Tasmanian Wilderness Society
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| Founded | 1976, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia |
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| Focus | Environmentalism, Peace |
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Area served
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Australia |
| Method | Nonviolence, Lobbying, Research, Innovation |
| Website | www.wilderness.org.au |
The Wilderness Society (TWS) is an Australian, community-based, not-for-profit non-governmental environmental advocacy organisation. Its vision is to "transform Australia into a society that protects, respects and connects with the natural world that sustains us."
It is a community-based organisation with a philosophy of non-violence and consensus decision-making. While the Wilderness Society is a politically unaligned group, it actively engages the community to lobby politicians and parties.
The Wilderness Society comprises a number of separately incorporated organisations and has Campaign Centres located in all Australian capital cities (except Darwin and Canberra) and a number of regional centres.
The Wilderness Society was formed initially as the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) and was basically a name change from the South West Tasmania Action Committee. TWS was formed as a broader organisation so that it could campaign on a range of issues, including HEC dams, forestry and mining wherever such issues occurred across Tasmania, so it was no longer bound to campaign on just Southwest Tasmania. Included in these were campaigns against the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC)'s plans to build dams in many locations around Tasmania. The HEC had appeared to exert an influence over politicians and the community, justifying this stance as being in the best interest of Tasmania, specially regarding the fate of Lake Pedder.
The motivation for the TWS formation was not initially the planning and construction of the Franklin Dam on the Gordon River, in South West Tasmania by the HEC, although that later became the organisation's key campaign. To the TWS and many Australians, the Gordon and Franklin Rivers were seen as part of the South West Wilderness, and not as an extension of the ongoing HEC expansion.
The group was originally established in 1976 from the members of the Lake Pedder Action Committee and the Southwest Tasmania Action Committee. Along with the United Tasmania Group, they had protested against the earlier flooding of Lake Pedder. The group already had established interstate branches as the South West Tasmania Action Committee (in NSW branch the word 'Action' was not included), so it was already a nationwide organisation. Significantly, all but four of the twenty-three people attending the inaugural meeting of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society in 1976 were members of the United Tasmania Group.
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