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Nature and Society Forests Years ago I read Perlin’s book A Forest Journey. It changed the way I look at history. Now I see that the way humans use resources is as powerful a way of looking at history, and of determining the future, as any conventional history of rulers, power plays, or political philosophies; it is indeed more influential. In A Forest Journey Perlin traced the destruction of forests in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean and up into Europe, until the Europeans, with their own forests destroyed, found the new forests of North America. Always the centre of civilisation moved to the location of the new forest resource, but now we have reached the end. There are no forests on the Moon or Mars. In those days timber from the forests was used for constructing buildings or ships, and as fuel for smelting metals, which at least had a long life span. Now we are destroying some of the last wild forests of the earth just to make paper; paper, for heavens sake, that cheap material, which we waste as though it had no value. The May 2007 edition of The Monthly contains a long essay by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan on the tragedy of Tasmania’s forests. It tells a shocking story of corporate greed and political connivance, of people who see no beauty or value in forests except in terms of what money they can extract from the timber in them. They have no understanding that they are destroying their own and their children’s future. It is not as though they are providing many jobs or much prosperity, even in the short term, for other Tasmania. Woodchipping is a notoriously bad provider of jobs, and even their proposed pulp mill will not be a big employer. What it will do is ruin Tasmania’s clean, green image, and its ecotourism. Small, specialist timber mills would provide more jobs for timber workers and crafts people. In future years the current clearfelling operations could well come to be seen as the crime against humanity that they really are. When an area is felled, it is torched so that nothing survives. Then plantations are established on the cleared land and, so that wild life does not eat the seedlings, the area is strewn with poison baits. Never mind that endangered species can be pushed over the brink, and that animals are dying in agony. In a real forest animals and plants live in harmony, with interconnected needs. It is only when we disturb the balance that the trees need this sort of protection. When we have a great forest of some of the world’s most spectacular trees, Eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering plants on earth, we should treasure it. Apart from its aesthetic appeal, and the moral necessity of valuing other life forms, there is the very important point that established forests sequester large quantities of carbon, not only in the trees, but in the whole forest ecosystem, including its soils. The Federal Government recognised this fact when it recently announced that as a carbon dioxide reduction measure, it would provide money to save tropical rain forests. We already know that illegal logging and weak government measures are allowing the destruction of these forests. Whether or not any money our Government provides can change this, we do not know. But we do know that the Government, if it had the will, could halt the Tasmanian destruction. Unfortunately current tax laws give tax breaks for the establishment of plantations, and so the woodchippers not only make money from destroying the forest, they also make money from the tax system. This is ludicrous and immoral. The Federal Government should change the law to ensure that such tax incentives apply only to plantations on land degraded before the end of last century. There should be no tax breaks for destroying an existing forest and then establishing a plantation. We also need a new moral climate that says environmental protection laws override other considerations. There should be no chance of the Tasmanian Government ever again changing the environmental laws to accommodate a company’s ‘need’ to pollute or destroy. In John Donne’s famous quote, ‘no man is an island’ he spoke of the interconnectedness of all people. For someone living when he did, it is really quite a remarkable idea. Now when we are at last realising that humans are not just connected to each other, but to the whole natural world, that pollution here affects the air and the oceans, and what we do can indeed make the world uninhabitable, we need to enlarge on Donne’s view. Tasmania is not an island in this sense, nor is Australia. What happens here affects the rest of the world, and what happens in the rest of the world affects us. We have a duty to save Tasmania’s forests for the sake of the world. Jenny Wanless June - July 2007 edition accessible here Back to top ________________________________________________________________
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