Tasmania Nature Nonprofits

Tasmania is an island cut off from the mainland when the seas rose, and it kept things the mainland lost. The Tasmanian devil survives here, the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world, and the thylacine survived here until 1936, when the last one died in a Hobart zoo and became the most famous extinction in Australian history. The southwest of the island is one of the last great temperate wildernesses on Earth, a country of buttongrass and myrtle forest and rivers that run the colour of tea.

Those forests include Huon pine, which grows so slowly and rots so reluctantly that individual trees live for thousands of years and stands may be older than any other organism on the continent. The fight to stop the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s was the largest environmental campaign in Australian history and it succeeded, and it made the modern Australian green movement.

The organizations here defend the remaining old-growth forest from logging, fight a transmissible facial cancer that has devastated the devil population, and protect a World Heritage wilderness now facing fires that it did not evolve with.