Myths, politics, and Leadbeater’s Possum

The endangered Leadbeater’s Possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri) is Victoria’s faunal emblem. Apart from two known exceptions, the small arboreal marsupial lives within wet eucalypt forests in Victoria’s Central Highlands, although early records suggest it was once more widely distributed.

These forests are dominated by mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans), alpine ash (Eucalyptus delegatensis), and shining gum (Eucalyptus nitens) and are also highly productive sources of arguably Australia’s most valuable and marketable hardwood timbers which are retailed around the country as ‘Vic Ash’.

This intersection between a high profile endangered species and a valuable timber industry has resulted in Leadbeater’s Possum becoming the central figure in the latest round of the environmental lobby’s 30-year campaign to shut-down Victoria’s native hardwood industry. It is also fuelling broader political campaigning over the environmental performance of the Baillieu State Government.

It is no accident that these campaigns have ramped-up following the 2010 State election. Unlike the previous decade under Labor, Baillieu’s Coalition Government has expressed very strong support for the state’s rural primary industries. However, to the state’s ‘green-left’ demographic, any support for continued natural resource use, even at low levels of production, is viewed as being contemptuous of endangered and threatened species. Accordingly, it has become clear that getting a ‘green’ environmental tick requires Governments to be actively working to end resource use activities such as native forest timber production.  

Revealing insights from a recent biography by former Premier Steve Bracks suggests that this is essentially what Victoria’s previous Labor state governments were doing. In the decade under Bracks and then Brumby, small local native hardwood industries were closed or dramatically down-sized in Victoria’s Otways, Wombat, Portland, Bendigo, Mid-Murray, and East Gippsland regions; mostly to facilitate new national parks. This has essentially concentrated the remaining native hardwood industry into central and eastern Victorian forests and, in concert with a series of recent mega-bushfires, has appreciably reduced the annually harvested forest area to its lowest level in a century. 

With only around 9 per cent of Victoria’s State forests still theoretically available for long-term timber production, and the annually harvested area dropping to around 5,000 hectares (or 0.07 per cent) of the state’s public forest area), activist campaigns against the native forest harvesting could have been expected to decline. Instead they have intensified, particularly in the Central Highlands where large areas of forest were severely burnt in 2009 thereby placing an additional focus on unburnt areas within designated production forests where timber harvesting is continuing.

The environmental lobby groups specifically campaigning to ‘save’ Leadbeater’s Possum include the Wilderness Society, the Central Highlands Action Group, My Environment, and The Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum; with support from other groups such as Markets for Change, and The Last Stand who are campaigning more generally to end Australian native forest timber production. Meanwhile, the Australian Greens continue to provide political support for such an outcome, including their latest “Too precious to lose” campaign.  

Despite the efforts of these groups, the greatest publicity surrounding this issue has always been generated by media-savvy ANU ecologist and Leadbeater’s Possum specialist, Professor David Lindenmayer, whose high profile ensures that virtually his every public utterance finds its way into the ABC or the Fairfax press.

His recent resignation from a Victorian Government body overseeing the recovery of Leadbeater’s Possum following the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires was sensationally reported in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper in mid-September under a screeching headline: “Making himself extinct: scientist quits over ‘absolute disgrace’ surrounding Leadbeater’s Possum”.

With a long list of academic achievements, it is understandable that elements of the media have adopted Professor Lindenmayer as their ‘go-to’ man for commentary on forestry issues. Unfortunately, they ignore the reality that he is a conservation biologist rather than a forest scientist fully conversant with the planning and management of commercial timber production. Accordingly, the media’s thrall of his academic credibility has at times allowed misinformed or errant views about forest management to pass unchallenged into the conventional wisdom, whilst far more informed views are ignored. 

A year earlier in the Canberra Times, Professor Lindenmayer had justified his penchant for publicising his views through the media by saying that “There is general disrespect for science these days among politicians. The Government will pick up the phone to talk to lobbyists before they will if ever – talk to a scientist”. Ironically, this is exactly the problem faced by forest scientists seeking to give much needed perspective to errant views of forestry being peddled through the media by environmental lobby groups, at times indirectly supported by Professor Lindenmayer. 

While Lindenmayer has been actively promoting his research in recent years, his regular forays in the media have at times extended beyond his ecological expertise into areas of forest management where he has strong but often poorly substantiated opinions. Invariably these opinions substantially reflect the highly exaggerated and agenda-driven views of the environmental lobby.

This was evident in the recent Age article in which Lindenmayer described the Victorian Government as an “environmentally bankrupt administration” whose efforts to guarantee a future for the Central Highlands’ timber industry “will lock-in the extinction of Leadbeater’s Possum” within 20-years.

What such a view ignores is that most of the Victorian wet forests which provide possum habitat are simply not used for timber production, or are excluded by prescription. Indeed, in the Central Highlands, all present and future timber harvesting is limited to within a net area comprising only about one-third of the region’s wet forests, with the other two-thirds being comprised of formal and informal parks and conservation reserves, closed water supply catchments, and management reserves where timber harvesting is excluded.

In those wet forests where the timber industry is permitted to operate, harvesting is restricted to regrowth forests, with any larger pre-1900 origin trees being identified during planning and excluded from harvesting. Along with streamside reserves and exclusions due to other Code of Practice requirements and management prescriptions, this provides current and future nesting habitat for birds and arboreal mammals in the designated wood production forests, and complements the much larger area of protected habitat residing in neighbouring parks, closed water catchments and other reserves.

In view of this, the Baillieu Government’s support for a sustainable timber industry which is restricted to approximately a net one third of the Central Highlands’ wet forests will not make the Leadbeater’s Possum extinct as Lindenmayer has claimed.

Professor Lindenmayer’s resignation was also covered as part of an ABC TV 7:30 Victoria segment several days after The Age article mentioned earlier. Lindenmayer is no economist, but the propensity for inappropriately straying away from his scientific expertise was exemplified on this program when he remarked that, “Most Victorian’s would be unaware that VicForests (the state’s commercial forestry agency)…has been running at major losses over the past 10-years”.

While this claim has also been widely promoted by the environmental lobby, it is incorrect. As was briefly mentioned later in the 7:30 Victoria segment, VicForests has returned a profit of $11.6 million over the eight years since it was established in 2004. While this is an admittedly modest result, it reflects the struggle that they have had in dealing with a range of factors largely beyond their control.

These include two huge bushfires in 2006 and 2009 which significantly impacted on wood production forests; an unfavorable business climate; and the costs of dealing with incessant anti-logging activism including several very expensive legal actions brought against them in the past few years.

The 2011-12 financial year provides a good example given that VicForests suffered a significant financial penalty from lost productivity associated with the drawn-out sale of the state’s largest sawmill (formerly owned by Gunns Ltd); and from having to expend several million dollars on legal actions brought against them by environmental lobby groups. These legal costs essentially prevented VicForests from recording a multi-million dollar profit rather than incurring the $96,000 loss that it recently announced.

Professor Lindenmayer’s ill-founded attack on the financial performance of VicForests mirrors a long-standing tactic of the environmental lobby to misrepresent the returns from selling logs as the ultimate measure of the worth of timber harvesting. In fact, timber harvesting’s socio-economic value is overwhemingly based on the subsequent utilisation of those logs by a diverse industry which includes businesses associated with forest harvesting, log haulage, primary log processing, secondary timber manufacturing, and retailing; as well as the government-employed resources associated with planning and managing timber harvesting and securing forest regeneration.

The socio-economic value of Victoria’s native hardwood sector is estimated to encompass at least one billion dollars per annum in economic activity and up to 5,000 jobs including secondary timber processing, retail, and indirect employment. It is this, rather than just the currently modest returns from selling logs, that would be lost if timber harvesting was to cease in response to the incessant calls to close VicForests being made by environmental lobby groups.

Even though attempting to pin the decline of Leadbeater’s Possum solely on the timber industry is demonstrably wrong, concerns for the possum’s future are not unfoundedgiven that 43 per cent of its habitat was reportedly burnt in the 2009 bushfires. However, is important to acknowledge that the possum is ultimately dependent on severe bushfire as in its long-term absence over several hundred years, its preferred wet eucalypt forest habitat will eventually revert to an unsuitable non-eucalypt vegetation type.

In the decades after a severe bushfire, developing regrowth amongst older standing dead or alive trees provides ideal nesting and feeding habitat. Accordingly, the upshot from the 2009 bushfires should be future high quality Leadbeater’s Possum habitat in the tens of thousands of hectares of wet forest which was burnt in closed water catchments, national parks, and other reserves. Admittedly though, this will take time to develop and relies on an absence of follow-up severe bushfires which cannot be guaranteed.

Given the structural requirements of suitable Leadbeater’s Possum habitat, there is also potential for modified timber harvesting to improve future prospects for the possum. Indeed, the conservation of the possum in wood production forests has been an important management consideration since 1987. 

One potential option would be to significantly extend the time between harvests (the rotation length) in the designated wood production forests. While this would enable trees in these production forests to stand for long enough to develop tree hollows and provide arboreal mammal habitat, it would be immediately problematic for timber volumes unless it was expanded into some reserved areas which, given the political climate, would be very unlikely.

However, extending the rotation length would have no positive benefit for decades given that most of the areas currently harvested are 73-year old bushfire regrowth where Leadbeater’s Possum will be largely absent until trees become old enough to develop nesting hollows. This is also why immediately ending timber harvesting would not provide any benefit to the possum for decades despite activists’ claims that it will save them.

Another management option already in use in Tasmania, is to adopt a timber harvesting system that retains older trees in close proximity to regrowth. This involves planning to ensure that at least half of each harvested site is within one tree length of retained forest, so that post-harvest regrowth as it develops, becomes foraging habitat for Leadbeater’s Possums that are nesting nearby.

A further option in regrowth forests would be to modify current commercial thinning practices to deliberately damage some retained trees to promote decay and facilitate the earlier development of nesting hollows.

While Professor Lindenmayer has previously spent many years advocating similar approaches as the best way to harvest timber while minimising wildlife impacts, over the past two years he has declined several invitations to engage with VicForests in regard to habitat management. Arguably, this suggests he is now more intent on helping to achieve a political outcome then on designing and implementing practical conservation strategies that would help both an endangered species and an important regional industry.

Apart from raising questions about the conduct of a prominent scientist, the Leadbeater’s Possum issue exemplifies that, largely through uncritical and supportive publicity afforded to environmental activism, we have become a society in which “green” urban myths are accepted as absolute truths, while rural realities are dismissed as self-serving myths.

Forestry is far from perfect — no activity that is so subject to the vagaries of nature can be planned and implemented with absolute precision. However, beyond the reality that it involves trees being cut down, there are rational explanations for almost every criticism levelled against native forest timber production. Unfortunately, these are often so complicated that they rarely find their way into a mainstream media beset by time and space constraints to a degree that favours simple answers to complex questions, and with a tendency to unquestioningly defer to anyone pushing a ‘green’ agenda.