Tasmania’s broken ‘forests peace talks’ expose the ugly face of eco-extortion

Ironically, the environmental lobby have for decades castigated industries for growing large and becoming greedy, powerful, corrupt and ultimately uncontrollable – think ‘big tobacco’, ‘big mining’, and more recently ‘big fishing’ by super trawlers. Now by their own logic, they must assume the same mantle – ‘big wilderness’ as they were recently dubbed in The Australian – as a rapacious corporate conglomeration constantly searching for causes or manufacturing and nurturing dubious environmental crises so as to keep the donations rolling in.

A perverse consequence of this is that grass-roots environmental groups and charities attempting to make real on-ground conservation gains are effectively starved of much-needed funds while local sensationalism overshadows genuine global issues. During the last year of the Tasmanian ‘forest peace talks’ an area twice the size of Tasmania was deforested in developing countries while our so-called environmentalists strove to achieve an outcome that would exacerbate this by encouraging import substitution for what we could sustainably produce ourselves.

Across the board of Australian natural resource use, the big questions that need to be answered are: where will it all end? And what are the consequences of allowing unelected, unaccountable, and largely scientific-illiterates to effectively determine our resource use policies? At what point does Australia realise that it can’t afford to just give up important industries at the first whiffs of confected outrage amongst a community who mostly lacks even the most basic knowledge of rural primary industries such as fishing, forestry, mining or agriculture?

Sadly though, the recent ‘super trawler’ issue demonstrated that the federal government and Environment Minister Burke in particular, are highly sensitive to environmental campaigns and seem to have an attitude that if they generate enough noise they must be appeased, regardless of whether the facts and likely consequences say otherwise. Clearly, given their reliance on Greens support to remain in power, their major concern is politics rather than science and industry.

Accordingly, it is hard to see much changing in the short term. There is simply too much at stake for the ‘big wilderness’ industry to willingly moderate its behavior. While the requisite removal of the ‘environmental protection’ exemption in the Competition and Consumer Act 2010which would force the environmental lobby to be more accountable for its behaviour, is unlikely to be considered in the current political climate. 

Arguably, the only small comfort to be drawn from Tasmania’s broken ‘forest peace’ process is that the behaviour of the environmental lobby has exposed and highlighted the problem of eco-extortion and drawn some attention to the need to address it.