Biblical Capitalism, the Amish, and the GFC

        

Once upon a time people used to swap things. It was called trade. Some people were better at swapping things than others. Some people were able to make more things and store more food than others. They had more than they needed so they did more swapping, that is, they traded surplus. This was great but people wanted to be able to swap with people they might only meet once, or might never meet at all. This was made possible by a substitute from of exchange called “money”.

The creation of currency led to a great leap forward in human development. People began to trust money so much that they would give goods to someone who promised to pay them what the goods were worth plus some more, if they didn’t have to pay until later. That was called credit. If they couldn’t pay, they had to return the goods. These kinds of arrangements gradually kept getting more and more complicated. Governments started issuing sovereign bond for example, someone invented insurance, and people could invest in enterprises for a share of the profit.

As complicated as these developments became they had something in common with our very first swappers. There were two parties, an agreement, and a good or service was provided. Money was generated from surplus wealth and then re-invested. Money was simply a way of helping us honour our agreements between ourselves to exchange goods and services.

Because credit was based on the lender having a surplus it encouraged enterprise, thrift, saving, and productivity in order to generate a surplus. You either did this yourself, or you owned the means of production, such as land, slaves, serfs etc. In Biblical times this was how money was understood. The main issues of controversy were providing for the poor (through gleanings for example), allowing fair (though not always equal) wages, not extorting, respecting private property and inheritance, and not charging excessive interest or taxation. The Biblical prophets were quick to condemn what trade law today calls ‘unconscionable conduct’ with respect to the vulnerable – widows and orphans. This is what might broadly be termed ‘Biblical capitalism’. It was as fair as it could be in pre-literate societies, and it worked. The church however never established a clear set of economic rules that could give modern expression to ancient principles so things drifted along.

Now we have a fractional reserve lending system which allows private bodies to create money out of thin air and lend at interest. Agreements between two parties can be bought and sold electronically in seconds. Money and certain contracts have become tradeable commodities in themselves. In this way the financial system has become de-linked from the real economy. Money no longer serves us, the economy, or the community, we serve it - except the Amish and their Mennonite cousins don’t. 

They continue to trade and bank as they have done for three hundred years based on what they consider to be Biblical principles. None of them is spectacularly wealthy but their communities are prosperous and no one is hungry. It’s pretty simple:

·        You work hard from a young age;

·        You don’t buy stuff you don’t need (no consumerism);

·        You don’t try and keep up with anyone (no marketing propaganda);

·        You look after your family first (they are your cause and your security);

·        You generate a surplus through saving (no credit cards);

·        You use that surplus to invest in the means of production: land, plant and equipment etc. (No parties and drinking saves a lot of money);

·        You make more money;

·        You have more children;

·        You leave an inheritance (like your parents did for you, rather than having to borrow to get a start in life, then pay for your family, then fund your parent’s retirement, then fund yours);

·        You don’t owe much (because you don’t spend much), you pay what you owe fast, and to delay payment of any debt is stealing;

·        You sleep well at night and everyone goes to your funeral. Chances are you or a close friend builds your coffin.

There are now a plethora of books about the Amish, some of them quite misty eyed. I don’t think I could be Amish. I like art, music, travel and science too much, but I have to give them credit. The Amish/Mennonite have never had a financial crisis, a great depression, a war, austerity, or handed over control of their lives to the State. Banks that mostly lend to the Amish have weathered the GFC just fine. If nothing else the Amish are living proof that credit driven consumerism and highly leveraged debts are choices, not as it were, ‘acts of God’, and there are other ways of living.

On a personal note I have not used a credit card since 2001 when I had to use one to travel on our honeymoon. We are a middle income single income family. We have a home mortgage but apart from that if I can’t afford stuff I don’t buy it. We have the same television we were given in 2001 and I have never bought one. I ride the same bicycle I had when I was 17 but I am now considering electric bike options as an alternative to driving. I’m a consumer to be sure but I like to save and I hate debt…

Next post: Islamic banking

 

Tag line: GFC, Global Financial Crisis, Amish, Amish Banking, Amish Businesss, Mennonite, alternative economics, Biblical capitalism, monetarism, fractional lending, investment

On Gold

 

 

The autumn leaves are beautiful even as they fall; perfect yellow from perfect green. Is that why they call this aging ‘the golden years’?

We sat in the orchard, my son and I. Picked out by the autumn sunlight the leaves were more beautiful than gold. They lay scattered on the ground like a pirate’s treasure hoard tipped from the chest, only fragile and ephemeral.

I have seen gold in the palaces and cathedrals of Europe. The sweat of peasants stolen and immortalised in leaf on ceilings, and in angel adorned feasting trays.

Wars have been fought and people killed to gain gold – a yellow metal less appealing than these scattered autumn leaves. What fools are men! The hair on my child’s head, gold shot through with red, is the best gold yet. Long may he live while I turn grey – age an injustice no gold can allay; our comfort rather to see our children play.

Harry Potter and the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement – Lessons from Canada

It’s official – Canada has a forestry peace agreement. The agreement has been signed by 21 forest companies and nine environmental organisations. It covers 76 million hectares of publicly owned boreal forest across northern Canada. Included in the agreement is immediate cessation of logging in 29 million hectares of caribou habitat in return for a cessation of ‘divest and boycott’ campaigns by environmentalists, and a joint approach to future management. See further here: (http://www.canadianborealforestagreement.com/) and here.

 

If you thought Tasmania’s forest wars were unfortunate go to Canada. The level of conflict, violence, and sheer bloody minded devastation over decades makes one weep. It would take a wizard to fix that mess -and it did. JK Rowling (God bless her) is credited with helping tip the balance. Rowling, in part at the urging of Canadian ENGO ‘Canopy’ insisted that paper for her books come from sustainably managed forests. Her decision to print the last of her Harry Potter books in 2007 on recycled and sustainable paper sent reverberations through the publishing industry. Industry had a choice – miss out on multimillion dollar contracts for book printing and face ongoing market sanction, or get their act together. See further here: (http://canopyplanet.org/news/4/299/JK-Rowling-Accepts-Award-in-Toronto-Recognizing-Her-Role-in-Protecting-Canada-s-and-the-World-s-Forests/)

The Canadian boreal forest agreement has many parallels but there is a warning. Canada has struggled to make real headway because of lack of legislative support and because of some examples of industry failing to abide by the agreement. This has led Greenpeace and one of the prime ENGOs behind the agreement to withdraw. See here: (http://canopyplanet.org/canopy-seeks-new-path-for-boreal-forest-protection/)

What does this mean for Tasmania? Put simply it means:

a) forest agreements can happen;

b) they require good will, independent verification, and government backing;

c) they create wealth and stability;

d) they can protect the environment;

e) markets want forest products that meet specific sustainability criteria;

f) while Tasmanians have been fighting the world has moved on; and

g) the world will continue to move on whether Hodgeman wants it to or not.

Some years ago I read Gerry Adam’s autobiography. Some may remember him as the Sinn Fein leader who led the IRA to the negotiating table. Others will remember him as a terrorist. Either way his explanation for how theNorthern Ireland peace process came about was startlingly simple. He wrote simply that the people who were participants in the ‘troubles’ grew up, had kids, their kids grew up, and suddenly they didn’t want their kids getting blown up. Middle age does that. Both parties realised they couldn’t ‘win’ so they decided to talk. Tasmania’s ‘forest wars’ date from the mid-seventies. Many of the original protagonists are now grandparents. Neither side can ‘win’. If the Irish could more or less settle 300 years of conflict in which thousands have died, surely Tasmania can settle a 30-40 spat over forestry?

Much has been said and will be said about how the peace deal is all a Labor Green conspiracy. It is nothing of the sort. The forest industry approached environmental NGOs because they had run out of options. Roughly eighty percent of all the old growth (that isn’t burned on the ground or bulldozed into rows) gets turned into woodchips as the first stage in paper/cardboard manufacture. This product, for sound technical and economic reasons, cannot compete against plantation timber from New Zealand, Australia, Chile and elsewhere.

Without a market for chips it becomes hard to manage the forests for sawn timber, veneer, and special species. It is getting harder to sell those products to environmentally conscious markets without environmental certification. Certification is hard to get if green groups are running international boycotts and corporate campaigns against you. Add the GFC and a high dollar and the industry is on its knees. The last time I looked they were getting $120 tonne for woodchips and paying $4.00 royalties. No wonder Forestry Tasmania can’t record a profit. Of course Gunn’s strategic decision to get out of old growth, sell the Triabunna woodchip mill, and not pay its debts, created huge problems for the industry as well. Gunns was responding in part to green lobbying. However they were also taking a long term strategic view of markets. If the economics of old growth woodchipping were so great, why is it that no one in the industry could get finance to purchase the Triabunna mill?

And so we come back to the current agreement. Enter the Liberal Party…..

State Liberal leader Will Hodgeman has vowed to tear up the forest agreement. It appears that the Liberals inhabit a universe where, if only those pesky selfish vego left leaning greenies would get out of the way decent hard working men could make a living cutting down high conservation value forests and nothing would need to change. There is probably more truth in Harry Potter. As the Canadian experience has shown, the world has changed whether Hodgeman likes it or not. So how might this play out in the event of a Liberal victory?

Protest

A Liberal State government can be expected to enact vicious anti-protest legislation. I well remember being on the East Picton blockade in 1991when the Groom Liberal Government introduced legislation that would have sent us to prison for three years – roughly the same period of incarceration you might get for rape. Anti protest legislation may largely shut down ‘direct action’ at State level, but what direct action does occur will be more militant.

Payouts

Industry has already been paid tens of millions of your hard earned tax dollars and not a tree has been protected. They won’t be giving it back, but they won’t get any more from a Labor federal government either without a forest peace deal.

Politics

Environmentalists will press the case for world heritage listing and Federal protection of forests. There will be no rational outcome to this. A Liberal federal government (aka Eric Abetz) will reject listing on principle. A Labor federal government will do the maths in the marginals. They have hung the Tarkine out to dry to save Sid Sidebottom’s seat but they may well try and shore up green votes elsewhere by supporting another forest lock-up in Tasmania. In that event they might even splash some money around and try and buy some blue colour votes back from the Liberals.

Boycott

Local ENGOs will join hands with international organisations like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund to run international ‘divest and boycott’market campaigns against Tasmanian forestry. This will hurt Tasmania but the movement will have nothing to lose and nowhere else to go.

Burning

Forestry may just burn a lot more timber on the ground –unless someone decides to build a pulp mill to take the chips. Gunn’s won’t take them even for a mill so this would require a new proponent and a new approval from the Feds. Forestry could try and turn chips into chemical products or burn them for electricity. That latter option is really the wild card – the unstable element in an explosive cocktail. An Abbot Liberal government in Canberra might even be nutty enough to ‘green wash’ such a proposal.

Nothing else would galvanise or unite the green movement like burning world heritage value forests for electricity. We would see a movement betrayed with nothing to lose and nowhere to go, powerful international players, a neocon government, an industry struggling to stave off collapse, a single power plant, hundreds of miles of vulnerable power lines, ….. I would say there is potential for things to get very messy. I would rather it didn’t. Where is JK Rowling when we need her?

Tag line: Canadian boreal forest agreement, canopy JK Rowling award, JK Rowling environmental record, Tasmanian forest peace deal, Tasmanian forest agreement, Harry Potter, markets for change, divest and boycott, Canopy forest campaign, canopy publishers campaign.

Forest Peace Deal - Back to the Future Since 1989

 

 

For those with long memories, the last time industry and conservationists sat around a table and ‘talked turkey’ was in 1989 at the ‘Salamanca Talks’. They failed, in part because conservationists would not accept or legitimise the ‘clearfell and burn’ method of forestry. Both sides were overconfident. Conservationists were on a roll and imagined that they could still get Fed intervention for large scale protection of wild places. For their part the industry figured they could keep gaming the system at State level. A quarter of a century of conflict later and no one is confident. The conservationists have endured a quarter century of clearfelling in HCV forest. As predicted 20 years ago the industry is now on its knees. Without FSC certification they have limited options. One of these is to burn HCV (high conservation value) forests for electricity. See here: http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/burning-forests-for-electricity.html

 

The biggest and perhaps most dangerous compromise the ENGOs have made is to do what they didn’t do in 1989 – legitimise ‘clearfell and burn’ forestry. Their willingness to do so now is perhaps the most significant shift in the history of this conflict.

If contemporary forest practices are OK then rationally there is no reason why they shouldn’t be applied to HCV forest. This is what foresters have been arguing forever. On that topic see my post here: http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/why-foresters-are-from-mars-and-forest.html

If ENGOs accept these practices as sustainable then it will be very difficult to argue against future roll-back of reserves. Essentially ENGOs have said ‘we will legitimise what you do as long as you give us the bits we want’. This is a pragmatic approach but it may open a Pandora’s box. No wonder the green movement is split.

As a participant and observer of this conflict for the last 30 years I can say that this was a compromise forged on realism. For that reason it is likely to work. Let’s hope the political dinosaurs and naysayers of this world will end up on the wrong side of history.

Tag line: Tasmania Forest Peace Agreement, High Conservation Value Forests, forest stuardship certification, forest practices code, sustainable forestry, world heritage area, TWS, FIAT.
 

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.