ENVIRONMENT
The Forest Wars
David Lindenmayer
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

It was once possible to walk the 1500 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane enclosed in native forest. Today Australian forests have been pushed to the margins, surviving as scattered islands, logged around and through. In most states this continues, enabled by expedient myths about forest’s resilience and replaceability that have become entrenched in popular wisdom. These range from “logging is good for fire safety” to “wildlife can simply scuttle away to another tree as soon as one is felled”.

Renowned scientist David Lindenmayer confronts these fables that he was educated on as a young student in his latest offering, The Forest Wars. He is concerned with native forest, which provides a range of benefits beyond forest plantations. Tall, wet eucalypts in particular are not only habitats for native wildlife but are more resistant to fire, better sinks for carbon and can conserve clean water for cities.

Many myths rely on a neoliberal lexicon where native forests are “resources”, or “green capital” and logging can be “sustainable”. It assumes the fungibility of nature, as if one tree were as good as another. The author explains that native forests are complex ecosystems that have developed sometimes for hundreds of years, with ancients that cannot simply be bulldozed and replanted by saplings in another cycle.

Forest Wars begins with its author tracking wildlife, trudging around wet eucalypts and through mossy gullies, but soon evolves into a sustained and righteous tract as we follow him up the production line to the sheer waste at the heart of the enterprise. Another myth: old-growth forest will end as fine furniture. In fact, only four per cent becomes sawn lumber and half of that is used for beer pallets. A whopping 60 per cent is lost as waste, with most wood taken from the forest simply pulped for paper and packaging.

The economics surrounding the destruction of native forests are obscene. State-run enterprises are loss-running, essentially charging taxpayers to destroy their own native forests. VicForests, for instance, has only once reported a profit, while Forestry Tasmania lost an eye-watering $1.3 billion in the decade from 1998. Over the years they have survived on generous loans from state treasuries that will never be repaid, with expenses that include settling lost court cases, and, in the case of VicForests, hiring a private investigator to spy on the author. “Melbourne is not Moscow,” Lindenmayer states.

This murky world is at best ignorant and self-interested and at worst sinister and corrupt. Its most cynical manoeuvres involve aggressively logging forest as soon as there is a movement for its protection. Another is co-opting First Nations groups under the guise of “forestry gardening” or “cultural thinning”. Here, business-as-usual logging becomes “healing Country”, an attempt to “blackwash” a calamitous PR image.

Attempts to regulate have been underfunded and politically compromised. In one instance the author meticulously investigates violations of logging boundaries and gradient guidelines, then submits the analysis to regulators, only to have his findings contradicted. Through an FOI request he discovers their results are nearly identical to his, entering a Kafkaesque netherworld.