region” said Groundswell spokesper­son Sarah Van Est.

tasmanian-devil

“Already under direct threat from the dead­ly facial tumour dis­ease, loss of habi­tat sig­nif­i­cant­ly increas­es the like­li­hood of con­tact between healthy and dis­eased ani­mals. This has the poten­tial to increase the rate of spread of DFTD.”

“A fur­ther threat is the sub­stan­tial increase of heavy traf­fic in the area, which would great­ly increase wildlife road­kill” added Miss Van Est.

A lead­ing wildlife expert, Prof. Hamish McCal­lum, head of Grif­fith University’s School of Envi­ron­ment and for­mer chief sci­en­tist of the Save the Tas­man­ian Dev­il Pro­gram, con­firmed that the mines would have a poten­tial­ly dis­as­trous impact on dev­ils.

“There is suf­fi­cient evi­dence to sug­gest that it may threat­en the sur­vival of pop­u­la­tions of Tas­man­ian dev­ils in the area,” said Pro­fes­sor McCal­lum.

Miss Van Est said that “Self-reg­u­la­tion and token fines offer no real incen­tive for wealthy min­ing com­pa­nies to take mea­sures to ensure pro­tec­tion for the endan­gered Tas­man­ian icon.”

As well as con­tain­ing sig­nif­i­cant dev­il habi­tat, much of the Tarkine has already been inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied as high con­ser­va­tion val­ue wilder­ness. Groundswell is call­ing on the State and Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ments, specif­i­cal­ly fed­er­al envi­ron­ment min­is­ter Tony Burke,  to safe­guard the area and the dev­ils by ensur­ing imme­di­ate and ongo­ing pro­tec­tion in the form of Nation­al Park or World Her­itage List sta­tus for the Tarkine region.