How Much Forest Should Be Saved?

Jennifer Marohasy claims: "With 45 percent of Tasmanian forests not available for wood supply because this area is reserved.."

This is the lie repeated over and over again by pro-industry groups.

I've lived in a forested area of Tasmania since 1984 and personally witnessed the 'reserve' system in action. The vast majority of these 'reserves', although they might only comprise 10 metres around streams, are clearfelled. In addition, subject to: (i) aerial spray drift of toxic pesticides, (ii) the dead carcasses of 1080 poisoned wildlife (they head to water before they die), council roadside scrub cutters (because 5 metres on the sides of roads are also 'forest reserves'), heavy siltation and compression from forestry bulldozers and other vehicles that drive right through rivers and creeks, browsing animals when young seedlings try to regenerate and/or replacement with industrial tree monocultures. And more.

The word 'reserve' itself is one chosen by spin doctors to deceive. What is the definition of the word, Marohasy? Certainly 'not subject to logging, tourist development, road building, chemical drift.'

And remember that the text of the RFA has been changed so that the word 'protect' now has only a meaning allocated to it by the Federal and State Governments. It can no longer be subject to interpretation by pesky federal court judges anymore, after the shock 'Wielangta' served on the business-as-usury crowd.

http://braidwood.nsw.greens.org.au/2007/02/24/regional-forest-agreement-change-is-alice-in-wonderland-nonsense/

I n regards to forestry on the mainland we must fix all the problems in Tasmania forestry first because their industry is so huge in terms of everything including federal subsidies. Also there is enough depth there in other services such as home grown engineering to produce better technology across the board.

It may mean we have to accept say more hardwood laminations from Tasmania in all traditional mainland building practices depending on wood, in both our structural and finish grades of timber. Random selections in timber packs delivered to building sites riddled with finger joints may become the norm, from milling much shorter logs or best ends delivered to chip mills. This requires some overview and the establishment of a sawmill priority multi point flitch selection process.

This brings me to this conclusion, at the elite end of the timber business we need a national authority that is independent of outside influences enough to be trusted by the public at large to poke right into the vexed issue of managing timber assets in reserves over very long time cycles.

The federal government could quite easily do this through the existing RFA process and probably will under extreme pressure from industry heavies or green lobbies at critical times for political parties at election times. By this I mean it could swing either way depending on the winds of change. But I want something more than these crazy battles every time there is a federal or state election imminent.

Let all the interested parties devise another system that is completely independent of any whims or extremes and form themselves round a peer group examining best practice in every direction and authorising appropriate people where they have demonstrated ability over time. I can recommend the principles we incorporated in NATA some fifty years ago. This voluntary peer review process recognises people and practices in many important industries today.

Finally; I see our parks and reserves co existing with long term forest and land management practices where wild fire and controlled bushfire sees no legal boundaries.
Timber extraction could be likewise seamless provided it improves both the reserve and the resource in the broadest terms.

Mosaic burning should commence now in each branch of every administration including public and private sector to achieve our aims. The big question is where to start, are we protecting the old growth or thinning the young crop planted around the outskirts?

Boxer; this whole bloody industry world wide is driven by one thing, greed at every level. Part of the answer to your last question lies in all logging operations sending less of the good stuff to the chip mills as we did.

You may all ask, but what do I know about logging practices deep in any private or state owned forest? I could respond with another question, can you guess where most of the export wood chip came from?

It’s deeper than that.

Trash clean up including pine forests in Australia has been abysmal. Some of the wasted solids can be harvested too. Around 35% is left on the ground as “normal” fire recycle but in many places it goes much higher than that, with well established mall practice back in the bush and in the log selection yards at any mill associated with the chip export business.

However I must say this, things may have improved a bit since the 80’s when I last detailed trucks on the run and various log yards. Note too cheap plantation pine was available everywhere in this part of the world from places like NZ.

This last comment is important relative to the above, although I did not see all the machinery in use at this time, Burnie had a huge reputation in the export of locally built and highly modified equipment for mining and forestry. I don’t recall seeing much head wood or minor species on our trucks nor do I recall seeing any built to pick it up.

And the forest from West Papua that goes into my roof - what of its fate?

I know what you mean Jennifer, but the question is loaded by the use of the word "saved". If a reserve "saves" a forest, then forest outside the reserve is presumably "lost". It is also logical that if a forest is lost when it is logged and regenerated, then it is no longer fit to be reserved, because if it is lost, it must lack fundamental values that exist only in forests that have never suffered massive disturbance. There are no old growth forests that would meet this criterion if you include natural cataclysmic events, but it is understood that people are worried about human induced disturbances and they ignore the existance of natural disasters. That's another topic on it own; we are talking here about feeling good about ourselves.

As proud Tazzie's example demonstrates, a regenerated forest may contain all the qualities of the original forest. So if you look at this issue over a period of, say, a century, and the forest does regenerate well (not all forests do) then none of the forest is destroyed if you harvest and regenerate it.

If a regenerated forest recovered all the aesthetic values of an uncut forest in say 50 years (a reasonable guesstimate value for a wet schlerophyll forest such as mountain ash or karri) and if you harvest 1% of the forest a year, then at any time about 50% of the forest is in a condition that even a green person would describe as "high conservation value". This term covers forests that are regenerated and the greens now want to include in a reserve. So in this simplistic model, you could harvest all the forest on a 100 year rotation and suffer no loss of all the original forest values over 50% of the forest.

Granted, at any one time, some of the forest would lack some values. About 1% of it would look like a total mess, another 1% would be covered in regrowth a metre high, and so on. I have listened to a deep green friend make complimentary remarks about a forest which I could see had been logged about a decade before. It was a selection cut in a dry schlerophyll forest, but we had driven through several log landings before the remark "this is nice piece of bush" was made.

Now if you exclude from this available forest buffers around private property and along main roads, around special tourist features and stream reserves, you are more likely to be talking about actually harvesting about 80% of the forest on a 100 year rotation. The 20% is never touched, other than managed to control tourist impacts, and all the 80% is harvested, of which 50% is in "high conservation value" condition at any time. To my mind, this would be a better model than locking up large slabs of forest in reserves, most of which almost no one ever sees, and then treating other large slabs of forest as commercial resource. One of the downsides of the current approach is that it becomes a never-ending fight over whose share of the forest is the biggest. This creates uncertainty in the industries that want to operate in the commercial forest, which discourages investment. I suspect it even discourages investment in plantations and private native forest, because the investor can never be completely confident that when harvest time comes around, a neighbour who has become attached to the vista of someone else's plantation from their kitchen window will attempt to prevent harvest. There are already examples of this.

If we use wood, and while this nation remains a net wood importer, we are morally obliged to bear the environmental consequences of our consumption as much as possible. Locking up forests in reserves just to make us feel better and consequently consuming other people's forests seems like a difficult moral postion to adopt. We are placing our feelings above other people's forests, because it is well understood that much of the logging in other nations' forests is illegal and/or is followed by conversion of old growth forest to palm oil and rubber plantations.