Why Foresters are from Mars and Forest Activists are From Jupiter

Forest "regeneration burns" following clearfelling in Tasmanian Oldgrowth. Photo credit Beth Heap. 

 

Introduction

It is fair to say that professional foresters and environmental activists inhabit different planets; or at least they see this one very differently. That people have different worldviews is not a bad thing, but it can be extraordinarily difficult for any of us to see past our worldview even if the evidence to the contrary is glaring.

Example:

• Some people continue to believe in communism even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the exposure of the utter failure of the communist project;
• You can tell some Christians that you are gay, you love Jesus with all your heart, you practice an exemplary Christian life, you have prayed and fasted for healing, sought rights of deliverance, contemplated suicide, and ended up on anti-depressants, and they will tell you to pray harder for healing;
• If you an evolutionary biologist speciation proves evolution, irreducible complexity proves evolution, gaps in the fossil record prove evolution, entropy proves evolution, extinction proves evolution;
• If you are a forester and you log a forest that is seventy per cent rainforest species by canopy cover, napalm it, and plant rows of eucalyptus in its place, this will be sustainable in your eyes.

The Conservationist’s View

So on to forestry. I argued in a previous blog (http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/quest-for-holy-grail-ecosystem.html) that full ecosystem management is a distant, and in most if not all instances, unattainable goal. It follows that a comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve (CAR) system for the target ecosystems is essential:

• as an ecological benchmark;
• to give effect to the precautionary principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle); and
• to maintain ecosystem resilience in the face of environmental change (climate change, pollution, etc).

It also follows that extractive activities with big environmental impacts like mining, clearfelling, or demersal trawl, are inherently destructive.

This is essentially the world view of environmentalists. Within that world view, activists peg themselves on a spectrum from, on the one hand, a fairly pragmatic appreciation of the challenges of natural resource management, to a mystical invocation of the sacredness of mother earth on the other.

The Forester’s View

Foresters deeply oppose these concepts. That’s a big thing to say, but it is in effect what they do say. In this alternate world view, sustainable forestry makes otiose any form of preservation because best ‘practice forest management’ ensures that the environment is not harmed in any way. In this view, all issues such as landscape values, water quality, karst, biodiversity, ground water, and soil structure, are adequately addressed through management. Any form of conservation is therefore unnecessary at best and counter productive at worst. This view was put forcefully to the Legislative Council by former forester Geoff Wilkinson. You can view Mr Wilkinson’s submission here (http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ctee/Council/Submissions/Sub%20121%20-%20Geoff%20Wilkinson.pdf). On a personal note I once suggested to a former district forester for Geeveston that we should have a buffer zone to prevent logging to the boundary of the World Heritage Area (WHA). He said that current management provided a buffer i.e. logging World Heritage value forests is a form of conservation. He was sincere in this statement.

Some History

Let’s start with a trip down memory lane. Tasmania’s first anti logging blockade happened at Farmhouse Creek in Southwest Tasmania in 1986.  Following this action the Forestry Commission argued before the Helsham Royal Commission that protection of the Farmhouse Creek (and Lemonthyme) forests was unnecessary. They got protected anyway.

Then in 1989 conservationists and foresters sat around a table to find a way forward but were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to overcome their world view differences. At that time, and at any time since, the Forestry Commission could have advocated formation of a comprehensive and representative reserve system, and begun work to that end. Had they done so, they could have prevented considerable environmental damage, saved the community the worst of 25 years of social conflict, and undercut both the green movement and the Green Party. Instead they went to the government of the day with a proposal for a law that locked in destruction of all the old growth forests that were not then in secure reserves. That was pretty much all the old growth on Crown (public) land. This destroyed the fist Labor/Green government and locked in community conflict to the present time.

Since then the official line has changed from ‘we don’t want forest conservation in Tasmania’ to ‘we have enough forest reserved from logging that conservation values are already protected’. Industry said that in relation to the Recommended Areas for Protection under the Grey government, proposals for WHA extensions, formation of the Douglas Apsley National Park, the Regional Forest Agreements (RFA #1 and #2), the Community Forest Agreement, and now the Forest Peace Agreement; in other words, every forest conservation proposal for the last quarter century.

Nevertheless we have the Regional Forest Agreement? Isn’t this enough?

The extent to which the RFA provides adequate forest protection is a complex question. What I will say here is that I was a Wilderness Society Activist for the five years preceding the RFA. Industry fought against the proposal that became the RFA tooth and nail. Foresters were rather silent. In other words it didn’t come about through the conscience of enlightened forest managers. It came about because of a national groundswell of protest in which tens of thousands of people marched in the streets in cities around the nation and hundreds of activists went to jail (or at least remand) for forest conservation. These were at the time the largest protests since the moratorium marches of the Vietnam war. Prime Minister Keating needed to diffuse the issue before the next Federal Election. The Regional Forest Agreements with the States was his compromise solution at that time.

Put bluntly, if it were up to foresters, there would be no Tasmanian forests reserved from logging at all.

Trust and plausibility?

 

It is always dangerous to make broad brush statements (and hard not to in short blog essays)! The ‘forest management’ argument is certainly more plausible in some circumstances than others. For example, when applied to forest that has been extensively selectively logged and burned, forest management may in some instances improve the forest. The argument is stronger for logging in dry forest types if there are small coupes, careful selection of replacement species, adherence to the Forest Practices Code, long rotations, and adjoining un-logged forest. The argument becomes steadily less convincing as you progress into pristine old growth, wet forest types, and rainforest. It becomes absurd when replacing one forest ecosystem with another, such as plantation, and when there are systemic breaches of professional standards.

Even if you accept the forest management argument in some instances there is still an issue of trust. Foresters occupy a strange position . They both inform policy and implement policy. They are forced to respond to public demands that forest be taken out of production but must also honour supply contracts. They both determine forest practices, implement forest practices, and police forest practices all at the same time.

Despite the best professional efforts of many in industry, it is hard for informed observers to take foresters seriously when, for example, they:

• want to log glacial refugia rainforest communities;
• find the largest living thing in the southern hemisphere (El Grande http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Grande_(tree ) and set fire to it;
• use cable loggers on precipitous slopes and only stop when embarrassed by publicity stemming from a blockade by The Wilderness Society (at Hellyer);
• obtain exemptions from planning laws, freedom of information laws, and laws concerning threatened species;
• self regulate; and
• ostracise whistle blowers.

One forester who broke the unofficial code of silence that surrounds forestry mismanagement in Tasmania is Bill Manning. Never a greeny, Mr Manning confirmed what many had suspected or had actually observed. 

 

To quote: “…the forest industry has become so woefully negligent in its practices that it has been forced to be exempted from all other state environmental, planning and land management legislation for the simple reason that were it to be judged by the legislation that other Tasmanians have to abide by, it would be found to be comprehensively in breach of Tasmanian law. From my extensive in the forest industry, I believe that corruption of forest management in Tasmania [is] such that there is no enforcement of this weakened code of forest practice, and no silvicultural outcome other than the clearfelling of native forest for plantation…the decimation of habitat for endangered species…and finally a culture within the Tasmanian forest industry of bullying, cronyism, secrecy and lies.” (Quote from Senate Hansard, Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, Plantation Forests Industry, 8 October 2003, at page 501).

Mr Manning documented over 100 alleged breaches of the Forest Practices Code, including alleged serious corruption and criminal activity. A profession as diligent as that suggested by Mr Wilkinson’s submission might be expected to support a full enquiry, rally behind their colleague, and press the authorities to investigate thoroughly these allegations. Instead Mr Manning was ostracised, sacked, vilified, and when I last heard, was unemployed and suffering depression.

 

There was no investigation, and there have been no prosecutions. Mr Manning’s notes are presumably sitting at the bottom of someone’s filing cabinet. Is there any reason to suppose that ten years later anything has changed?

 

Cable Logging in World Heritage value forests, Florentine Valley Tasmania

 

Readers may be interested in my earlier post on the forest peace deal here: http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/tasmanian-forestry-peace-deal-should-we.html

Tag line 1: forest peace talks, silviculture, forest practices code, florentine valley, world heritage, forest protest, Ta Ann, old growth forest logging, clearfelling, El Grande, World Heritage Area, RFA, Regional Forest Agreement, corruption, Legislative Council.

Tag line 2: forest peace deal, Christine Milne, Terry Edwards, Vica Bailey, Bob Brown, Dr Pullinger, old growth forests, high conservation value forests, The Wilderness Society, Tony Burke, Michael Hodgeman.

Roads Through Wilderness – can there be such a thing as a ‘wilderness development’ policy?

Tarkine Wilderness with Button Grass

Like ‘fighting for peace’ wilderness development is often seen as an oxymoron. It is thought that as soon as you have development, by definition, you cease to have wilderness, or you have less of it. Tasmania is one of the few places where true wilderness exists.

Wilderness is a place where human beings are transitory; where there is little if any sign of the existence of people, where if the modern world ended you wouldn’t notice. There are no roads, no signs, and in the strictest sense, no permanent walking tracks.  It is an ecological benchmark for nature untrammelled by man and unaltered by the modern world. It’s not about scenery or about any human aspiration. It is nature for nature’s sake – solely and unapologetically.

Unsurprisingly there isn’t much of it left. Further, the baseline for what is considered ‘wilderness’ keeps diluting. I cringe when I watch BBC documentaries where people enthusiastically describe, for example, the Scottish highlands as ‘pristine wilderness’. That land has been logged, cleared, grazed, farmed, fought over, stolen, bled for and owned for a thousand years. In my native Britain, if you can’t hear traffic – its wilderness!

 

Most people can’t see the use of wilderness. That’s because it doesn’t have a “use”. It’s a bit like justifying the “use” of happiness, beauty, love, truth, spirituality, or anything really important. It may be useful but it doesn’t exist to be useful, it just is.

This brings us to a recent suggestion that we build a road bisecting the South West National Park/World Heritage area and charge people $300 a day to drive down it. After all, there’s a lot of space out there going to waste. The Groom Liberal government has already done the same thing through the Tarkine wilderness but there is no toll (and if there was it would still never pay for the cost of road construction).

It’s an obviously nutty idea it but does betray a desire for greater access to, and profit from, our wild lands.  There is a limit to how much people will sacrifice for nature without getting tangible returns. There is a long term risk of ‘roll back’ if the green movement remains puritanical. The answer I think is quite simple.

Think of wilderness as a series of concentric circles. The closer to the centre you are the less sign there is of human existence. On the periphery you have scenic drives, short interpretive walks, lodges, boat ramps, scenic railways, picnic facilities and camp grounds. You might even have hotel accommodation that blends reasonably well with its environment (not concrete and glass with big car parks and golf courses). Further in you have well constructed walking tracks, toilets, shacks, and elsewhere, four wheel drive trails. Deeper in you have nothing at all. You raft or walk through but you take everything with you, and you do so at your own risk.

In Tasmania there is significant scope for investment in infrastructure to support nature based experiences around our wilderness areas without trashing the centre. Unfortunately there has been a history of inappropriate development proposals by people who don’t ‘get’ wilderness and don’t understand Tasmania. On the other side you have an anti development lobby that is paranoid about incremental loss of wild lands to uncontrolled development and reactively oppose anything that they see as infringing. This is partly because of a history where conservatives vandalise wilderness then claim that because its values are degraded it is no longer worthy of protection.

 

It would be very helpful if government opened a meaningful dialogue with environmental NGOs about developing a formal wilderness development policy based on the above principles. This might include for example, guidelines about the types of buildings and construction materials that are appropriate on the edge of our wild lands.

There is simply no reason why for example we couldn’t have small scale chalet style accommodation at the southern edge of Lake St Claire where the old HEC pump house is, or re-build the hotel at the Springs on Mt Wellington, or have a Mt Wellington cable car, or have a small development at the end of the Donough’s Hill track overlooking the Franklin River on the way to Queenstown. These things are not going to destroy the wilderness but they will connect people with it. Those who are able and willing to walk for 21 days unassisted through the South West still can; and they will be more likely to have a job when they get home. If we can put wedge politics aside we can move forward on these issues, but we can only do so meaningfully if we truly appreciate what we have. What we have is amazing. I attach a handful of photographs for reference.

 

Tasmanian Wilderness - a gentler way to travel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ecotourism in Old Growth Forest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tarkine Wilderness Lodge - development's sensitive side

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

Open Cut Mining - development's insensitive side

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Longer View

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tag line: Wilderness development, Tarkine, ecotourism, wilderness management, world heritage area management, national parks, Tarking mining, Tasmanian rainforest

Quest for the Holy Grail – 'ecosystem management' of supertrawlers, forestry, and marine parks

Up to now natural resource management has been about sustainable yield. In simple terms ‘sustainable yield’ means that you can harvest a given amount of resource (timber, fish, clean water, etc) from a given ecosystem/area forever. That has been the stated objective of our natural resource management agencies such as forestry and fisheries since the 1950’s. Last year all that changed.

After seven years of negotiation our federal fisheries authority granted, through their minister, a licence for a Dutch supertrawler (FV Abel Tasman aka Margiris) to harvest a given quantity of fish from Australian waters. The quota was based on best available knowledge and then heavily weighted to allow for uncertainty i.e. the catch was set well below what was considered sustainable. The Official view was that the supertrawler could fish for a hundred years and not deplete stocks.

However following a massive community campaign the Environment Minister rolled the Fisheries Minister in Cabinet, changed the Act, and withdrew the licence on the basis of “scientific uncertainty”. The Minister has since explained this action in terms of requiring complete ecosystem management rather than simply counting the fish. This changes the game completely. ‘Ecosystem management’ means ensuring that all parts of the ecosystem and their interactions remain intact, or at least robustly represented in secure reserves.

Ironically the same environment minister had no concern for such matters when allowing open cut mining in the Tarkine. Further, an examination of publicly available maps and management plans shows that the new marine reserves declared by the minister last year give some of the most fragile and important marine habitats (IUCN cat I and II) little protection from highly damaging activities such as demersal trawling. An overlay of marginal electorates provides a very clear explanation as to why.

On the other side of Bass Straight there is relatively little conflict about 'sustainable yield' when it comes to forestry on public land. There is however entrenched disagreement over whether forest management in theory and in practice compromises/damages/changes or otherwise harms various forest ecosystems. On a personal note I spoke recently with a river guide with decades of experience on the Picton river. The Picton flows through now heavily logged forest valleys that the conservation movement sought to preserve. He had a raft of complaints about logging impacts from permanent reduction in water flows that have ended his commercial rafting operations over summer, to loss of mosses on the river bank due to water turbidity.    

If we understood completely every organism in a system and all the interactions between them we could then conduct controlled experiments to determine the impact of harvesting. We could then with confidence manage ecosystems sustainably. That will never happen. Ecosystems are just too complex. At Elizabeth Middleton Reef for example there are 1000 identified species of fish. That’s just the fish. Then there is the coral, the sea plants, and all the stuff that crawls around in the mud. If you were to attempt to chart the interdependencies between these elements of the system you would soon run into the multiples of millions of links. The human mind cannot manage this complexity. Supercomputers can manage the data volume but that does not mean we have understanding.

Furthermore much of the world’s biodiversity is microscopic and the microscopic world is still poorly understood. The Craig Venter institute for example, has an ongoing program wherein they sail around the world taking regular water samples and analysing their contents. They have to date identified over 60 million new genes and hundreds of thousands of microbes previously unknown to science (see further http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/gos). To put that in context, microbes generate about half the oxygen in the air we breathe, drive every biochemical cycle that allows life to happen, and make up about half the world’s biomass but we know almost nothing about them.

OK not all ecosystems are as complex as Elizabeth Middleton reef, but they are complex. Fungi for example are key to decay and hence regeneration in temperate wet forest/rain forest in Australia but many are not even catalogued. A team of mycologists working a random 100m transect in the Tarkine discovered entirely new species and found many examples of very rare species. Can we really do ecosystem management with clearfell and burn?

To make the task even more impossible we don’t have baseline data for most of what we do in natural resource management. In other words we often don’t really have examples of undisturbed ecosystems to compare and we can’t know exactly how things might have changed in the last 100 years or so. There is now a whole science of palaeoecology that attempts to reconstruct what undamaged ecosystems were like. I would not be the first person to say that our failure to fund basic science is a policy of deliberate ignorance by stealth.

How then can we harvest resources without losing species? For many environments we can’t and this makes complete non-sense of the ‘wise use’ argument that market forces can somehow look after the planet and we don’t need preservation or wilderness. What we can do is preserve representative samples of viable ecosystems as a baseline for study and comparison, and then consider ways to extract resources from what’s left. If we really want to avoid extinction, and if we deal in science rather than perception, there will be profound implications for wilderness and natural resource management.  I will touch on some of these in the next blog.

 

Tag line: Margiris, Abel Tasman, Supertrawler, sustainable yield, Tarkine, West Report, Professor West, natural resource management, forest piece deal, forestry, marine reserves.

 

Back to the Future – Post Modernism and Gay Adoption

If society were based around human wholeness what would it look like?

I write this article in response to the commentary generated by my posts on gay marriage. It would be easy to have a shouting match which reveals nothing more than the fact that there is a collision of world views which, like giant icebergs in the ocean, sometimes bump up against one-another, their curious shapes colliding at the corners. The corners are an odd assortment of wedge issues. Gay adoption is one of these.

Really it’s about post modernism; whether human society is something we can invent, or whether there are some things inherent and innate that we can’t or shouldn’t change. Is there a plumb line for what it means to be human?

We can look from an evolutionary perspective to simians. Homosexuality occurs in simians to varying extents. Indeed I have been corrected on, and surprised by, the extent to which it occurs across numerous species in the wild. I have not done an exhaustive review to find out whether or not gay simian couples habitually raise young but if anyone has observed this they are probably describing an exceedingly rare event. Penguins and black swans often do form gay couples who raise young. What significance is seen in this probably depends on your world view. I suggest that raising a chick to be a swan is very different to raising a human baby to adulthood.

We can look from the perspective of the world’s great religious writings. This is a reasonable thing to do because, whether or not you believe them to be inspired, they do incorporate thousands of years of human experience and understanding. The Abramic religions do not countenance gay adoptions. I know of no religion that does, but someone with greater learning may enlighten us.

Every society makes provision for adoption – usually as a familial or tribal obligation to care for orphans. Other societies have variously tolerated, celebrated, or suppressed homosexuality. I know of none that tolerated homosexual adoption. Maybe there is an anthropologist out there who has found one. Again, they will be describing something very rare.

Perhaps this is because gay adoption challenges the most fundamental philosophical underpinnings of human society. If a mother and a mother are sufficient, there is no need or place for fatherhood. If a father and a father are sufficient there is no need or place for motherhood. If there is no need or place for either motherhood or fatherhood there is no need or place for the traditional family at all. It is a complete ‘free for all’. If two mummies are OK and two daddies are OK then any two heterosexual women and any two heterosexual men should also have the right to create a ‘family’ and adopt. On reflection, why stop at two daddies, why not have several….you get the idea.

This debate is only partly about equality. As the boundaries are pushed (and they will be) the debate will shift from whether a minority group should share in marriage to whether ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘fatherhood’ have any real meaning. There are some who see all three concepts as redundant. As a correspondent to a facebook friend of mine (who is a gay activist) wrote in relation to the gay marriage bills “Lets just get the fucking bills through and then get rid of the whole fucking institution [of marriage].” It is reasonable to ask whether it is wise to de-construct the foundational underpinnings of our civilization because some people within a minority group of less than two per cent of the population want to do something that appears foreign to human society.

 

There are practical issues also. If we have true marriage equality then any two men who register a marriage should have as much right to adoption as a heterosexual couple have to conceive. Let’s be real for a moment. If that ever becomes law the paedophiles will head to the registry office and down to the adoption office in very little time. I am not saying gay people are paedophiles. I am saying paedophiles are intelligent, strategic, and work in team to gain access to children. Allowing male unions to adopt gives them more opportunity.

Since the human question is one of identity, a logical place to start would be the story of traditional/indigenous societies for the last few thousand years. That is where we have come from, and as a species, that is really who we are. I am not an anthropologist but a good place to start is linguist, naturalist, anthropologist and author Jared Diamond. For the record, Diamond regards Christians and Christianity with withering contempt.

You can read Diamond’s books for yourself but in essence traditional indigenous societies tend to have the following key features:

• Babies are breast fed until at least the age of two but often much later
• Babies are in the immediate physical proximity of their mother, and usually in skin contact with their mother, until they can walk
• After they can walk they remain in close proximity with a close relative
• Children grow up in an extended family/tribe/village/clan
• There are rights of initiation into adulthood and they are different for men and women
• Gender roles vary according to need and custom by genders are clearly distinct. The means of distinction are as varied as the number of extant cultures in the world.
• Every child is given a value system and cosmology which forms part of their tribal/clan identity.

Thus by the time ‘normal’ homo sapiens become adults they have a family identity, a gender identity, a tribal/clan identity, and a cosmology. That was also the case in Western countries until the great cultural dismantling got underway in the 1960’s. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to figure out that all these essential aspects of human identity and wholeness are under systematic attack in the West.

In this context further deconstruction of 'marriage, gender, mother, father, and family' is unhelpful from a whole of society perspective. My reading of pro-gay rights blogs suggests that this social deconstruction is the next wave in the long march from "what consenting adults to at home is no one's business" to "We will close down your organisation or put you in prison if your clergy won't formalise gay unions, your school won't teach pro gay marriage propaganda, and your adoption agency won't foster children to gay couples; and we will fine you for speaking out on these issues and take your children off you if you object to them being taught pro gay school curricula." Hating Christians is not a crime and what was once a plea for tolerance and respect is now a no holds barred assault on basic freedom of conscience and practice. This militancy is perhaps understandable given the many injustices suffered by gay people from religiously inspired policies. That said, forcing people to take sides doesn't foster understanding. It leaves people who might support some but not all of the gay agenda with limited options.

I am not a fundamentalist because I am religious. I'm a fundamentalist because I think a line is the shortest distance between two points, 2 + 2 = 4, and people who wander off into the wilderness without knowing how to survive tend to die there. We can be more creative with social mores but I still regard post modernism, and many of the policies that come from there, as exceptionally silly. 

 

Tag line: gay marriage, gay adoption, family values, emily's list, postmodernism, deconstructuralism, Jared Diamond, gay rights, marriage equality

 

 

Bush Fires - an Indigenous Legacy and the need for cultural change

Bush fire sky - photo credit Robin Roberts Photography



This week a large uncontrolled bushfire came within roughly six kilometres of our home (as the crow flies). It was a sobering experience. Friends evacuated the nearby township of Collinsvale, our youngest loved watching the helicopters flying overhead with their water bags hanging down below, and we packed for a rapid evacuation.

It was a timely reminder that Indigenous people burned this ancient continent for thousands of years. They did so to open up dense forest and scrubland, encourage new growth, and make better conditions for game. This process selected against fire intolerant species and favoured fire adapted ones. As a consequence of this and ongoing climate change, most of the continent has adapted to burn. This burning was not random. Indigenous people used fire to manicure the bush. They were managers not arsonists.

That was 200 years ago. Now we have arsonists, plus in recent decades the southern continent has seen a strong drying trend, and droughts are becoming more frequent. The Aussie dream of a ‘home among the gum trees’ is plain stupid unless you build underground. Our society has yet to accept this fact – even after Ash Wednesday (1983 for you young folk), the Victorian fires, and the latest round of fire in South Easter Australia/Tasmania, [update - now we have catastrophic fires and a state of emergency in New South Wales].

After 200 years we still view fire like Europeans – it’s bad, it destroys property, it needs to be put out. We don’t manage with fire – we fight fire. This won’t work very well in the longer term. As the climate changes, more than ever, we are going to need fire to manage fire. Frequent low intensity burns reduce fuel loads – but there is a balance. Too frequent burning reduces regeneration; too infrequent leads to hotter fires later. There is a lot of science in this, but this science we need to get to grips with. As an aside, Forestry Tasmania still makes the rather bizarre claim that clear-felling and napalming old growth forests somehow mimics Aboriginal burning practices. The only thing thease two burning regimes have in common is that Forestry’s burning regime discriminates against rainforest species and reduces biodiversity. Centuries of Aboriginal fire management had a similar affect over much of the continent.

Bicheno Fire Tasmania - photo credit Hanna Woolley



Bushfire is shaping up as a new wedge in Australia's culture wars. On the one-hand greenies are blamed for restructions on fuel reduction burns and road access into remote country. On the other hand industrialists are blamed for climate change. Fact is that Australia contributes less than two per cent of global CO2 emissions. We can be part of a global trend (which does include China) to address carbon but we cannot actually control our climate. We will just have to adapt to hotter and more frequent fires. We may need to re-think our leafy suburbs, put a stop to urban expansion into bushland, clear 'fire protection' belts around the approaches to our cities, and just stop living permanently in some places.

Our Western Red Cedar house faces onto a bush hillside. That hill hasn’t burned since 1967, it is extremely dry, and fuel loads are high. There should have been several low intensity burns in the last few decades. I can’t afford to get arrested for arson and trespass but the local Chigwell youth did the civic thing and burned their side of the hill a couple of years ago. At some point the rest of that hill will burn. There is no other possibility. It makes a lot more sense to burn it deliberately on a cool spring day than wait for a random bush fire on a 40 degree day with high winds at the height of summer.

Managing and living with fire requires a fundamental change in attitudes, management, laws, and for some people, architecture. Why is it that we don’t build underground? There is no better way to fire proof a structure, yet anyone proposing this would struggle to find a builder, be thought eccentric, and experience great difficulty navigating a maze of council regulations and building standards. Underground building is however the obvious answer to living in a harsh fire prone environment. It intrigues me that much of the new residential construction of large homes in Sydney and Melbourne is concrete slab and glass, basically what office buildings are made out of. It is a cheap, unimaginative and ugly construction method. These buildings are expensive to cool and expensive to heat. Put the same single storey building underground and you have an instant eco-home. Warm in winter, cool in summer, and highly resistant to fire (but not flood!). By ‘underground’ I don’t mean burying it in a hill-side. Simply excavate 1-2m down, leave the windows above ground on one to three sides, slope the roof to the ground at the rear, and cover with 0.5 – 1.0m of dirt. Add some curves and landscaping and your ugly concrete box is now a stylish modern eco-home. Add double glaze for extra efficiency. Modern open plan lay-outs favour light and ventilation and thus lend themselves to underground designs. Add pull down metal shutters and you basically have a bomb shelter.

OK its more expensive than your standard brick veneer with a water tank but that won’t always be an option. It may sound like a hippy rave but one thing the market mechanism does very well is price risk. At some point in the not too distant future the insurance industry is simply going to stop insuring normal homes that are near gum trees. Fortune will favour those who thought ahead.

For a timely discussion from a subject matter expert see here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-21/fire-expert-professor-david-bowman-discusses-the/5036718

 Tag line: bush fires, Tasmanian fires, fire management, Indigenous firestick methods, underground housing, cultural change, climate change and fire, insurance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burning Forests for Electricity

Loggers and Tree Huggers Agree – Conservative Politicians Don’t

 

The forest peace deal signed by conservation and industry groups late last year still hangs in the balance. The upper house of State parliament, known as the Legislative Council, split evenly on the Bill which was to give effect to the agreement. They will re-consider whether to sign the Bill into law this year.

Meanwhile there has been no moratorium. I wrote in an earlier blog that we should support the deal if it was real. ‘Real’ means lines on 1:25,000 scale maps, time frames, and dollars. Anything less will simply provide political cover for clear felling to continue while isolating conservation concerns. That is precisely what happened with the Regional Forests Agreement where conservation goals were rorted but the agreement was touted as proof that the issue was solved.

How did we get here?

By 1991 everyone who understood the forest industry understood that the wood-chipping industry had around 20 years left in it before it collapsed. It was by then established in the literature that global plantations would provide a cheaper and superior resource in that time frame. Since over eighty percent of all the old growth timber is either wood-chipped or burned, plantation pulp would cripple the old growth logging industry. Heads of industry knew that, management of the (then) Forestry Commission knew that, and as a 17 year old wilderness activist, I knew that.

In 1991 I sat around a table at the Wilderness Society with a group of people and discussed how we could lock-up as much wilderness forests of world heritage significance as possible in the next two decades. There was also some discussion of what a post wood-chip driven industry might look like, and whether there was still a chance to save what remained of the small saw mill sector before the wood-chippers took the lot.

Around that time a very different group of people discussed how to ensure access to as much old growth as possible to make as much money as possible before the game collapsed. The result was Resource Security Legislation which destroyed the first Labor Green accord and government. I discuss this in more detail in my book.

What is now clear is that many saw a pulp mill as the saviour of the status quo. A pulp mill would provide a customer for the old growth wood-chips no one wants, plus plantation timbers that have been established on private land. However, even without environmental objections, this was always a high risk business venture. Eventually the pulp mill proponents made a strategic decision not to take old-growth chips, and to sell-off their wood-chip mill. Conservationists bought the chip mill.

Meanwhile what was predicted in the early nineties has now come to pass and the wood-chipping industry is in its death throes. For some reason no one thought to tell the workers and contractors in the industry that the status quo wasn’t going to last. What the CFMEU were thinking I can only guess.

But there is a plan B for industry. It is to burn the old growth in a furnace to generate electricity and pass it off as renewable energy. Never mind that old growth forests are carbon sinks, wildlife refuges, havens of biodiversity, vital components of an integral wilderness, linkages between different bioregions; or simply that they are ancient, wild and beautiful, free without reference to the needs of man. Maybe that’s the reason some people aren’t comfortable with them. Anyway, according to Forestry Tasmania it’s all OK because they will re-seed with eucalyptus trees and then log them on a 60 year cycle; so it’s all renewable and environmentalists are just being emotional. Burn the forests, turn on the lights.

I wish this was the stuff of conspiracy theorists but it isn’t. Forestry Tasmania detailed this in an article in the local news paper in which they said this was the best way to “out green the greens.” There is a real risk that without a meaningful forest agreement forests that have remained inviolate since the last ice age will simply be burned. The Liberal (read Conservative) party have already given tacit approval to this policy. It creates a neat wedge issue for them, and since they don’t really have a forest policy they may as well have a wedge.

On the other hand a big wood furnace would provide a focal point for protest in the same way that the Franklin Dam did for the South West in 1983. I must be getting old because I remember 1983. The community split down the middle, it became a State’s rights issue, and the Federal Government ended up sending F-111 bombers over Tasmania to take pictures of the Dam site. 1300 people got arrested including (from memory) a blind guy in a wheel chair. Maybe I am middle aged and conservative but I’m getting tired of this conflict. It only takes one vote from an upper house member to shift. The Feds have the dollars on the table. You can find out all about the Legislative Council here: http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ 

and contact all of them here: http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/lc/lclists.pdf

Please do!

 

Note: if these links don’t work copy and paste them into your browser.

Tag line: 1 forest peace deal, Christine Milne, Terry Edwards, Vica Bailey, Bob Brown, Dr Pullinger, old growth forests, high conservation value forests, The Wilderness Society, Tony Burke, Michael Hodgeman.

Tag Line 2: biofuel, logging, old growth, clearcut, clearfell, wood-chipping, world heritage, carbon sinks, forest peace deal, environmental protest

Saints and Sustainability

 

Shortly before Christmas I gave a public lecture at the Cathedral on environmental values, deep ecology, creation care and sustainability. The talk considers where the notion of inherent or intrinsic value comes from, how it has played out in Western Civilisation, and where we are positioned currently.

The lecture is too long to repeat the whole text but the text, video and audio can be found here:

http://saintdavids.org.au/event/2012/11/saints-sustainability/

Click on the link or paste into your web browser.

Following is some introductory text from the talk, and some key Bible passages for reference.

Introduction

I am a Christian environmentalist, and until recently a Green voter. While I am now in the season of family life I was at the pointy end of the environmental struggle in Tasmania for much of the 1990’s.  It was such a strange experience that I wrote a book about that and other things.  It’s called Finding Home.  It looks like this, and you can purchase a copy through Fullers, the Hobart Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes&Noble.

What made the experience strange was that I lived in two camps, one evangelical and one environmentalist. 

I found most Christians, at least the evangelicals I encountered, were hostile to the environmental movement.  It was seen as a distraction from saving souls at best and idolatry and nature worship at worst.  Civil disobedience was frowned upon or seen as rebellion and therefore sinful - a sign perhaps of being socially maladjusted.

For their part many if not most environmentalists were hostile to Christianity – certainly the evangelical brand that I came from.  In short, Christianity was blamed for modernity which was seen as the cause of our over exploitation of the earth.  More importantly perhaps, Christianity was blamed for a set of values that places man at the centre and ascribes value to nature only to the extent that it can be exploited for human use.  In other words, Christianity denies any intrinsic value in nature.  This, it is claimed, has led to unrestrained exploitation of the natural world and the current ecological crisis.

Now I could cite a bunch of proof texts to argue for a Biblical environmental ethic, but I am going to take that as a given.  I want to examine the above critiques from the point of view of where value comes from, and look at how the notion of inherent value has and continues to change the world…..

 

Some Bible Passages:

Genesis chapters 1 and 2 – God declares all creation as good before humans come on the scene.

Genesis chapter 9 verses 9-17 – Post flood God makes a covenant with all creation.

Job – There are numerous passages in which God boasts about creation

Exodus chapter 23 verses 10-12 – Gleanings were left for the poor and for the wild animals. Every seventh year the land was to lie fallow, and all beasts of burden must rest on the seventh day of the week.

Leviticus chapter 25 verses 4-7 – repeats the command to leave the land fallow every seventh year. “You may eat what the land yields during its Sabbath…for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.”

Romans chapter 1 verse 20 – “Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made…”

Revelation chapter 11 verse 18 – “The nations raged but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and the saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”