Image: Albert Tucker and Clifton Pugh protecting trees from logging, Hurstbridge 1963

Vast increases in world population and its capacity to consume, have wrought environmental destruction on an unbelievable scale.

Within a single lifetime, the consumer societies of the west-about one-fifth of the world’s population have consumed, devoured and poisoned more of this planet’s resources than in all previous history.

With an infinite arrogance and bottomless greed, we have declared war on every other form of life on this planet. Crocodiles, tigers and snakes are gentlemen compared to us.

What was once a human population has now the status of a planetary plague-that is the general picture.

But now I would like to speak as an artist-to try to breathe a little life into a spiritual dimension that has been denied and rejected-the pre-condition for our environmental atrocities.

The spiritual health of all people depends on our ability to make direct contact with those invisible, infinite and wondrous powers of creation which flow through all forms of life. And this contact is best made through primal untouched wilderness, forests and all forms of wildlife, uncontaminated by human exploitation, pollution and abuse.

Only then can we experience that sense of the eternal, the sacrosanct and the ineffable which gives meaning, purpose and direction to human existence.

Albert Tucker A.O

The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation is opposed to logging in the Dandenong Ranges National Park. Click here to have your say.

Image: Eva Davis-Jones