The recent announcement by the Victorian State government to ban native forest logging on public land in Eastern Victoria has been strongly welcomed by local environment groups including the Otway Ranges Environment Network(OREN) and Geelong Environment Council(GEC). Although the local communities of Eastern Victorian will need to go through a transition, claims of economic doom and gloom are unfounded. The logging phase out process to be completed by 2030 for Eastern Victoria is very similar to the process used to phase out native forest logging the Otway Ranges that successfully transitioned the local community and economy between 2002 and 2008.

“When the Otways logging ban was announced in 2002, wild claims were made that the Otways region would be economically devastated if native forest logging came to an end, that there would be mass unemployment” said Simon Birrell spokesperson for Otway Ranges Environment Network. “Claims were made that in Colac, where a number of hardwood sawmills were located, the town would die and that the Midway woodchip mill would close down. Instead nature based tourism has significantly expanded in the Otway region and this can easily be the case for Eastern Victoria.”

“For example, the Otway town of Forrest was founded on logging and had a sawmill mill that was phased out. It is now a hub for those who go mountain bike riding through the forests. Shops that were derelict when the local sawmill was operating have now been renovated and opened as a café. There are accommodation businesses. In another example, Otways logs once went to the Birregurra sawmill. Now many people who live in Birri work as part of the tourism service industries along the Great Ocean Road.”

“For the Otways there was six year transition between 2002 and 2008, for east of the State it will be a ten year transition to 2030. Claims the towns such as Orbost will die are rubbish. Orbost can easily be developed has a major gateway hub for nature based tourism to see the wonders of the tall forests and magnificent scenery the region of far East Gippsland has to offer. What needs to happen is investment in making the place more accessible for visitors and a marketing campaign to promote the wonders of the area so more visitors go.”

“It is concerning that Federal Government ministers were so quick to condemn the Eastern Victorian logging phase out. The Federal coalition government should note that the Victorian Liberal Party supported the Otway logging ban in 2005 and voted to support passage of legislation to ban logging and create the Great Otway National Park. Rather than irresponsibly talk up the negative, it is hoped both the State and Federal Liberal and National Parties will work in a bi-partisan way with the State Government to ensure a just and fair transition for the communities impacted by this decisions and jointly explore nature conservation tourism employment opportunities.”

“Finally, both OREN and GEC have recently been lobbying the State and Federal Governments to cancel the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) that covers the Otways, given logging has already ended. We suspect that the requirement to renew the RFAs, by March next year, has prompted the State Government to announce this latest logging ban decision given there are also four RFAs that cover the East of the State and, if renewed, they would have guaranteed logging to the year 2040. This would have been irresponsible. All the RFAs need to be cancelled as they now all come into conflict with this new State Government policy to phase out native forest logging across Victoria by 2030.”

A logger recently posted this nasty message to forest activists on a day when they were meeting to negotiate the protection of giant trees.

HUG THIS!

This one image is so powerful, it will permanently destroy any claims of ‘sustainability’ or ‘environmental concern’ by the industry and VicForests.

The logger who posted this boastful image on an environment group’s Facebook page clearly illustrates his industry’s brazen contempt for the community.

It was posted the same day EEG and others met with DELWP on giant tree protection (21/10/15).

This is why we need urgent interim measures for giant tree protection while prescriptions are developed. There are not many of these leviathans left out there!

Ask Daniel Andrews [email protected].gov.au to urgently protect giant trees.
 

Victoria is still far from having a comprehensive, adequate and representative national park and conservation system, and most major threats to nature identified in past reviews are still very much with us – habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, harmful fire regimes, over-grazing, modified water flows. Precious habitat remnants are being bulldozed for urban expansion or roads.

This article also appears on the AWPC website.

Great Forest National Park needs your pledge.

Victoria is the most cleared state in Australia, populations of native birds and animals are in freefall, and less than 25% of our rivers and creeks are in good condition.

The Great Forest National Park proposes that Victorians create and add a new 355,000 hectares of protected forests to the existing 170,000 hectares of parks and protected areas in the Central Highlands of Victoria. The basis for this tenure change is weighed scientifically, socially and economically against 5 key reasons;

1. Conservation of near extinct wildlife and plants after Black Saturday and in light of future fire events.

2. Water catchments of Melbourne, LaTrobe and the Goulburn Murray systems. The largest area of clean water and catchment in Victoria. Food bowl and community security.

3. Tourism. This is Victoria's richest ecological asset, but these magnificent forests have not yet been included in a state plan to encourage tourism. Our rural towns want and need this boost to tourism.

4. Climate. These ash forests store more carbon per hectare than any other forest studied in the world. They sequester carbon, modulate the climate and can act as giant storage banks to absorb excess carbon if they are not logged. The financial opportunity in carbon credits is significant and can be paid directly to the state when a system is established federally.

5. Places of spiritual nourishment. These magnificent forests have been described as a 'keeping place' by the traditional owners, a place to secure the story of the land and places of spiritual nourishment that we pass on to future generations. There should be no price tag on the value nature brings to mental health and spiritual well-being.

The tallest flowering trees on Earth grow north-east of Melbourne. In their high canopies dwell owls, gliders and the tiny Leadbeater's (or Fairy) Possum. Victoria's precious and endangered faunal emblem lives only in these ash forests of the Central Highlands.

David Lindenmayer, from the Australian National University, is an ecologist and conservation biologist who has spent over 30 years studying the Mountain Ash Forest of Victoria.

‘There’s a little mixture of things that always want to have the last word. The Lyrebird is one and the Kookaburra is another and the Eastern Yellow Robin and the Pilot Bird are two others,’ he says.

(image: Eastern yellow robin)

‘The birds are calling less than in the morning, but still nevertheless calling, and they’re just confirming their territories before there's an extraordinary change in the light in this long dusk period,’ says Lindenmayer.

The Mountain Ash, and one of Australia’s most endangered mammals, the Leadbeater’s Possum, are threatened by ongoing clear-felling and bushfires.
The population of large old hollow-bearing trees has collapsed. These are a critical habitat for the animals that use them, including Leadbeater’s Possum. There is a high risk that the possums will become exinct in the next 20-40 years.

(image: The Wilderness Society)

(image source: The Wilderness Society)

Home to threatened species, including Victoria’s animal emblem - the Fairy Possum, the proposed park will also be a sanctuary, providing real and lasting protection to some of Victoria’s, and the world’s, rarest plant and animal species. Prominent environmentalists Tim Flannery and Bob Brown have lent their support to the campaign. Sir David Attenborough has weighed into the state election, backing a call for the creation of a Great Forest National Park to protect the state faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s possum.

The environmentalist’s intervention comes as a survey found 89 per cent of Victorians support the creation of a new national park in the Yarra Ranges and Central Highlands.

Logging over many years had previously reduced the Leadbeater's possum down to a fraction of its original range and now only around one per cent of mountain ash forest is old growth. A new 'taskforce' attempts to negotiate the future of the logging industry in the central highlands of Victoria and the possible creation of the new national park, in light of the critical status of Leadbeater's Possums.

The state government — elected in November — has so far made no official commitment to the proposed 355,000-hectare Great Forest National Park, which would include both recreational areas and conservation zones.

https://www.facebook.com/GreatForestNP?fref=ts

The good news is that the Victorian Government has given its strongest indication yet that it is open to ending clearfelling and closing down the hardwood timber industry in key parts of Victoria's Central Highlands to prevent the extinction of the Leadbeater's Possum.

‘The time for further reviews and studies is over. The only thing that will save Leadbeater’s Possums from extinction is to immediately stop the clearfell logging of the forest it lives in,’ Greens Senator Rice said.

Join the Great Forest National Park Volunteer Campaign Team. Text 'GFNP volunteer' to 0428 029 437. http://wilderness.org.au/articles/great-forest-national-park#sthash.UHAmATbg.dpuf

Send Your message of Support:

National Threatened Species Day marks the day in 1936 when the last Thylacine died in Hobart Zoo. Seventy-eight years later, in the week leading up to this year’s National Threatened Species Day, Sunday 7 September , Liberal member for Prahran, Clem Newton-Brown, has been letterboxing his area with a flyer proclaiming the Napthine government’s commitment to the recovery of Victoria’s faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s Possum. But his claims don’t hold up.

Liberal MP campaigns on conservation policy as Napthine government condemns Victorian emblem to follow the Tasmanian Tiger into extinction

The flyer claims the government supports all 13 recommendations of its Leadbeater’s Possum Advisory Group (LPAG), which were released in April, and specifies five.

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum, a community group established 10 years ago to protect the possum has already dismissed the recommendations as “mediocre”. The advisory group was composed entirely of government employees and representatives of the logging industry and its findings were constrained by terms of reference that mandated continued industrial logging in the animal’s habitat.

Now a new ‘Action Statement’ for the species, has been covertly. The previous action statement, in force since 1995, has been quietly revoked.

The new action statement is based largely around the inadequate LPAG recommendations and has been reviewed by the group. Its conclusions are scathing.

”This is the first time government policy for the conservation of a threatened species has been formally predicated on, and constrained by, ideological determination to maintain the very industry that is destroying what is left of the species’ habitat, says the review (attached).”

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum had been hoping that, at the very least, there would be some significant additions to the area of forest reserved for the critically endangered marsupial to compensate for the 45% that was lost in the Black Saturday fires. But one of the actions is simply to “Retain” the reserve. In other words, not to increase it.

” “This is more of an INACTION statement”, says Steve Meacher, the Friends’ forest campaigner. “Of the 35 actions and sub-actions proposed, most are ‘not enforceable’, including three on the flyer. Only 4 appear to carry any mandatory power at all. And they were all assessed by LPAG itself, the government-appointed advisory group, to have minimal, if any, benefit to conservation of the possum.”

Taken as a whole this so-called “Action Statement” cannot be considered a serious contribution to the protection of our state’s faunal emblem. It is little more than a thinly disguised restatement of the present government’s declared policy to permit and support the continued logging of Mountain Ash forests that provide the Leadbeater’s Possum with its primary and most critical habitat. This action statement will push Leadbeater’s Possum further along a trajectory to extinction.

It is a dishonest and misleading document that deserves only to be treated with utter contempt. The anonymous authors, the secretary, the department, the minister and the Napthine government, including Newton-Brown, all deserve to be thoroughly ashamed.

Newton-Brown’s flyer declares the government will invest $11 million on implementation. It is understood that over $7 million of this is to be given to VicForests!

Contact for comment: Steve Meacher Ph: 5962 9008 Mob: 0447 330 863

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?

“Recently VicForests was caught out exporting whole logs, before that it was planned destruction of endangered wildlife habitat and currently the Ombudsman is investigating VicForests’ due processes." The industry is "in decline, with jobs on the line as the supply of trees dries up."

VicForests has been given aid of almost $1.3 million to clean up degraded clear-felled public forests that should have been rehabilitated and paid for by VicForests years ago. It is not the first time its poor management has been subsidised by taxpayers.

Today, Thursday 30th June 2011, Jill Redwood of Environment East Gippsland, asked, “What other business has made a loss every year yet is rewarded by millions of dollars of tax payers money to keep going?”

Miss Redwood described how VicForests has for years claimed that it was regenerating forests as it chopped them down, but it was not really doing so. Now that the government, with its $1.3 million taxpayer dollars is recognising that the forests have been devastated. The $1.3 million keeps a lie going.

“The regeneration backlog is out of control – over 7,000 ha in East Gippsland alone. If logging isn’t profitable enough to be able to clean up the mess it leaves, the logging should stop."

VicForest's poor record in minimising harm to our forests goes way back:

“Recently VicForests was caught out exporting whole logs, before that it was planned destruction of endangered wildlife habitat and currently the Ombudsman is investigating VicForests’ due processes."

“The genuine sawn timber industry, as opposed to the woodchip industry, has been struggling to compete with pine timber products for years. Almost 90% of sawn timber and wood panels are now derived from pine. This is causing loss of jobs in the native forest industry”, said Jill Redwood.

“It’s a bit rich for the Baillieu government to blame conservationists for this”.

The Age recently cited a Treasury report which said that VicForests, which is the government-owned company that logs Victoria's native forests, is "running out of timber, has failed to keep track of how much forest is left to log and cannot manage its costs."

According to the same report, VicForests had breached Department of Sustainability and Environment rules twice by logging too much and its backlog of forest that needs replanting has nearly tripled.

According to The Age,"The report portrays an industry in decline, with jobs on the line as the supply of trees dries up. Its early leak to another media outlet has embarrassed the Baillieu government, under pressure because of divisions between the Liberals and Nationals over conservation issues.

Ben Butler, "VicForests operations condemned," The Age, February 23, 2011
....................
Source: Environment East Gippsland, Media Release of 30 June 2011 and the Australian Forests and Climate Alliance Newsletter #3, March 1, 2011

Many Victorians who lost friends and family, and know people who lost houses in the 2009 furnace in Victoria are appalled at some of the recommendations issuing from the Royal Commision Final Report. They are trying to find solutions that match the enormity of the increase in bushfire threats of the future. Inform yourself with this analysis of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission Report and Recommendations!

Analysts in the field are calling for new ideas and asking Victorians to be wary of obsessing about yesterday’s solutions, which haven’t worked or are still scientifically unproven).

Safety lies in scientific, not simplistic solutions

Thoughtful people say that before land management is altered we need evidence and scientific knowledge before repeating unproven solutions. Fire management must be different for each landscape, taking into account that there are 300 different vegetation types across Vic.

Burning off a ritual to ward-off evil but not a real solution

Calls for burning-off as a solution lack science and evidence. They are like warding off evil by burning incense, but they do a hell of a lot more damage, whilst doing little if any good. Burning gives a false sense of security by cultivating a mistaken belief that it will make people safer. Fire experts appointed by panel all agreed that prescribed burns wouldn’t reduce fire severity on extreme fire danger days.

New extreme weather conditions need useful, not political or superstitious responses

CSIRO and BOM study of 2007 says Victoria faces up to 65% more days of extreme fire risk in the next decade. Extreme weather conditions are unfortunately Victoria's new future. Politicians need to accept this reality and allow the delivery of new solutions to match, instead of simply legitimating inadequate traditional responses from their politically positioned beneficiaries.

Declaring war on forests and the environment and trying to alter nature is ineffective and could add to problem.

Fact: Arson and electricity problems, not trees, cause loss of lives

Contrary to the folklore of forests as a danger in themselves circulated by the logging, real-estate and agribusiness industries, it turns out that arson and power line failures are far and away the greatest cause of total areas burnt and loss of lives.

We need to control the sources of the fires - the arsonists and the power-line incidents - not the forests which keep our country cool and watered and stop carbon emissions.

Australians need to beware of politically and commercially motivated scapegoating of groups, such as 'environmentalists' and 'greens' because these tactics are used to avoid and postpone real solutions, whilst protecting bad habits in the commercial world.

We cannot afford to have commercial beneficiaries of forest-destruction, such as land-developers, loggers and agribusiness take our future hostage. We have to take democratic and political control to ensure that rational solutions are used to tackle a new future of extreme weather conditions.

Extreme weather conditions in January/Feb 2009

Fires tragically claimed 173 lives, damaged or destroyed more than 2000 properties and 61 businesses, burned through entire towns and affected 430,000 hectares of land throughout Victoria. Disasters on this scale do not occur in isolation, but are the result of preceding events and conditions.

The 7th & 8th of February 2009 were the hottest days on Victorian records. These terrible conditions which many of us recall were exacerbated by high winds and very low humidity. Most meteorologists think that these conditions were less a drought than a permanent trend of drying. Many believe that they were signs that climate change is here.

The general conclusion by responsible scientists and other environmentalists is that we all need to work together to find best way to deal with this frightening but unavoidable reality.

Shocking facts about the Royal Commission into Victoria's 2009 Bushfires

Royal Commission recommendations into the Victorian Bushfires seem politically driven not scientific

The Royal Commission’s team of experts admitted that on days of such extreme conditions, control burns were useless. So why did the Commission recommend threefold increase in so-called controlled burns?

Was this Royal Commission politically driven even in these shocking circumstances that demanded rigorous honour, compassion and honesty?

Observers say that the Royal Commission ignored the fact that the major danger around towns and settlements was not old growth forests, but - to the contrary - plantations and the flammable re-growth from logging!

The fires that came out of these plantations killed 11 people.

Yet the fire-risk they caused and continue increasingly to cause was not examined by the Commission!

Shocked observers feel that this strange omission can only be explained by the wish by the authorities to protect commercial interests vested in plantation assets.

Bizarre and irrelevant focus on native forests on public land ignored major causes and areas of bushfires

The one dimensional nature of the Royal Commission's focus on just native forests on public land for prescribed burning will do nothing to lessen the fire risks that the other land tenure types pose.

Priority attention needs to focus on deadly powerlines

SEVENTY PER CENT OF BLACK SATURDAY'S DEATHS WERE DUE TO POWERLINES!
Much can be done to reduce the risk of power line sparks in hot windy weather. Attention to this would provide the most effective protection against fires in the future!

Media, including public media, has a responsibility for ongoing fatalities by bushfire

The commercial and public media (the ABC) should provide objective information. At the moment all mainstream media and the government favour sources from the pro-logging and commercial forestry lobby. This lobby unconscionably pushes an over-simplified message about fuel reduction burns that is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT to saving lives, or preventing firestorms on days like Black Saturday.

Critique of Recommendations from the Commission

Although there have been some good recommendations, some are very bad. Others seem to be largely padding.

Bushfire Safety Policy.

Recs 1-4 and 6-7: Mostly sensible and relatively obvious, on education, safety policy revision, evacuation and shelters, looking after the vulnerable and elderly, standards for community refuges.

Rec 5 is a bit ambiguous on the subject of evacuations.

Emergency and incident management.

Recs 8-19: These discuss internal processes to be improved, such as the Department of Sustainability and Environment and or the Country Fire Authority (DSE/CFA) needing better coordination.

Fireground response

Rec 20-26: Fast response by aircraft – put on standby, look at engaging Defence Department to help, more inter-agency communication, radio black-spot problem looked at etc.

Rec 24 & 25: Dangerous incidents including back-burns (obviously a problem in the past) be fully investigated, and no back-burns lit until IC gives approval (implies past mistakes with cowboys lighting up and creating bigger fire front. Hearsay has it that 50% of fire area in 2003 and ‘06 caused by back burns).

Electricity caused fires.

Recs 27-34: Underground or bundled power lines – priority in high danger zone – to be replaced within 10 years. Power utilities to improve relevant performance with inspections every 3 years. Advice to cut down even more trees along power lines that are outside of clearance zone ‘just in case’. Councils also advised to cut down ‘hazard trees’ around lines, as well as to install spreaders and vibration dampers as soon as possible on power lines.

Deliberately lit fires.

Recs 35-36: These recommendations make noises that sound like huffing and puffing about better arson prevention and detection and police training but don't give details.

The Report gives more practical suggestions, such as police patrols.

Planning and Building.

Recs 37-55: Planning, mapping, bushfire risk, council controls, CFA input ... etc. Recommendation 39 talks about “substantially reducing development in areas of highest risk – giving due consideration to biodiversity conservation...”

It may seem picky, but it is hard to see how these two things are logically or logistically connected.

Rec 39-40: Discusses minimal lot size to allow for ‘defendable space’. Does this mean permanent moonscaping? (A good way to heat up the earth.)

Rec 41: Amend planning regulations to let more tree clearing permits through where fire threat is a priority. Looks for a maximum level of permissable clearing.

Rec 42: Mention of “collective offset solution” (?) when native veg cleared.

Rec 43 – This is one for the cynics!

DSE to “conduct biodiversity mapping to identify ...threatened species throughout Vic...”
State and local government have demonstrated lack of will or allocated resources to do this even in small areas where it’s critically important. The Department of Sustainability and the Environment have been shown by Auditor General reports in 2009 and the Minister for the Environment's responses to be unwilling or unable to carry out such an immense survey and mapping exercise.

Thus this recommendation seems naively founded on ignorant overestimations of DSE's competence, power and resources. Or worse, it simply continues to use DSE as a convenient front to cover inaction with a pretense of good intentions.

Man or Mouse - no contest

Will Brumby reject or set up such a Mickey Mouse type biodiversity mapping exercise?.

Rec 44: Fire resistant plants list to be produced by the CFA. Don't the bushfires already produce fire-resistant vegetation and isn't this part of the problem of our drying environment? Old-growth forests (by definition) do resist fire, but this is not what is meant by the commission, unfortunately.

Rec 46: Buy-back land and settle people elsewhere in high risk zone – non compulsory.

No mention of funding fire-bunkers.

Rec 47- 55: Building codes, overlays, etc

Land and fuel management - a pyromaniac's guide

Recs 56 – 62: Currently about 1.5% of land is burned annually. This is a huge amount. The Commission has recommended that the area to be crudely devastated in this way by human agency may be increased up to 5%, or 3 x increase!

Why was more burning advocated despite the Royal Commission’s expert panel earlier admitting there was little evidence that control burns achieved anything on the extreme days Victorians will face in the future?

Cynics will say that it's no surprise that the Royal Commission is politically driven, but Victorians should march on Parliament in outrage.

Rec 57: Annual report on targets and “impacts on biodiversity”! We cannot say what the impact of a burn was for years afterwards. As the report says, there is a need baseline data, seasonal monitoring, and surveys on many diff veg types, aspects, areas etc.

At least they admit they don’t have the necessary information, but this doesn't stop them making dangerous recommendations about burning off.

The current monitoring looks only at plants. It does not look at micro-fauna, fungi, insects, frogs, reptiles, birds and the ground mammals that are most heavily impacted when huge areas of forest are ‘control burnt’.

Rec 58: DSE to improve its long-term data collection to monitor the effects of its burns and of bushfires. As mentioned above, DSE' current data collection is almost non-existent and next to useless.

DSE does not monitor the impact of fire on loss of ground cover and on the soil life that depends on healthy leaf litter. It doesn't look at how the vegetation that grows back after a fire is thicker, more flammable i.e. "fire-adapted."

Risk analysis model lacking holistic context could promote commerically motivated abuse

Rec 59: Contains a risk analysis model which gives humans priority over the [read 'natural'] environment where there’s a dispute.

The dangers of this model are obvious. Without a healthy natural environment we will all perish and the risk of commercially vested interests using this model to devastate natural forests and make them loggable or clear them for housing and agriculture is a well-known one which the commission, in good faith, should have avoided.

Recommendation 60 promotes annual destruction of roadside vegetation

Rec 60: Revised Planning regulations allow major vegetation clearing along roads under the guise of fire safety. This is often where the last remnant strips of original vegetation survive in farmland. Such actions will raise the water table and promote more drying.

Rec 61: Discusses getting the Federal government to solve conflict over destruction of valuable roadside vegetation and to modify the already tattered Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) to allow protected vegetation to be destroyed annually!

Rec 62: That VicRoads, which is an organisation that has no core ecological or environmental expertise, do risk assessments along roadsides.

Organisational structure.

Recs 63 – 64: Monitoring and implementation.
Rec 66: Auditor General or other ‘independent’ body report back on the progress of these recommendations by July 2012.

Age letters [email protected]
Herald Sun [email protected]
Talkback on Gippsland ABC 1300 295 222 or text in 197 22 842
Melb talkback on ABC 1300 222 774
Drive show – regional Vic 1300 303 468

Or make your comments here on this article and send the article around to politicians and friends to publicise the absurdities, cruelties and dangers in these recommendations.

Tasmania's forest industry has rejected a Greens plan to ban logging in high conservation value forests.  The Greens says 300 jobs would be lost but more than 700 created through the strategy.  Even job creation is not enough to move the die-hard destructive mentality.  Both Labor and Liberals support Gunns pulp mill and neither is proposing any new forest reserves.
Trees up to hundreds of years old cannot be replaced overnight, despite how "sustainable" the logging is supposed to be!

Governments fail to see the value of forests when they can't see the trees as anything but resources to plunder, or "manage", for economic benefits and jobs.

Tasmania's forest industry has rejected a Greens plan to ban logging in high conservation value forests.  The Greens says 300 jobs would be lost but more than 700 created through the strategy.  Even job creation is not enough to move the die-hard destructive mentality.  Both Labor and Liberals support Gunns pulp mill and neither is proposing any new forest reserves.

Mr Bartlett signalled that on the hot topic of forestry, Labor wanted to ensure the logging of old-growth forests would continue in the long-term.  I believe old-growth will always be part of Tasmania's (forestry) mix.

The manufacture and sale of high value products from special timbers provides employment for more than 2,000 Tasmanians and generates about $70 million for the state each year.   The vast majority of wood from these forests (approximately 80%) goes into short lived products such as paper and cardboard which decompose and release carbon very quickly. So, carbon storage in wood products can never make up for the loss of carbon storage in old growth forests.

An alliance of forestry companies in Tasmania has launched an advertising campaign warning of the risks to the economy if all old growth logging is stopped.  Forests remain silent inside the consciousness of people who are environmentally illiterate! 

Governments fail to see the value of forests when they can't see the trees as anything but resources to plunder, or "manage", for economic benefits and jobs.

Who will publicise the risks to our heritage, our air, water, homeless native wildlife,  and additional greenhouse gas emissions when old-growth forests are destroyed?  By their very nature, these trees take hundreds of years to replace themselves, yet we, the public, are supposed to be so myopic that the ephemeral financial returns from logging old growth forests should over-ride the value of these ancient sentinels, guarding the wealth of natural ecosystems?

It may appear as if nothing is changing in forests, but countless natural cycles are silently at work every day and night. Old growth forests have a high level of biodiversity, and logging  causes disturbances and destruction.

Conserving the nation's forests and woodlands is one the easiest, cheapest and fastest ways that we can start to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve carbon storage.

Many of the RFA old growth forests protected in Tasmania consist of trees of little use to the timber industry. Despite repeated requests for solid evidence supporting such ‘statistics’ as “90% of the Upper Florentine Valley is reserved from logging,” data and maps supporting such claims have failed to materialise. We do know, however, that most of the ‘protected’ country in the Upper Florentine consists of buttongrass, scrub and high-altitude moorlands, with very few tall-eucalypt forests reserved.  Only 22% of Tasmania’s original tall-eucalypt forests have been reserved. 

Tasmania is the largest exporter of woodchips in Australia, exporting more than all the other states combined. 

This year, ironically, is the UN Year of Biodiversity, and next year is the Year of Forests.

As our population swells, more natural resources such as forests will be considered as assets to plunder for economic benefits!  Our natural heritage, and ecosystems, are continually under threat from industry and developments.

We are already world-leaders in wildlife extermination, and Tasmania is famous for the genocide of its indigenous people, destroying Lake Pedder, exterminating the Tasmanian Tiger and for the current threats to the Tasmanian Devil.   Logging native forests destroys homes, creates stress and robs wildlife of habitat. We humans are not part of their ecosystems, and removing trees increases fire risks.

Unless we declare all our old-growth forests and remaining native vegetation as part of our national park system, the logging mafia will continue to threaten, bully and dominate our State governments.

(Photo: devastation at the Styx old growth forests - Wikipedia commons)

A recent poll shows the Labor government of Premier David Bartlett is in trouble, with the Greens polling well. Unless there is a late surge in support for David Bartlett's Labor or Will Hodgman's Liberals, one or other of them will be governing in minority after March 20, ending 12 years of ALP majority rule.

People can relocate, retrain and be resourced in other industries.  Trees up to hundreds of years old cannot be replaced overnight, despite how "sustainable" the logging is supposed to be! 

(photo: Styx logging sign)

Our old-growth forests do not owe us, non-indigenous people of Australia, a livelihood.   We owe it to next generations a nation with its natural wealth intact and viable through preservation, and honouring our heritage and non-human species.