Bob Brown legal challenge shines a light on decades of environmental misinformation

Under the Regional Forest Agreements, native forest timber production is regulated by a hierarchy of plans and enforceable operational prescriptions designed to prevent and/or minimise environmental impacts. These include regional forest management plans describing regional conservation values; a code of practice that gives operational guidance and sets minimum standards of protection; area-based operational prescriptions for particular situations and localities; and individual harvesting plans for each coupe that guide on-site practices and act as the benchmark for operational supervision and monitoring of contractor performance.

Since the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement was first signed in 1999, conservation areas have significantly expanded, more stringent protections for threatened species have been developed, and timber harvesting has substantially declined due to various state and Federal government policy changes, as well as difficult market conditions. The same has occurred in Victoria. This contradicts the activist rhetoric which continues to misrepresent RFAs as exempt from environmental laws and thereby an impediment to environmental protection.

Just one example of the reality is that 97% of Tasmania's 1.2 million hectares of old growth forest is either protected in world heritage areas, national parks and other reserves, or is otherwise unavailable for timber harvesting. That fact alone debunks the persistent claim by the BBF that logging poses an existential threat to Tasmania's 'ancient' forests and all threatened wildlife species that inhabit them. The other 3% that is still available for harvesting is essential to maintaining Tasmania's iconic special timbers and wooden boat-building industries.

There is no doubt that misinformation has been the lifeblood of anti-logging activism for several decades. It has been conceived by activists but promoted by the city-based mainstream media either without question, or with only minimal opportunities given to alternative, and usually far more informed, views.

Yet, today's media pile-ons against alleged contrarians, conspiracy theorists, or the politically-incorrect suggest that journalists have only 'discovered' misinformation since 2016 when a recently departed US President began over-using his Twitter account. Those journalists who are most vocal in calling-out misinformation seem to view it solely as a weapon of right-of-centre politics, while oblivious to, or hypocritically silent on, their profession's role in misinforming the wider community for decades on left-of-centre, politically-correct causes, such as 'saving' forests from logging.

The damage attributable to misinformation spread about forestry has been immense. Both in terms of industry livelihoods lost and rural lives unfairly over-turned by political decisions forced by misguided public sentiment; and latterly through the obvious environmental impacts of forest fires no longer able to be fought as efficiently as in the past when a strong forestry culture and workforce prevailed. It may be too late to turn this around, but perhaps the propensity for environmental activist groups to engage in legal actions offers a belated opportunity to expose their modus operandi of exaggerating and distorting reality for ideological purposes, and its quantifiable adverse consequences.