– why closing remote Aboriginal communities is a bad idea for everyone

What if Aboriginal people did take Prime Minister Tony Abbott at his word, and abandoned their “lifestyle choices” to dwell on tiny communities in traditional lands?

The country would be heaps better off, right? It would save taxpayers a motza?

In fact, Australia might find that it is a whole lot worse off, and fairly quickly. Because – leaving aside any considerations of culture and human rights – Aboriginal communities are actually doing a great service to the nation by occupying that archipelago of remote outstations and microscopic communities.

What Aboriginal people are doing out there is managing the land. What they are doing is conserving the last vestiges of species and ecosystems which could collapse altogether in their absence. Some conservationists believe we need many more indigenous people occupying the outback, not fewer.

One such conservationist is Dr Barry Traill, from Pew Charitable Trusts. Last year, in a landmark TED talk in Sydney, he put it succinctly: “the problem for a lot of our wildlife in the outback is not too many people, but too few people.”

“In our outback there are now fewer people on the country than at any time in the last 50,000 years, on most of the outback. And by on the country I actually mean in it and managing it, dealing with fires, dealing with feral animals. We now have a situation where most of the country is simply not managed,” Dr Traill said.

He said from the 1940s, as Aboriginal people left remote areas, numbers of native animals dwindled. The pattern was repeated across Australia – Aboriginal hunting and burning disappeared from the landscape, leaving it to wildfires and feral animals.

“As the number of people declined in the desert…so did the number of some of the animals,” Dr Traill said. “We now know that this not only occurred in the Great Sandy Desert, but in many other places. The details vary, but elsewhere in Central Australia, in northern Australia as the patterns of humans changed in the outback, animals have declined.”

Dr Traill said he strongly believed that Aboriginal people needed their traditional country; that they were happier and healthier if they had attachment with it. But he said the opposite was also true – “the country needs its people”.

“Our outback is one of a tiny number of great, wild places left on our fairly crowded planet. But if we want to keep it healthy, if we want to keep our extraordinary wildlife there, we need to bring back people into all of our outback wilderness.”

Arguably the Australia’s greatest environmental success story over the past decade is one that most people know almost nothing about – the proliferation of indigenous ranger programs across much of outback Australia. These programs, the bulk of which are funded by the Federal Government, employ local Aboriginal people as rangers on their own lands.

From small beginnings, the ranger program has swelled to employ about 700 indigenous people on more than 100 teams. It is one of the few areas of environmental spending which has largely survived the successive purges of the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott Governments’ razor gangs. It is also one of the few areas of environmental policy that is supported by almost all sides in the environment debate.

Over the past decade scientists have recorded a frightening “second wave” of native mammal declines across much of northern Australia. Much of the immediate cause is thought to be the feral cat, populations of which have recently exploded and are cutting a terrible swathe through hundreds of species of mammal, birds and reptiles.

The indigenous ranger groups are the front-line battling this worrying surge toward extinction. They are resuming the hunting of cats and foxes which in the past suppressed their numbers, and reinstating the complex burning regimes which created the habitat preferred by native animals.

“The rangers have now come back, they manage the fires, they deal with feral animals like water buffalo, the bush is healthier, and wildlife which has declined … are coming back,” Dr Traill said. “And there are now dozens and dozens of Aboriginal ranger groups like this operating throughout Australia, and they’re combining traditional knowledge, western science and using modern equipment and modern technology.”