The Conservative Forest

This is a 28 line poem that uses satire to interrogate the non-conservationist cultural values and attitudes that have been mobilised to discredit environmentalism (and to perpetuate an idealised account of pioneer and settler history in Australia) in public discourse. The poem employs a narrative technique to describe an inverse of the Edenic or post-Romantic pastoral conception of wilderness. It also uses imagery to evoke a satirical idealisation of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ as concepts. The voice of the poem is of an authority figure explaining why it is preferable and correct to control and exploit forests. This sets up an ironic disjunction between the first order narrative of the poem and the sub-text which undermines it.