What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
TS Elliot, The Wasteland
This murky world of (the state-owned forestry industries) is at best ignorant and self-interested and at worst sinister and corrupt. Its most cynical manoeuvres involve aggressively logging forest as soon as there is a movement for its protection. Another is co-opting First Nations groups under the guise of “forestry gardening” or “cultural thinning”. Here, business-as-usual logging becomes “healing Country”, an attempt to “blackwash” a calamitous PR image … Attempts to regulate have been underfunded and politically compromised … ‘if everyone is losing, why does it continue? When the answer arrives, it is depressingly banal: government capture by vested interests.
Professor David Lindenmayer
There is little that surprises in the following review of Forest Wars by environmental scientist David Lindenmayer.
Eight years ago, In That Howling Infinite published If You Go Down to the Woods Today describing what was then happening to the forest in which we live. As logging has intensified throughout the mid-north coast over the last year, things have not changed, but rather, have gotten much, much worse.
As we survey the desolation and devastation of state forests on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, we bear witness to his words at first hand. For years now we have witnessed the destruction of our ecosystems and critical wildlife habitat by large scale, broad acre industrial logging as harvesters as large as battle tanks camp upon the land like an occupying army. Forestry Corporation NSW’s operations on the Coffs Coast and its hinterland has left us and our precious ecosystem at the mercy of what is by any account a destructive and seemingly unaccountable extractive industry.
See also in In That Howling Infinite’s Losing Earth series:
- The Return of the Forest Wars
- Losing Earth – the decade we almost stopped climate change
- Paradise Regained – back to nature in Queensland
- The Bonfire of the Insanities – the biofuel greenwash
- The Bonfire of the Insanities 2- the EU’s Biomass Dilemma
- The agony and extinction of Blinky Bill
“Like an occupying army”
Tarkeeth morning, And Tarkeeth evening.
What a difference a day makes
Myths, spin and outright lies: the truth behind the logging industry
Kurt Johnson, Sydney Morning Herald 7th June 2024
The Forest Wars, by David Lindenmayer (Allen & Unwin 2024)
It was once possible to walk the 1500 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane enclosed in native forest. Today Australian forests have been pushed to the margins, surviving as scattered islands, logged around and through. In most states this continues, enabled by expedient myths about forest’s resilience and replaceability that have become entrenched in popular wisdom. These range from “logging is good for fire safety” to “wildlife can simply scuttle away to another tree as soon as one is felled”.
Renowned scientist David Lindenmayer confronts these fables that he was educated on as a young student in his latest offering, The Forest Wars. He is concerned with native forest, which provides a range of benefits beyond forest plantations. Tall, wet eucalypts in particular are not only habitats for native wildlife but are more resistant to fire, better sinks for carbon and can conserve clean water for cities.
Many myths rely on a neoliberal lexicon where native forests are “resources”, or “green capital” and logging can be “sustainable”. It assumes the fungibility of nature, as if one tree were as good as another. The author explains that native forests are complex ecosystems that have developed sometimes for hundreds of years, with ancients that cannot simply be bulldozed and replanted by saplings in another cycle.
Forest Wars begins with its author tracking wildlife, trudging around wet eucalypts and through mossy gullies, but soon evolves into a sustained and righteous tract as we follow him up the production line to the sheer waste at the heart of the enterprise. Another myth: old-growth forest will end as fine furniture. In fact, only four per cent becomes sawn lumber and half of that is used for beer pallets. A whopping 60 per cent is lost as waste, with most wood taken from the forest simply pulped for paper and packaging.
The economics surrounding the destruction of native forests are obscene. State-run enterprises are loss-running, essentially charging taxpayers to destroy their own native forests. VicForests, for instance, has only once reported a profit, while Forestry Tasmania lost an eye-watering $1.3 billion in the decade from 1998. Over the years they have survived on generous loans from state treasuries that will never be repaid, with expenses that include settling lost court cases, and, in the case of VicForests, hiring a private investigator to spy on the author. “Melbourne is not Moscow,” Lindenmayer states.
This murky world is at best ignorant and self-interested and at worst sinister and corrupt. Its most cynical manoeuvres involve aggressively logging forest as soon as there is a movement for its protection. Another is co-opting First Nations groups under the guise of “forestry gardening” or “cultural thinning”. Here, business-as-usual logging becomes “healing Country”, an attempt to “blackwash” a calamitous PR image.
Attempts to regulate have been underfunded and politically compromised. In one instance the author meticulously investigates violations of logging boundaries and gradient guidelines, then submits the analysis to regulators, only to have his findings contradicted. Through an FOI request he discovers their results are nearly identical to his, entering a Kafkaesque netherworld.
Lindenmayer with a mountain brushtail possum, 2004. Rebecca Halas
To lift us from our funk, Lindenmayer offers an invigorating alternate universe. Here forests are protected and valued. They provide habitat for endangered native species, income through carbon sequestering and tourism as well as jobs in management and conservation – far more than heavily mechanised logging provides at present.
As one of the most referenced researchers, Lindenmayer is a world-renowned scientist. Yet again he demonstrates that he is also an excellent science communicator. The book’s 37 myths are mostly treated soberly and, with the aid of diagrams, dispel many popular misconceptions without a hint of condescension. The reader will permit the author wandering from hard science to rhetoric to sum up in the final myths.
I found I was more comfortable in the forest’: The scientist who took on the logging industry
Everything else was going well. I managed to get there on time and Professor David Lindenmayer was waiting out the front with a cheery grin. He had suggested we go for fish, but not too fancy. I had proposed Fich, which I’d heard was good – a takeaway joint adjoining a smart seafood restaurant in Sydney’s inner west.
David Lindenmayer at lunch at Fich.Kate Gerachty
He looked neater than you’d expect from a bloke famous for the years he has spent deep in Australia’s oldest and wettest forests and for finding his way into the political heart of the sprawling battles fought over the industries that depend on cutting them down.
Tasmanian salmon is admired by conservationists about as much wood chipping is. The problem is, Lindenmayer explains with the sort of detail you’d expect from a scientist that the salmon are raised in great big floating pens in places like Macquarie Harbour.
There, he says, great clouds of fish poo sinks, sucking the oxygen and life out of the surrounds. Native species like the Maugon Skate, already threatened, are pushed towards extinction.
He explains that these salmon-farming fish-poo death clouds can also contain tiny parasitic worms called nematodes. A quick Wiki session later in the afternoon informs me that nematodes can be found in half the world’s population and that having travelled into space in the payload of the space shuttle Columbia, they are the first known life form to survive a virtually unprotected atmospheric descent to Earth’s surface.
“He was a very, very difficult man to talk to,” recalls Lindenmayer when we get to the scallops.
The old man worked as a rocket scientist at the Woomera missile range and in Melbourne, helping to develop rockets and the propellant that would drive missiles into space or between continents. Eventually, disturbed by the machines’ violent potential, Bruce gave up the work and retrained as an economist.
Around this time, father and son began spending more time together, birdwatching in the bush. Men, says Lindenmayer, communicate better side-by-side, looking out at something rather than towards one another. “No bloke says, ’Let’s go and look at the sunset; they say, ‘let’s go fishing’.”
Lindenmayer with a mountain brushtail possum in 2004. Rebecca Hallas
And so another world began to open somewhere between them. It was not just about what they saw but what they heard. Beside his father, Lindenmayer learned that the sounds birds made could reveal not just what species they were but what sex they were, what they were doing, and what was bothering them.
Those quiet moments resonated.
In the late 1970s, at school in Melbourne and then Canberra, Lindenmayer became a useful athlete, even playing for a graded football team in the Netherlands. Within a year, he realised he was not going to make it.
“I was a goalie. Everyone in the Netherlands has the perfect physique for a goalkeeper. I didn’t. I realised my hands are smaller than Donald Trump’s.” (First noted in the wild by Vanity Fair editor Grayden Carter, Trump’s small hands became a thing during the 2016 election.)
On his return to Australia, Lindenmayer dived into ecology, studying marine biology in Townsville and apprenticing himself to the famous reef ecologist Dr John “Charlie” Veron, the man who would become known as the “godfather to the corals” for his work in building the first expansive and accurate taxonomy of the Great Barrier Reef.
Lindenmayer volunteered on some of that world-leading work, trailing behind Veron underwater in Scuba gear, helping to gather and carry Veron’s coral samples. “He must have spent 10,000 hours underwater,” says Lindenmayer, who spent hundreds of hours in the sea with his mentor. He was calm, and he used less air than anyone. He must have had a set of gills or something. His breathing was incredible.”
Lindenmayer’s was not. “I found that I was more comfortable in the forest rather than in the water. I learnt I could see more in the forest than I could underwater,” he explains. “I didn’t have to concentrate on breathing.”
It looks much like the famous beef and pork you get at Silvas, the famous old Portuguese joint a block up the road.
Reading Lindenmayer latest book (his 49th), The Forest Wars, you don’t get any sense of comfort. Lindenmayer’s description of his early work in the 1980s building a scientific baseline of how species like the Leadbeater possum, “the sweet-faced faunal emblem of Victoria”, use their habitat trees reads as deeply unpleasant.
The young scientist hauled bundles of traps and equipment, a tall ladder over one shoulder, deep into the dense understory of wattles and ferns, fallen logs and moss of Victoria’s central highlands to set traps, one for every 50 metres of forest. He soon discovered that the possums were “feisty and lighting fast” with a bite. By day’s end, his neck was garlanded with leeches, and in the shower, the water ran red “like a horror movie”.
He immediately fell in love with the work.
Lindenmayer’s work in those forests overturned how modern Australia understands them. When he began in the field, he believed, like everybody else, that trees would rejuvenate endlessly after their logging. His research shows the ecosystems they support are simply lost when they are felled.
His work reveals that rather than protecting us from fire, selective logging removes trees, drying forests out and creating highways for the infernos of the modern era. It has also shown that the animals that live in towering old trees do not move on from logged areas to reestablish themselves elsewhere but die in them when they are cut down.
David Lindenmayer in a native forest near Currawon. Wolter Peeters
To establish this, Lindenmayer and the teams he has worked with over 40-odd years spent thousands of hours in the forests.
They sat in silence, watching the animals they had carefully caught, radio-tagged and released – birds, gliders and possums – return time and again to the same hollows high in the bows of the old mountain trees.
In That Howling Infinite 