Markets for change: when anti-logging activism morphs into extortion

The consequences of ending Australian native forest timber production in accordance with the demands being made by groups such as Markets for Change, would include:

• Encouraging more imports of rainforest hardwoods from developing countries with weaker environmental regulations. Western demand for high quality timber is implicated in substantial environmental degradation through permanent deforestation and unsustainable logging in many tropical countries. Greenpeace is actively campaigning to end illegal and unsustainable logging in developing countries, and estimates that Australia already imports $840 million worth of suspected illegally logged timber from these countries. Given this, it is highly illogical for Greenpeace to undermine its own campaigns in developing countries by supporting a campaign to end Australian native hardwood production which would ultimately increase demand for imported tropical hardwoods.
• Destroying or significantly affecting the livelihoods of the up to 80,000 Australians estimated to work in jobs directly and indirectly associated with native forest timber production. These include forest management, timber harvesting, log cartage, timber processing, product manufacturing including furniture, and retail sales. Many of these workers reside in rural Australia where there are few other employment opportunities.
• Significantly weakening the capability to manage forest fire, which is by far the greatest threat to the environmental integrity of Australia’s forests. Timber production, although it occurs in only a minor portion of the public forests, raises revenue and provides an economic imperative to maintain road and track access and sustain Government workforces who undertake key prevention activities such as fuel reduction burning across the whole public forest estate. Harvesting contractors and their equipment play a vital role in fire fighting which would be difficult to replace in their absence.
• Significantly reducing overall carbon storage potential by lessening the amount of carbon stored in the community in wood products, while making forests more vulnerable to severe forest fires which can release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
• Increasing greenhouse gas emissions associated with importing more timber and effectively forcing other consumers to turn to non-wood substitute materials thereby increasing the demand for steel, aluminum and concrete that embody far greater levels of energy use in their mining, processing and manufacture.

In 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasised the importance of maintaining a balance between forest conservation and ongoing resource use in order to combat climate change when it stated that, “In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre, or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained (carbon) mitigation benefit”.

Respected international conservation organisations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are focussed on expanding the protected network of forests so that most nations have at least 15 per cent of their forest area contained in conservation reserves; and restoring degraded forest landscapes to improve the lives of people, especially those in the developing world, and to contribute to carbon sequestration and storage. 

However, in Australia it appears that our environmental lobby, with support from wealthy donors from the business and philanthropy sector, are intent on setting a different ‘lock-up and leave’ agenda for Australia’s forests. Their campaigns to shut-down Australian timber industries are likely to significantly negate efforts to conserve precious forests in developing countries by shifting Australia’s hardwood demand to these already vulnerable landscapes. 

Sadly, the activities of groups such as Markets for Change confirm that Australian society is being increasingly held to ransom by a cashed-up ‘environmental industry’ employing career activists whose own livelihoods are reliant on creating and sustaining environmental crises even where none exists. Their uncompromising pursuit of a narrow ideological aims without regard for wider consequences threatens to worsen overall environmental outcomes for Australia and the planet. Nothing exemplifies the truth of this as much as the conflict over native forests.