Tasmania will be a richer state when it protects its native forests

Tasmania has become Australia’s new logging hub, wasting public money while destroying our native forests. Tom de Kadt reports.

LAST WEEK, the Australian Conservation Foundation announced: research This showed that Australia had destroyed most of its forests since colonization. Only 34% of the continent’s mature forests remain.

With native forest logging halted in WA and reduced in VIC, Lutruwita/Tasmania is now Australia’s logging hotspot. The ACF data echoes Resource Watch’s 2021 findings showing that the only remaining intact forests in Lutruwita/Tasmania are those within the Tasmanian Wildlife World Heritage Area. Everywhere else Tasmania’s forests are degraded, fragmented and getting worse. So much for the much-debated ‘sustainable forest management’ claimed by the Tasmanian Government’s logging agency Forestry Tasmania (trading as ‘Sustainable Timber Tasmania’).

It is unclear whether he is Tasmania’s Chairman of Forestry. Rob de Fegleybelieves what he says, but almost every paragraph in his latest article in the Tassie local rag says, Mercury (‘Our forestry activities stem from responsibility’, 22 October) was misleading. But public relations, greening and deception are how native forestry works. The truth is, as always, that logging of globally important native forests destroys more value than it creates.

In 2020, this reality was temporarily violated. Forestry Tasmania (F.T.) defective second attempt to earn the Forest Stewardship Certificate (FSC), the gold standard of forestry management. The ten major failures included logging threatened species habitat, mismanaging conservation values across the landscape, and logging of old-growth forests.

Despite this failure, the weaker certification program Responsible Wood tells markets and consumers that FT is sustainable. Illegal recording? Scientific evidence that swift parrot habitat is being destroyed? Is there a report showing that logging is Tasmania’s number one source of CO2 emissions? Zero action. There’s nothing stopping Responsible Wood from greening Tasmania’s least sustainable and most failing industry.

In 1977, the future chairman of the FT, Evan RolleyHe was a humble infantryman who destroyed forests. He purchased an incendiary laser cannon, no doubt inspired by Darth Vader in the Star Wars debut. Yes really. It was a waste of time and money and didn’t work. But if Rolley’s dream came true and he could laser blast Tassie’s beautiful forests today, Responsible Forestry would mark it as sustainable.

Responsible Forest’s forestry standard has (so-called) four sustainability criteria.

There is cultural sustainability. However, the Palawa-Pakana people in Lutruwita/Tasmania still refused to allow their forests to be cut down on stolen land. Permission was not taken from them either.

Then there is environmental sustainability. But aside from the cumbersome FSC failures mentioned above, the 2022 report Tasmanian Forest Carbon: From Emissions Disaster to Climate SolutionIt showed that logging in Tassie’s forests is the state’s biggest source of CO2 emissions. Did responsible Wood investigate? Of course not.

The third criterion is social sustainability. However, we know from the industry’s own research that leaked In 2018, 65% of those living in rural areas and 70% in urban areas oppose tree cutting. In the latest version of this lack of public support, Central Coast Council Search Range Forest voted against local logging. I treated them well. The ‘sustainable yield’ of Australia’s native forests, and with it the number of workers, has been in structural decline for years.

My favorite criterion is the fourth one, “economic sustainability”. But it costs the FT more public money to plant our public Aboriginal forests than it makes from the small amount of product put on the market.

Leading forest economist John Lawrence recently numbers in the magnificent Dial Range forest, which is planned to be cleared (sustainably!). The profit and loss analysis for the 20-hectare coupe included: Revenues, $420,000; Harvest and Cartage, $255,000; On-Road, $20,000; replanting $30,000; Fees and Overheads, $127,000; Cash Loss, minus $12,000.

That’s Forestry Tasmania’s bad economics in a nutshell: wasting public money to create financial loss while destroying Aboriginal forests. These wasted valuable public funds are diverted to housing, health and education.

Like ethics for arms dealers and health advice for smokers, sustainability criteria for logging are nonsense. Logging is the opposite of sustainability. Hence the need for greenwashing, PR and spin. And public land and public money. As pointless as they are, FT fails to meet any of Responsible Wood’s sustainability criteria.

He was protecting Aotearoa/New Zealand forests 25 years ago. Western Australia and Victoria more recently. Today, New Zealand has a thriving plantation-based forestry industry. Everything industrial is flawed, but at least forests can thrive and public money is not wasted. Amazingly, New Zealand did it without compromise, without artistic masturbation, without jungle chandeliers or sparkling stilettos. Yes, this is a reference to Mona Muse Kirch KaecheleHe advocates for the continuation of logging, not its end.

of New Zealand Pureora Forest Park Comparable to Takayana/Tarkine. The difference is that it is protected, whereas we are still logging and mining Takayna. And compared to our Franklin Dam campaign, in the 1970s Kiwi conservationists succeeded in transforming Pureora from a logging area into a vast national park.

Research The University of Waikato, New Zealand found that:

“…the recreation and conservation value of Pureora Forest Park has proven to be far greater than the $7.1 million paid in 1979 as compensation for lost revenue from timber milling. [about $2m in today’s money].”

Similarly, Tasmania would be a richer state if it protected its own forests. Richer because the public money Forestry Tasmania loses every year will stop. Richer because we will be free to visit our forests again. Richer because our forgotten tourism infrastructure in these State forests can be uncovered and restored. Richer because we can right the wrongs of the past and return forest land to its Rightful Owners. It is richer in employment opportunities because there is a job-rich future in forest tourism, conservation, restoration and science than a declining logging industry could ever dream of. Richer because our embryonic big tree tourism may take off. And richer because renewed ecosystems can once again lead us to a brighter future.

Don’t forget, Tasmanian Wildlife World Heritage Site produces It’s worth close to a billion dollars a year just because of its preserved beauty. Tassie is a quarter of a century behind our friends across the ditch, but we can catch up, maybe even surpass them, and be rewarded for it. The evidence shows they were ready and waiting.