Tasmanian Forest Agreement - Letter to Parliamentarians

Dear <<  >> MLC

I write to encourage you to support the continuation of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement.

I lived in the Ouse district as a young child. At that time there were seven saw mills within a short drive of one-another in the district. Now there are none. There have been no significant lock-ups of forest in the Ouse district. From 1983 to the early 2000’s the amount of logging in Tasmania increased exponentially and the amount of woodchip exports increased exponentially but the mills closed.

While it is convenient to blame the greenies (as the locals often do) the material reality is that forestry pulped and burned vast quantities of saw log and special species timbers because it was just easier to make money from bulk chip exports given negligible royalties, favourable political treatment, and removal from any form of public accountability.

 

At 17 I joined the Wilderness Society after seeing a cable logging operation at Hellyer. It was 1991. At that time it was established in the literature that old growth woodchips would be uncompetitive against planation pulp within 20 years. The (then) Forestry Commission knew that. Industry chiefs knew that. Academics knew that. As a 17 year old TWS activist I knew that. The Liberal and Labor parties pretended not to know.

The wilderness movement worked hard to lock up as much high conservation forest as possible over the next 20 years before the inevitable industry collapse happened.

Forestry Tasmania and their industry allies worked hard to undermine any attempts at industry reform, conservation, or accountability over the next 20 years before the inevitable industry collapse happened. They didn’t fail to plan – they planned to fail; but a lot of money got made in the mean-time. Meanwhile the Tasmanian forest industry has been handed millions of dollars to not log forests that were never theirs.

 

Faced with unsustainable losses the Tasmanian forest industry approached the conservation movement to make an agreement. An agreement was freely made between the parties without any external interference. All signatories made significant compromises. Facing similar circumstances in Canada, conservationists and industry formed the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement which can serve as a model for Tasmania. We are not the first.

The agreement was substantially modified by the Legislative Council. The environmental signatories agreed to these changes even though this required further compromise. The conditions of the agreement have been adhered to. While much has been made of some protests by Still Threatened Still Wild and the Huon Environment Centre, these need to be kept in perspective. The activist community in Tasmania has accepted the agreement. The two organisations above are so lacking in local support that they had to import protestors from Victoria who have no background in the Tasmanian scene. While they have made a nuisance of themselves and drawn some flack this hardly qualifies as substantial protest activity or market interference. Industry can shrug off these protests.

If you vote down the agreement we are back in the trenches. There is no good outcome to this for Tasmania. If the Liberal party and their MLC colleagues trample their own tradition of civil freedoms and outlaw protest activity in Tasmania the campaign will simply move elsewhere. Industry cannot shrug off a concerted international boycott and divestment campaign. For more on this see my blog posts here: http://www.findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013_05_01_archive.html  and here: http://www.findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013_04_01_archive.html

This conflict has been going on for too long. I turn 40 in October and I have been protesting since I was eleven. Recently I attended a celebration of the extension of the WHA. I asked Bob Graham when this all began for him and he said “we started the forest campaign in 1973”. That’s the year I was born. Actually some areas have been campaigned for since the 1940’s.

The agreement represents the only viable way forward for resolution of the forest conflict and long term management of the forest estate. The agreement leaves regrowth forest, plantation estates, and uncontested old growth forest as the basis of a future industry. In a rational universe the State would also be vigorously pursuing industrial hemp as an allied industry.

Ultimately I would like to live in a State where forest workers can go about their jobs with dignity and broad community support, and where some of the most amazing forest and wilderness on the planet gets the protection it deserves.

It is now up to you to decide whether to be part of the future or condemn us to the past.

Yours sincerely

 

Erik Peacock

 Tag line: Tasmanian Forest Agreement, Canadian Forest Agreement, Gunns, Old Growth Forest Conservation

 

 

Logging to the edge of the World Heritage Boundary. The boundary was drawn to exclude loggable forest. Photo taken from www.ForestryTasmania.com 

Disclaimer:  this blogspot does not support all the content on the www.ForestryTasmania.com website but notes that the images contained therein are an authentic representation of Tasmanian forestry practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Saving the Tarkine Wilderness

True wilderness still exists on planet earth – within driving distance of a domestic airport.  The Tarkine is named after the Tarkinener Aboriginal people who inhabited a large expanse of North West Tasmania at least since the land bridge to mainland Australia was flooded circa 6000BCE.  It’s an incredible primordial and still largely unspoiled place.  It is also a stronghold of the new threatened Tasmanian Devil.  Stands of tall Eucalyptus forest give way to pure temperate rainforest that wash up against rolling grassy hills interspersed with woodland, rivers and streams that find their way to a wild coastline. 

This should have been made national park along with Yellowstone but instead the Tasmanian government spent scarce public funds bulldozing a road through the middle of it.  It was calculated vandalism.  I joined the fight against the road, eventually suing the Government in the Supreme Court.  Largely as a result of that campaign eco-tourism is flourishing in the Tarkine and the world’s largest tract of temperate rainforest is protected from logging.  However it is now threatened by mining. Given the size of the area some small scale or underground operations could be managed without doing great violence to the integrity of the area.  Unfortunately we are talking ‘open cut,’ lots of mines and lots of roads.  

 

This is not my video, is was shared on youtube by user jeffdjtube. It shows some of the gorgeous scenery in the Tarkine region.

This is a call for help.   

See more here: http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/tasmania/tarkine-indigenous-heritage-under-threat

Saving the Old Growth Forests

A face in the forest.  This used to be in Mt Field National Park.  It has now been logged.

Ever wondered what the world would look like without people?  I once answered that question by walking solo through unbroken old-growth forest for five days on a compass bearing.  Those forests are gone.  Forty years of industrial logging have taken their toll on the great forests of the world and Tasmania’s forests are no different.  I spend the better part of a decade fighting to save them. We are now in the end-game fighting over what’s left and there is still much to gain.  This photo essay is as relevant as ever since these sorts of forests are being logged as I type. 

This is the East Picton forest, now logged.

So am I against logging?  Where is the balance?  I’ll just say that after 200 years of land clearance and four decades of industrial logging it is time to protect what’s left of world heritage value and transition to plantation and re-growth, with some small scale carefully managed logging for furniture/craft timbers.  Meanwhile the timber industry is experiencing the collapse that academics and environmentalists predicted 20 years ago.

This wasn't protected by the Feds. Can you spot the lady?

Note that the Tasmanian government has actively suppressed development of industrial hemp as an agricultural industry in Tasmania.  Now even the Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association is asking for those restrictions to be removed so they can found a new industry.  We did it before with poppies and essential oils.  Only ignorance keeps us poor.

Forestry Tasmania felt the need to regenerate this patch of old growth forest that had been there since the last ice age.

Where the road ends.  Logging road pushing west into virgin forest.

Get a birds eye view from the observer tree: www.observertree.org