Time to investigate 'Green' media spin

Last week, the ABC's Media Watch program (19/3/12) was at pains to point out the failure of journalists to investigate errant claims about environmental issues made by some community groups in media releases.

While this is a worthy and long overdue sentiment, the program used it to justify an attack on a particular group (the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF)) and an associated scientist (Dr Jennifer Marohasy) whose views about the future of the Murray River are at odds with the conventional wisdom being pushed by Australia's mainstream environmental groups.

As the Media Watch episode was entitled "What's in a name?" its primary purpose appears to have been to denigrate the AEF for having a title which implies that they are an 'environmental group' when in fact they support natural resource use and farming, and are sponsored by industry elements associated with these activities. Clearly, to the Media Watch presenter and his production team, a real environmental group opposes such activities – a politically correct view which is no doubt shared by most of the ABC's audience.

Having spoken about forestry issues at two AEF annual conferences several years ago, I would agree that they differ substantially from the mainstream environmental movement. Mainstream environmentalism is typified by extremists such as the Wilderness Society which sees environmental issues in simplistic 'black and white' terms, ignores unintended consequences and strives for absolutist outcomes such as evicting resource use industries through national park declarations. In stark contrast to this, the AEF accepts human resource use as both necessary and inevitable and advocates carefully managing it to minimise environmental impacts as part of an overiding balance between conservation and resource use.

While the mainstream envirionmental movement's campaigns against Australian resource use industries simply shifts our environmental impacts offshore; the AEF approach acknowledges that Australian industry is amongst the most advanced, technically skilled and highly regulated in the world and is far better at managing its environmental impacts than developing countries with lower technical expertise and under-funded and often corrupted regulatory regimes.

Forestry perhaps provides one the starkest contrast in these two approaches. As Australia's mainstream environmental movement has progressively influenced state governments to move towards ending our native forest harvest, Australians are increasingly using imported hardwood timbers from developing countries where timber industries are associated with permanent deforestation and lax controls over impacts to biodiversity, water and soils.

At the behest of mainstream environmental activism, Australia is essentially eschewing a highly skilled and carefully regulated local system of timber harvesting and regeneration that was restricted to only a minor portion of our forests, for far more extensive and less controlled systems in developing countries which are known to have far greater environmental problems.

While it unfortunately seems to be beyond the comprehension of most journalists, it is clear that the more complex approach to natural resource use issues and environmental management being advocated by groups like the AEF is far superior to the simplistic 'lock-it-up-and- leave-it' ideology espoused by Australia's mainstream environmental groups.

Nevertheless, the mainstream environmental movement has achieved stunning political success, particularly over the past decade. This is increasingly resulting in the unwarranted demise of significant parts of our resource use sector in favour highly dubious conservation outcomes. An example reported in The Australian last week (Cast out, 17/3/12) is the Federal Government's intention to create the world's largest no-take marine park in the Coral Sea. This is expected to substantially decimate Queensland's commercial fishing industry even though its allowable catch from the Coral Sea is tiny, averaging just 192 grams of fish per square kilometre per annum!

While decisions such as this are certain to make Australia the poster-boy for the world's environmental activists, its consequence of pushing our demand for seafood onto countries that are fishing unsustainably tags us as environmentally irresponsible while at the same time decimating our primary industries and the rural and regional areas which rely on them. It is becoming almost laughable to think that were once striving to be known as the 'clever country'.

The success of the mainstream environmental movement in driving such perverse outcomes owes much to the failure or refusal of the media to keep them accountable by challenging their many dubious public utterances. On an almost a daily basis these are littered with half truths and lies that simply misrepresent the real on-ground situation to a gross extent.

An example appeared in Melbourne's The Age on Wednesday 21^st in the form of an opinion article entitled 'Woodchipping agenda up in smoke for now'written by Lyndon Schneiders, the national director of the Wilderness Society. His article was a response to the Federal Parliament's vote to disallow a proposed amendment to clean energy legislation which would have allowed bioenergy generated from the native forest timber industry waste to be eligible for renewable energy credits.

Amongst a litany of lies and half truths scattered throughout the article, several stood out:

"Australia's ancient native forests were saved the ignominy of being incinerated for government-subsidised electricity..........."

"In 200 years Australia has cleared and logged much of its old growth and wild forests so it can only be misguided to burn the rest."

"Clearly, properly managed timber plantations are a renewable resource, but wood sourced from native forest logging is something else. It can take hundreds of years for these trees to grow to the size of 30-storey buildings, and a matter of minutes for them to burn"

"Similarly, the Victorian government is trying to lock in 20-year supply contracts for native forest ''waste''.To aid this it is planning to exempt logging from the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act so the habitat of the remaining 1000 or so Leadbeater's possums in the Central Highlands can be logged"

"The government will risk the extinction of threatened species and what little is left of its old-growth forest to keep the industry going"

Yet the bioenergy proposal was to simply use waste from already existing native forest timber harvesting and processing operations. There has never been any suggestion of changing legislation to allow harvesting to expand into the millions of hectares of national parks, reserves, and off-limits management zones where most of our forests (and virtually all our old growth forests) now reside. It is also ludicrous to suggest that plantation trees can be renewable, but trees grown in native forests are not. Overall, Schnieiders' rant is simply at odds with the reality that in many European countries forestry waste is an integral component of renewable bioenergy production that is aimed at reducing their carbon emissions by up to 20 to 30% in some cases.

While it could be argued that opinion articles are less of a reflection of media bias than articles written by journalists, but Media Watch nevertheless pilloried Dr Marohasy in their recent episode for expressing a considered opinion backed by her research that the proposed Murray-Darling Basin Plan was based on 'junk science'. Surely on the scale of inappropriate public utterances, this pales into insignificance compared to deliberate lies and exaggerations peddled by career activists such as Schneiders based on nothing more than emotion and a need to maintain relevance to keep the donations rolling in.

That The Age could publish such obvious rubbish is an appalling reflection of their editorial standards, but is sadly unsurprising given its highly unbalanced treatment of forestry issues over a long period. This was exemplified by its coverage of a recent legal case bought by a group of environmental activists against the state government's commercial forestry agency, VicForests, over timber harvesting at Toolangi north of Melbourne.

On the Saturday before the case started in early February, The Age published a 2,500-word article – "Industry pushes against the grain" – promoting the notion of VicForests as a hated and incompetent agency overseeing an industry that is virtually dead in the water. When the court case was subsequently won by VicForests, The Age devoted barely 250-words to reporting a result which clearly went against their agenda.

Biased media coverage of natural resource use issues should be fertile ground for the ABC's Media Watch, but despite efforts to draw their attention to they have displayed little or no inclination to cover it in the past. Then again, as some of the worst examples of biased coverage of environmental issues have emanated from the ABC, this is perhaps not so surprising.

Most notably, the double-episode of the ABC's Australian Story – 'Something in the Water' in February 2010 – springs to mind. It claimed that eucalypt plantations occupying just 4% of a Tasmanian town's water catchment were toxic to humans, animals, and marine life. Screened just 3-weeks before the Tasmanian state election, the program sparked a controversy that was not backed by credible science yet resulted in the unseating of the government's Health Minister and quite likely contributed to the formation of the current Labor-Greens minority government which has a distinctly anti-forestry agenda.

If the ABC is to ever rid itself of the perception that it caters to a primarily Green-Left audience, its supposedly independent investigative journalists need to start examining the excesses of mainstream environmentalism and the damage it is doing both to the wider environment and regional and rural communities. A good start would be for Media Watch to investigate arguably the most prominent form of media spin which is seen on an almost daily basis – that is the coverage of natural resource usage promulgated at the behest of mainstream environmental groups.