Sylvia Creek

VicForests are spending a lot of time in court and they still owe outstanding court costs to Environment East Gippsland. The environmental Davids who have been fighting these outstanding battles on our behalf are in need of our financial and political support.

The case began two weeks ago and will be summed up early next week in front of Justice Osborne (who also heard our case). So far it seems to have gone fairly well, with expert witnesses able to present flawless arguments for the protection of the Leadbeaters Possum habitat in the Central Highland’s. Professor David Lindenmayer and Dr Judith Ajani presented the case for the forests and the insane economics of logging. VicForests seemed to have a huge gaggle of barristers and lawyers to argue that if they can’t log the three coupes in contention, then they wouldn’t be able to log 167 other stands of the endangered Leadbeaters habitat. Logging might then be unviable in the Central Highlands.

The Brown Mountain ruling was cited throughout and clearly laid the path for much of this case.

My Environment has taken this very bold legal step, despite not having had much money to pay the bills to begin with, and like our case, have seen it balloon out to two weeks rather than one. They now desperately need some help to cover their legal costs.
http://www.eastgippsland.net.au/update/17-Feb-2012/img/result-creek2.jpg

DSE suing its old friend, VicForests!

VicForests are again facing the court again on 30th March at Orbost. This one sees the DSE (yes!) prosecute VicForests for illegally logging protected rainforest at Murrungowar just east of Orbost.

EEG sues VicForests again on the 10th April

On the 10th April, Environment East Gippsland is back in the Supreme Court suing VicForests for planning to destroy sites of Rainforest with National Significance. We’ll let you know more details of the trial as we get closer to the date.

VicForests owes EEG outstanding court costs

This month we go into mediation with VicForests in order to retrieve the legal costs back that the court ordered VicForests pay us after the Brown Mountain case almost 18 months ago! If it doesn’t work, we’ll be back in court in March to force the issue.

If you would like to read full details of the Sylvia Creek case, full transcripts will be placed on the My Environment website as they become available. You can read the transcripts of the first three days, in which the case for the plaintiff and VicForests' defence were outlined here.

Injunction extended

The Supreme Court 19th September extended the injunction to stop logging in Sylvia Creek forest near Toolangi after VicForests agreed to the moratorium.

MyEnvironment - Toolangi forest logging halted until 2012

The Department of Sustainability and Environment predictably dismissed concerns of conservationists by saying that there was no sign of live possums in the Sylvia Creek coupe at Toolangi, and that it did not meet the legal criteria of prime possum habitat.

Both statements reek of dispassionate recklessness.  These possums are tiny, nocturnal, in small numbers, and they live in holes in trees that are up to 50 meters tall. 

No confidence in VicForests
The public can have no confidence in the surveys done by VicForests as they were not supported by those carried out by expert ecologists and biologists.   Government departments are incapable of assessing the effect of logging on endangered species as their interests are primarily economic. 

Trashing the environment for short-term woodchip profits transforms areas rich in biodiversity into clear-felled wastelands that take decades to recover. 

Over half of the Leadbeater's possums' habitat was destroyed by Black Saturday, and the BAER (Burnt Area Emergency Response)  team recommended that this area not be logged, yet it continued.   Habitats of listed threatened species were logged. 

According to research published in US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the old-growth is nearly gone and on the verge of being unrecoverable. The Age

We are having our ecological and environmental assets stripped from the integrity of Victoria and from the people who need our life-supporting biological services. All species keep our ecological systems working, and they all have a role to play.

VicForests are losing money and taxpayers are subsidizing these losses. It's to keep fat-cat jobs in Parliament. Most of these trees goes to woodchips, not fine furniture.

The Tasmanian government seems to be accepting it's time to get clear-felling out of native forests. Their agreement is designed to see an end to large scale native forest logging and create more than 400,000 hectares of new informal reserves.

Now the Victorian government must do the same and place the intrinsic value of native forests and biodiversity, especially our threatened Leadbeater's Possum and other species, over the economic benefits of office paper.

It's a case of being in denial, of conflicting interests, and of not finding the facts, or evidence of threatened species, that they don't want to find.

The court extended an injunction blocking logging until next February, when it will revisit the matter.

David Walsh of VicForests arrogantly said that VicForests has chosen not to challenge the interim injunction at this stage of the game to allow this matter to be fully resolved at a trial as quickly as possible.

Really?