Toolangi

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?