YES. The wood supply licences and this environmental slaughter can cease – for a fraction of what Labour has conceded of the planned mining tax, and in one state, for the same amount promised to buy brand new ‘green’ cars. Tell everyone you know; write, phone, visit politicians and major federal election candidates and talk back radio and local newspapers – DEMAND the immediate halt of wood supply licences in native forests across Australia. DEMAND commonsense. Native trees to fight climate change with trees! Trees that already exist! No more phoney subsidies, grants, taxes, licences to cut or not cut them down. One rule for all native ecosystems. That they be left intact! DEMAND life for Australian wildlife.
In 2010 Australian wildlife faces its greatest crisis. This final onslaught on native forests by the logging machinery of multinationals in multiple states is causing impacts from which wildlife will never recover.
In NSW, the major parties ignore the
Auditor-General’s reportTo meet wood supply commitments, native forest on the north coast is being cut faster than it is growing back. This means that the forest will not regrow but there will be a reduction in yield in the future.
Forests NSW continue to look for new sources of hardwood timber to meet existing commitments from private property and leasehold land.
Given that native forest operations ran at loss of $14.4 million in 2007-08, continuing to service wood supply licences raises concern re the financial burden of loss on Forests NSW. (editorial note: i.e. the tax payer)
For the North Coast, where more than two thirds of all sawlog volume is obtained, yield modelling assumes a high level of cut for 20 years in order to meet wood supply commitments agreed by the Government.
This means there will be less timber available in the long term.
Content summary: Sustaining native forest operations: Forests NSW [The Audit Office of New South Wales]. (Performance audit) April 2009 revealing forests stretched beyond capacity. Throughout Australia the major parties ignore the warning by Australian scientists - Australian logging is creating the sixth greatest extinction crisis'Extinction crisis in Oceania' Professor Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales, lead author of the report into this study states:
"Earth is experiencing its sixth great extinction event" and "this threat is advancing on six major fronts" "Our region has the notorious distinction of having possibly the worst extinction record on earth. This is predicted to continue without serious changes to the way we conserve our environments and dependent organisms."
Threats in Oceania include:
Loss and degradation of habitat is the largest single threat to land species, including 80 percent of threatened species.
About 70 percent of remaining forests are ecologically degraded from logging.
More than 2,500 invasive plants have colonized New Zealand and Australia - representing about 11 percent of native plant species.
Invasive weeds, vertebrate pests, and fishes introduced by government, agriculturalists, horticulturalists and hunters.
Compiled by a team of 14 scientists after review of 24,000 articles this report was published in Conservation Biology. Comments from press release July 2009, Dan Gaffney, UNSW Faculty of Science of the planet centred in our region.
In NSW, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, multinationals and others have licences to a supply of wood from native forests that scientists say should have never been granted.
Ecologically inadequate, self-monitored codes of practice The process flawed from the outset..
"It was in Pitt Street in the city with little notice. The forestry department came up with a list of places, all proposal and counter proposal. There has been no real science as a basis of the Regional Forest Agreements on which these supply licences were granted. It was a quick political decision which had to be made. The Resource Assessment Commission used only xx indicator species in this area but generally it wasn't done. So any figures about what could/would be impacted had to be pulled out of the air. In many cases there was no soil nutrient data and this is what was necessary to establish any likelihood of biodiversity etc. Even the wildlife atlas can bring only a rough 5 km likelihood or not of species."
NSW scientist at the original negotiations
How the public and almost no other organisation can take legal action to prevent damage from logging given the way these wood supply licences are set up..
Because forestry has such broad codes of practice under these special regional forest agreements they get to make their own decisions about when or if they need a licence to operate from the relevant state environmental department. As well as that they do their own or no self assessment of already inadequate environmental practice.
"The only really legal question is after the event – for example a compliance action of sorts – which is of course retrospective and after the environment has been logged and damaged."
Senior solicitor, NSW Environmental Defenders Office, April 2010
leave thinly disguised clear felling across millions of hectares, so that the native plant and animal life that remain is subjected to further impacts that are likely to combine to cause mass extinction.
The country’s carbon sink is being felled. Wildlife is slaughtered daily along with hope for its future habitat. The fell and burn practice invites weed, feral animal and pathogen invasion on a scale never yet been seen, which will be impossible to control. These are the risks the Australian government and the opposition are taking with a continent on the brink, already having one of the highest extinction rates on earth, on a planet out of control.
IMMEDIATE
LATER BUT GUARANTEED
It’s now or never to save the variety of ecosystems of this world. Insist on investment in the masses of jobs plantation timbers can provide - but do not allow industry and government to start this process with the destruction of native forests. Logging companies using big machines employ few. Restoring degraded land with plantations employs many. Restore the damaged native forests, then let them sink carbon and allow the wildlife to recover.