The Forests Agreement to end all forestry disagreement?

An outbreak of peace is threatened in the forests of Tasmania. We have a Forests Agreement to end all forestry disagreement. A victory for conservation and for common sense, surely? An end to native forest logging; a move to a plantations-based industry; compensation for retrenched loggers; increased reservation. It all sounds so thoroughly rational, surely the Principles should be rolled out nationally?

Sorry to spoil the party, but we seem to have neglected to consider whether conservation is best-served by forsaking native forestry in favour of a swing to plantations and imports. The pursuit of peace sounds worthy, but if it merely replaces a polarised social landscape with a polarised ecological landscape, delivers perverse anti-conservation outcomes, and costs hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in the process, I have to ask whether it’s all worth it.

The root of the “forestry problem”, as I see it, is that we have been conditioned by years of exposure to the forestry vilification campaign to reject any notion that native forestry and conservation might be good bedfellows. This is despite plenty of evidence that this is indeed the case. But we live in an intellectually lazy and largely urban society in which our understanding of what makes the bush tick is rudimentary; and our hearts often rule over our minds.

People are sick of the war on forestry and just want it to go away. These are the perfect conditions for environmental NGOs to become the de facto voice of authority on matters forestry, and the self-proclaimed arbiters of good taste in conservation. Professional foresters and conservation biologists have been largely disenfranchised. Why ask them for a lengthy explanation of why things are done the way they are, or how they could be done better, when you can make up your own answers and then go fishing for “evidence” to support your case, and when so many in society appear prepared to believe you?

Black-and-white is the new green. It reminds me of the old adage that the simple solution to any complex problem is usually the wrong solution. In the context of conservation, that’s where we are right now with this forests agreement.

It’s ironic that the phrase inconvenient truth was coined to support a pro-environment agenda (and with good reason), but in the war on forestry, it’s the environmental camp that prefers to operate in a knowledge vacuum. But war doesn’t decide who is right, merely who is left, and the environmental NGOs aren’t thinking of disbanding themselves any time soon. In the battle for hearts and minds, sound-bites can bite. Spin-doctors and wordsmiths form part of the corporate structures of modern ENGOs. They have excelled at hijacking the language of forestry and conservation. Science, other than psychology perhaps, doesn’t enter into it. Say something outrageous about forestry often enough and people start to assume it’s true.

There’s always got to be a war on the Western Front, and the foot-soldiers can learn all they need to know about it from the ENGOs themselves, aided by the complicity of the mainstream media who have normalised their greenspeak, column-inch by column-inch. High-conservation-value forests? Sure, we’ll add that term into our lexicon, and we won’t ask whether it has any scientific basis whatsoever as currently used (it doesn’t).

I care deeply about conservation, but I can no longer call myself a conservationist because these days the word has connotations of radical environmentalism. If you think I’m over-reacting, ask yourself how rarely you hear the word “forester” and how often you hear the word “logger” instead; and note too how the entire industry is dismissed as the “woodchipping industry”; how regeneration burns are branded “forestry burn-offs”; harvesting and regeneration is called “land-clearance”; and all harvesting is “clearfelling”, despite most being by non-clearfell methods.

And how, of course, the only certification show in town is the Forest Stewardship Council - the one scheme in Australia that allows ENGOs to effectively veto certification even if all the sustainability boxes have been ticked.

In this warped view of reality, all native forests are high-carbon-density forests, and are likely to stay that way forever unless harvested (best not to mention the massive carbon releases from the Victorian bushfires; nor that wood use is a form of carbon capture and sequestration that can displace more carbon-intensive materials like concrete, aluminium and steel).

The profession of forestry is frequently vilified by ENGOs: after all, in their book, it seems, we’re only in it for the money, or because we get some perverse satisfaction in killing trees and desecrating wild areas. But most foresters that I know “do” forestry because they like trees, forests, nature, people and wood - and the knowledge that the forest resource is one of the few that we know how to use sustainably.

In many other endeavours in society we are living on credit, using finite and non-renewable resources. We clearly can’t go on doing so indefinitely, but we can go on doing native forestry indefinitely - that is sustainably - if we do it well enough.

In this context the ENGOs have done well to turn so many Australians against native forestry, when harvesting eucalypts gives us so much useful stuff that we all use. At the end of the day, forestry is no more about mindlessly chopping down trees than conservation is about mindlessly declaring more and more reserves. It’s also about nurturing forests and protecting these assets over decades and centuries, for future generations. The trouble is that if the media were to portray forestry accurately, it would be very boring for the rest of us. For every image of trees coming crashing down there would be 999 images of forests quietly growing, or foresters in office clothes sitting in front of monitors, coffee-mugs at hand.

It’s odd that the ENGOs choose to come down on forestry so much more than, say, mining, farming or fishing, when forestry is in many ways a paragon of environmental virtue in comparison to other primary industries. I think it’s because native forestry is an easy target: harvesting frontier forests is often very messy, and appears to involve an awful lot of wanton destruction. These aren’t neat woodlots we’re talking about (and from a conservation perspective, we’re lucky that this is so). Foresters can only work with the land they’ve been entrusted with. They appreciate that the frontier won’t go on forever, and that future forestry will be about revisiting old ground. The entire estate planning system is modelled and managed with this long-term view in mind - but what the public notes is the initial, messy harvest, the fire and smoke that rightly follows harvest, and the log-trucks rumbling through town.

Conservation in eucalypt forests need not be all about lock-up. The balance of nature never was so abstract a concept as in a naturally fire-prone eucalypt forest. Yet society’s disconnection from the bush make it difficult for many of us to appreciate the resilience of nature. Bushfires can sweep through tens of thousands of hectares almost overnight, but the forest starts growing back the very next day: it has been this way for as long as there have been eucalypts on the planet.

Today’s old-growth may not be tomorrow’s old-growth, and vice versa. This realisation certainly puts forestry in its place. For a start, it means it’s quite natural to use fire to help regenerate the forest after harvest. It also means that even disturbances as massive as clearfelling have their place, alongside less visually-confronting alternatives. The big-picture view is that conservation in these landscapes is about maintaining resilience and not exceeding tipping-points - keeping the landscape joined up, allowing ample forest to age naturally, and keeping enough ageing forest intermingled within a matrix that is managed to be productively young.

Broadly speaking, that’s what the various Regional Forest Agreements have delivered. Compare the ecological health of Tasmania’s forest estate, and the level of reservation of native vegetation in that estate, with the equivalent statistics for the nation’s rangelands and croplands and you’ll see that we’re in a league of our own.

So where does this more joined-up thinking take us? Well, any conservation gain from exiting native forestry would, in my view, be modest, because it would be in the context of the already-high level of forest reservation. And in reality, the forests would still require active management (at the taxpayers’ expense), for example, to keep weeds at bay and to manage fire risks.

Gradually phasing out native forestry is not a smart proposition either. Experience elsewhere, from the forest concession systems of Indonesia to the South East Queensland Forests Agreement, suggests that if there’s no incentive to manage for the long term, there will be a temptation towards asset-stripping - harvest what you can today because you won’t be allowed to harvest anything tomorrow. The motivation for maintaining standards will be all stick and no carrot - a sort of straitjacketing which promises to sap foresters’ professional innovation and their flexibility to deliver good conservation outcomes.

In my more cynical moments I wonder whether, deep down, that’s what the ENGOs want as it would help validate their anti-forestry stance - a self-fulfilling prophecy. But since the 1950’s, forestry has moved on from its “log-and-leave” days to embrace science and sustainability. It would be a big mistake to go back there again.

The extent of further non-conservation perversities from an exit from native forestry would depend on where we sourced the replacement wood. Can we rest easy knowing that we’re going to import more wood from somebody else’s back yard instead of our own? Perhaps so, if we discount the resultant carbon footprint and trade deficit and if we import from the well-managed plantations of New Zealand, South America or South Africa (though the blue cranes, blue swallows and other endangered birds whose African grassland habitat has been largely afforested may beg to differ). If the world’s not so lucky, our wood will come from the rainforests of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands or Indonesia, where ecological and social sustainability is still but a distant dream. In effect, the cost of exiting native forestry locally could be the export of deforestation and corruption to our near neighbours.

Or we could grow our trees in plantations here in Australia, which is what most people are assuming will happen. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the environmental movement likes this idea. But it’s not very long ago that the plantation sector in Tasmania was being accused of poisoning the waters sustaining local residents and oysters alike, and of killing off rural communities faced with encirclement by tree-farms.

I’m no great fan of the current plantation estate myself. In Tasmania, much of it is on land deliberately and only recently cleared of native forest - a perverse outcome of past agreements. For the future, we have to do better than this - but where? Unfortunately, plantations grow best where crops grow best. Do we want more food or more wood? Marginal agricultural land is often marginal plantation land too, and is often the only part of the agricultural landscape where native trees, shrubs and grasses still hang on. For plantations to thrive here requires intensive management, usually involving fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, which have an environmental and carbon footprint of their own. Conservation gain? Unless it’s very cleverly managed, I don’t think so.

In essence, the war on forestry is a social construct that has become disconnected from a harder reality - the reality of what makes the forest tick (ecology) and the reality of how our management choices impinge on its ecology (conservation). The outcome of this war is a forests agreement that, in forsaking native forestry in favour of a swing to plantations and imports, is not sensible and does not comprise effective conservation policy. It discounts the future and it discounts the cost of conservation in other places. It represents a step away from sustainability, not towards it.

We face horrendous planetary-scale challenges in the spheres of conservation and climate change, and we need vigorous ENGOs to help us turn our social, cultural and economic systems around to meet those challenges. It’s time they left domestic forestry to do its bit for our sustainable future, and moved on to dealing with these more pressing matters.