Forests

The Bonfire of the Insanities 2- the EU’s Biomass Dilemma

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The Biomass Greenwash revisited

I believe in Santa, fairies, leprechauns and unicorns; I believe that politicians don’t lie, that the Pope is infallible, and that capitalism provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number

But I don’t buy the biofuel greenwash!

As Abe Lincoln, said, you can fool some of the people some of the time, and most of the people most of the time. And yet, never underestimate the capacity and willingness of some people to swallow bullshit for decades. Probably became they NEED to believe that something is being done about climate change and carbon emissions, and the boosters of biomass promise clean, green, renewable, carbon-neutral and sustainable power. As some wits might ask, what’s the point of having a big brain if we insist on not using it?

In an earlier article, The Bonfire of the Insanities – the Biomass Greenwash, we described how the European Union’s desperation to reduce carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels kicked off a demand for wood pellets for burning to generate electricity that in turn created an industry. Promising clean, green, renewable, carbon-neutral and sustainable power, it came for what it called forest waste, and then it came for the forest itself.

We revealed how a deliberate accounting error determined biomass burning to be carbon neutral, whilst a mechanism to prevent counting carbon twice became a rule that carbon wasn’t counted at all. Indeed, it was declared that the burning of biomass was “instant carbon sequestration” whilst emissions exuding from the new-age power stations were actually “biogenic carbon” – green power!

Since the widespread distribution of North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance’s hard hitting film  BURNED: Are Trees the New Coal?, the true scale of the biofuel greenwash is being given the publicity it needs. The true colours of rebadged, born-again power plants like Drax near Selby, Yorkshire, the world’s biggest and hungriest, and our own Redbank in the Hunter Valley (more on that later), are now there for all the world to see. And they are not green.

A backlash against this greenwash is growing apace in Europe and the USA. But not in Australia, it would appear. Government and industry are enchanted by the lure of biomass with its carbon credit rewards and the prospect of creating a dependent, profitable domestic supply chain.

“We, the people” have yet to cotton on to the biofuel industry’s corporate jiggerypokery and semantic sleight of hand. In Australia and elsewhere, the general public, forest industry nostalgists, conservative politicians, and, even, many environmentalists believe that we are saving forests from destruction by using plantations for jobs and construction timber, when in fact the former are few, supplanted by hi-tech mechanization, and latter is destined for pulp mills and power plants.

While we in northern New South Wales might be alarmed about re-tooled plants like Drax and those in Ireland’s Midlands, something wicked this way comes. There is little community awareness of what is looming, and state and federal politicians chose to keep quiet about it.

Our State government has started implementing its plan for 70-80% of renewable electricity in our region to be generated by burning trees. As we’ve seen in our own Tarkeeth State Forest, biomass extraction is a shockingly destructive practice, and it is one which is destroying environments and communities all over the world.

Biomass extraction in Tarkeeth Forest, Bellingen Shire

In this grave new world, whole log “residues” can be chipped and transported to power stations or transported and then chipped in the power station, as at Vales Point on NSW’s Central Coast and Cape Byron in the north. Native forest biomass burnt with or without coal or something else, props up emission intensive enterprises with its “carbon neutral, renewable energy, subsidy attracting” hypnotism. Or else, the forest biomass is exported, as pellets, woodchip or whole trees.

It is a new industry for our own Bellingen Shire which is now supplying biomass to Cape Byron Power’s co-generation plant at Broadwater south of Byron Bay, the north coast tourist mecca and real estate hot zone.

The plan for our region is for 70-80% of renewable energy to be generated from forest biomass. By the middle of the year the former coal-fired Redbank Power Station at Singleton in the Hunter Valley, will be rebooted and burning 100% biomass, most of it to be sourced from forests up the 400km away. Redbank will be one of the largest wood burning electricity generators in the world. At 151 megawats, it five times bigger than either Broadwater or Condong,

Paul Hemphill © 2021

See also in In That Howling Infinite, The Bonfire of the Insanities – the biofuel greenwash; The Return of the Forest Wars and If You Go Down to the Woods Today 

In a brief statement and a powerful interview on Bellingen Community Radio 2BBB, Bellingen academic Dr Tim Cadman makes the global  and local case against  burning trees for electricity. and here, you can watch his short FaceBook video about the Tarkeeth biomass and Broadwater power station here: ttps://fb.watch/v/3Is1JLwio/.  Follow the truck from forest to furnace

Tim Cadman: the truth about Biomass ‘Green Power’

My name is Tim Cadman, I am a Research Fellow in the Law Futures Centre at Griffith University,  specializing in environmental policy, governance, sustainability, natural resource management including  forestry, and climate change. I am a ‘pracademic’ and spend a lot of my time working in developing countries in practical on-the-ground action-based research, including Papua New Guinea and the Brazilian Amazon.

I have been following, and attending the international climate change negotiations since 2001, when I exposed how forestry companies were clearing ancient rainforest on behalf of energy companies to create plantations for ‘carbon credits.’ Sadly, over twenty years later, this same problem is still besetting meaningful action on climate change.

I want to address so-called bio-energy, or biomass energy, and how it has become central to the destruction of forests in developed countries such as the US, UK, Australia and Europe, all in the name of ‘green’ power.

In the early days of the international climate negotiations an unintentional ‘loophole’ was created in discussions around what was termed ‘land use, land-use change and forestry’ (LULUCF). In the debate around how to count emissions from land use for agriculture, policymakers made a decision that all crops were the same, and as they were planted, harvested, and grew back, these emissions did not need to be counted. This included forestry, and this decision made its way into the Kyoto Protocol, and carbon ‘offsets’.

It doesn’t make sense for forests, which are not crops, are full of biodiversity, regulate climate, filter water, and provide a range of what are called ecosystem services that a field of carrots do not. This same problem, now admitted as such by many policy makers, has been repeated in the new Paris Agreement.

The consequence is that forests have now become a major source of electricity in Europe, the UK, and elsewhere.

As much forest as is grown across the UK every year is now burnt in just one power station, Drax, and is imported from the forests of the South east of the US, and the inland ancient temperate rainforests of Canada.

This same problem is being repeated here. In the mid north coast of NSW, under the guise of making use of what are called forest ‘residues’, large areas of forests are being cleared and converted to hardwood plantations. As with wood-chipping for pulp and paper, which originally was designed to make use of branches, such activities become a driver of deforestation, and the processing of ‘waste’ becomes the tail that wags the dog.

To make matters worse, there are now two converted sugar mills in the region that are  burning this wood for so-called ‘green’ energy and feeding it into the national grid. In short, our renewable energy is  contaminated.

And finally, to things even more dire, burning forests for power is worse than coal. The wood is wet, it is transported often up to two hundred kilometres in huge trucks, the source forest is burnt as part of forestry management. Capturing these emissions is just not possible.

This is the danger facing the forests of NSW. Forests are worth so much more, and in this period of unprecedented climate change, we need forests standing tall, not sent up the chimney.

Dr Tim Cadman © 2021

Tim Cadman BA (Hons) MA (Cantab), PhD (Tasmania), Grad. Cert. Theol. (Charles Sturt) Senior Research Fellow, Earth Systems Governance Project. Research Fellow, Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law. Griffith University

The road to hell is paved with flawed intentions

We republish below the full text of an article that appeared in The Financial Times on 1st July. As the debate ramps up here in New South Wales, it is a timely and informative wake-up call for environmentalists and governments alike.

Like BURNED: Are Trees the New Coal?, it reveals how dirty fuel and dodgy mathematics, a generous subsidies system and stringent climate targets incentivises the use of biomass without adequate safeguards. It will require “large-scale logging  of the forests we need to store carbon”, says Almuth Ernsting, from the campaign group Biofuelwatch. And yet, current EU rules permit the use of whole trees for energy production.

Biomass fuels include pellets, organic waste and crops grown for energy. They produce around half of the world’s renewable energy, and 60 per cent of the EU’s, and are treated as carbon neutral if certain sustainability conditions are met. Across Europe and Asia, the two main markets for pellets, governments hand out billions in subsidies to the industry each year. And as the world races to decarbonise, the use of wood-based biomass is expected to increase. In a report this year about the pathway to net zero, the International Energy Agency said solid bioenergy could produce around 14 per cent of global energy in 2050, compared with just 5 per cent last year.

With a review of the bloc’s climate legislation imminent, ministers from countries including Finland, Estonia and Sweden asked for “all forms” of bioenergy currently labelled as renewable to also qualify as sustainable investments, “keeping in mind” the EU’s decarbonisation commitments. It was a none too subtle reminder that if the status of biomass is changed it may be almost impossible for the EU to meet its target for renewables to provide a third of all energy usage across the region by 2030. The politics of all this is perverse, says a former White House climate adviser.

According to a leaked commission document, Brussels plans to prevent some forms of wood-burning energy from counting towards the bloc’s green energy goals. Campaigners say the changes must go much further, by excluding forest biomass from the renewables list altogether. “We should not be subsidising people to cut down trees and burn them,” says Ariel Brunner, head of EU policy at conservation group BirdLife International. “The notion that you can save emissions by burning carbon fundamentally doesn’t work.”

Chopping down trees, shipping them around the world on carbon-intensive vessels and burning the wood for energy “doesn’t comport with the idea of clean energy”, says Sasha Stashwick, from the Natural Resources Defence Council, a US-based non-profit organisation.

Pellets can actually emit more carbon per unit of energy than fossil fuels when burnt, since wood is less dense. But the industry argues that those emissions are offset by the carbon absorbed by trees as they regrow. If the wood is being sourced from sustainably managed forests — where the volume of carbon stored in the trees is “stable or increasing” — the biomass is carbon neutral, the industry says. However, landscape assessments ignore the fact that trees would have grown more and absorbed extra carbon had they not been harvested, say some scientists and campaigners.

A reduction in the amount of carbon being absorbed “is effectively the same as a tonne more of emissions”, says Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a climate campaign group.

The industry is keen to impress that it does not cut down trees that would otherwise remain standing. Instead, pellets are made largely from wood residues — such as offcuts from trees harvested for other purposes — that would normally go to waste or end up rotting.“The forest is never harvested for biomass,” since it is more profitable to use the wood for furniture or other products, says Jean-Marc Jossart, secretary-general of trade association Bioenergy Europe.

Non-profit environmental organisations dispute this, and point to photos of trucks piled high with tree trunks en route to pellet mills. Belinda Joyner, a resident of Garysburg, North Carolina, who has spoken out against the nearby Enviva mill, says the trucks driving through town carry “whole trees”, adding: “I’ve never seen a truck with little logs.”

Enviva says concerns about whole trees are “one of the most common misperceptions . . . An untrained or uneducated eye often mistakes low-value wood for high-value lumber.” Large logs might be diseased or deformed, and unable to be used for other purposes, the company adds.

Oh yeah!

The EU’s Biomass Dilemma – can burning trees ever be green?

Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times ,1 July 2021

In May, a billboard appeared outside the EU parliament in Brussels playing a video that showed sparse, deforested woodland, spliced together with footage of the bloc’s top climate official, and the words “the EU burns forests as fuel”.

The protest formed part of a campaign by green groups to force Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president for the EU’s green deal, to strip forest biomass — combustible pellets burnt for energy — from the list of energy sources classified in Europe as renewable. The argument goes beyond definitions. Weeks earlier, nervous about the growing pressure on policymakers to change the rules, ministers from 10 European countries wrote to Timmermans to stress the “crucial role” played by bioenergy fuels, such as pellets, in helping member states meet the EU’s climate goals.

With a review of the bloc’s climate legislation imminent, ministers from countries including Finland, Estonia and Sweden asked for “all forms” of bioenergy currently labelled as renewable to also qualify as sustainable investments, “keeping in mind” the EU’s decarbonisation commitments.

It was a none too subtle reminder that if the status of biomass is changed it may be almost impossible for the EU to meet its target for renewables to provide a third of all energy usage across the region by 2030.

The fact that biomass pellets are produced from carbon-absorbing trees makes them controversial Biomass fuels include pellets, organic waste and crops grown for energy. They produce around half of the world’s renewable energy, and 60 per cent of the EU’s, and are treated as carbon neutral if certain sustainability conditions are met. Across Europe and Asia, the two main markets for pellets, governments hand out billions in subsidies to the industry each year.

But what producers use to make pellets — carbon-absorbing trees, which governments and companies are turning to as part of the solution to runaway climate change — makes them highly controversial.

EU policymakers are now debating changes to the treatment of wood-burning energy as part of a wide-ranging package of measures to cut emissions, due to be published on July 14 — revisions that could wreak havoc with the bloc’s renewable energy target and commitment to more than halve emissions by 2030.

“Without relying heavily on wood biomass,” many member states “will find it very difficult to meet their future commitments, be it emissions reductions or renewable energy commitments,” says Jorgen Henningsen, former EU commission director responsible for climate change.

Climate Capital

Any changes could also call into question the legitimacy of EU countries having used the fuel to cut emissions up to now, and narrow the options for further decarbonising the power industry and other sectors.

“The politics of it is so perverse,” says Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser. The idea that national targets might determine the future for biomass, rather than its true environmental impact, is “absurd”.

According to a leaked commission document, Brussels plans to prevent some forms of wood-burning energy from counting towards the bloc’s green energy goals. Campaigners say the changes must go much further, by excluding forest biomass from the renewables list altogether. “We should not be subsidising people to cut down trees and burn them,” says Ariel Brunner, head of EU policy at conservation group BirdLife International. “The notion that you can save emissions by burning carbon fundamentally doesn’t work.”

A heavily subsidised sector

The multibillion-dollar market for pellets — the modern iteration of a centuries-old fuel — took off in 2009, after the EU classified biomass, at the time little used, as a renewable energy source alongside solar and wind. That incentivised countries with clean energy targets to adopt the fuel, and made the industry eligible for subsidies. In 2018 — the most recent year for which figures are available — EU countries handed out €10.3bn in support for the biomass sector.

Growth over the past decade “has been tremendous”, says Thomas Meth, executive vice-president of sales and marketing at Enviva, a major US-based pellet producer. The EU’s 2009 move was “certainly one of the catalysts”.

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Much of the millions of tonnes of pellets used globally is made and exported from expansive forests across the US south-east. The US, Vietnam and Canada were the largest exporters of wood pellets by volume in 2019, according to UN data.

And as the world races to decarbonise, the use of wood-based biomass is expected to increase. In a report this year about the pathway to net zero, the International Energy Agency said solid bioenergy could produce around 14 per cent of global energy in 2050, compared with just 5 per cent last year.

UK power company Drax,a major user and supplier of pellets, says the market will be driven by “increasingly ambitious global decarbonisation targets”.

The industry insists swelling demand for these small, cylindrical chips can be met sustainably, and that responsibly produced biomass is carbon neutral since the emissions generated by burning pellets are sucked up by regrowing trees.

Green groups challenge the neutrality argument, and warn that increasing production puts natural forests in jeopardy. Using more biomass will require “large-scale logging . . . of the forests we need to store carbon”, says Almuth Ernsting, from the campaign group Biofuelwatch.

Drax power station in Yorkshire. The industry insists responsibly produced biomass is carbon neutral, as emissions from burning pellets are sucked up by regrowing trees © Alamy ‘We need the right biomass’

The debate in the EU is coming to a head over possible changes to the bloc’s renewable energy framework — one of many pieces of legislation being updated to align with the region’s ambition to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent by 2030.

“We are expecting an almighty fight,” says BirdLife’s Brunner. “There’s a very powerful bloc of European governments completely enslaved to the agricultural and forest lobby.”

A person familiar with the discussions in Brussels, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says the biomass question is “one of the most politically sensitive files” in the climate package. It has divided agencies, with the commission’s environment department wanting tougher biomass rules and the energy department pushing back.

But if European lawmakers strip “bio-based energy” from the renewables framework, “Europe will not meet any of its goals”, says Enviva’s Meth. Drastic changes are not “realistic”, he adds.

Timmermans himself has said that without biomass the EU will be unable to achieve its clean energy goals. “We need biomass in the mix, but we need the right biomass . . . I hate the images ofwhole forests being cut down to be put in an incinerator,” he told the Euractiv website in May.

Current EU rules permit the use of whole trees for energy production, though say this should be “minimised”. Critics say the rules are too lax, and that the combination of subsidies and climate targets incentivises the use of biomass without sufficient safeguards.

Under UN guidance, emissions from biomass are reported by countries in the land, rather than the energy, sector. As a result, importing nations can enjoy lower domestic emissions and rely on pellet-producing countries to count the carbon.

Although the rules should deter producing countries from over harvesting, counting land sector emissions accurately is notoriously difficult — a view disputed by some in the industry. “The level of accuracy and transparency with which different countries measure and report land use emissions varies,” says Claire Fyson, policy analyst at Climate Analytics, a non-profit organisation. The risk is of “importing biomass that hasn’t been sustainably produced, or whose emissions from harvesting haven’t been accurately measured”, she adds.
Incentives for ‘burning wood’

The backdrop to the political jostling is a longstanding argument between scientists, campaigners and the industry about whether biomass is carbon neutral.

In February, more than 500 scientists wrote to the European Commission and European Council presidents, urging them “not to undermine both climate goals and the world’s biodiversity by shifting from burning fossil fuels to burning trees”. They added: “Governments must end subsidies and other incentives that today exist for the burning of wood.”

Chopping down trees, shipping them around the world on carbon-intensive vessels and burning the wood for energy “doesn’t comport with the idea of clean energy”, says Sasha Stashwick, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US-based non-profit organisation.

Wood pellet plant in Ahoskie, North Carolina. © The Washington Post via Getty Images

Pellets can actually emit more carbon per unit of energy than fossil fuels when burnt, since wood is less dense. But the industry argues that those emissions are offset by the carbon absorbed by trees as they regrow. If the wood is being sourced from sustainably managed forests — where the volume of carbon stored in the trees is “stable or increasing” — the biomass is carbon neutral, the industry says.

The complex calculation of whether carbon measures are “stable or increasing” is done at a “landscape” level — vast areas surrounding pellet mills that can span millions of hectares. Enviva and Drax say assessments of the US forests they source from are done roughly every five years using the country’s Forest Service data, in addition to other monitoring.

However, landscape assessments ignore the fact that trees would have grown more and absorbed extra carbon had they not been harvested, say some scientists and campaigners. A reduction in the amount of carbon being absorbed “is effectively the same as a tonne more of emissions”, says Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a climate campaign group.

Broad landscape assessments can also obscure the effects on forests of pellet production as opposed to other uses of the wood such as making furniture or paper, says Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. If forests are managed so that “they have no net growth, that’s negative for climate change”, he adds. Preventing additional growth is “so obviously wrong. Why does [the industry’s argument] take people in?”

The industry is keen to impress that it does not cut down trees that would otherwise remain standing. Instead, pellets are made largely from wood residues — such as offcuts from trees harvested for other purposes — that would normally go to waste or end up rotting.

“The forest is never harvested for biomass,” since it is more profitable to use the wood for furniture  or other products, says Jean-Marc Jossart, secretary-general of trade association Bioenergy Europe.

Non-profit organisations dispute this, and point to photos of trucks piled high with tree trunks en route to pellet mills. Belinda Joyner, a resident of Garysburg, North Carolina, who has spoken out against the nearby Enviva mill, says the trucks driving through town carry “whole trees”, adding: “I’ve never seen a truck with little logs.”

Enviva says concerns about whole trees are “one of the most common misperceptions . . . An untrained or uneducated eye often mistakes low-value wood for high-value lumber.” Large logs might be diseased or deformed, and unable to be used for other purposes, the company adds.

Net zero emission plans around the world map out an increasing use of biomass as countries race to dump fossil fuel energy. The IEA’s latest decarbonisation report estimates that the amount of land dedicated to bioenergy production could rise from 330m hectares in 2020 to 410m in 2050 — an increase roughly equivalent to the size of Turkey — if bioenergy use jumps as expected Stressing the need to proceed carefully, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre warned this year that most EU countries’ energy and climate plans did not “include an adequate assessment of the potential impacts of expanding forest bioenergy”. Only one out of the 24 woody biomass scenarios it modelled was likely to pose no risk to biodiversity and deliver short-term climate benefits, it concluded.

How the fuel is used may also change. Some strategies for reaching net zero talk about coupling biomass with nascent carbon capture and storage technology, which advocates say will generate “negative emissions”, in effect removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Critics say the technology is unproven at scale, and that negative emissions are only achievable if the biomass fuel is definitely carbon neutral. Without guarantees that it is, “we should certainly not be going full steam ahead” with the technology, says Phil MacDonald, chief operating officer at think-tank Ember Climate. “In theory, it can work,” he adds. But “you have to get things precisely correct along a complex supply chain.”

In its 2020 emissions inventory, the EU said the “very strong increase in the use of biomass for energy” had reduced carbon pollution across the region, though did not say by how much. will pay? Europe’s bold plan on emissions risks political blowback A lobbyist familiar with the discussions in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity, says changes beyond those outlined in the leaked document are likely, and that efforts are under way to limit which types of forest biomass are eligible for subsidies. “The challenge” for lawmakers is partly how drastic changes will be seen, he adds: the EU may have to “stand up in public and [say] what we have been doing . . . hasn’t worked”.

Martin Pigeon, from environmental campaign group Fern, says the  commission is “really split internally”, and there is “a serious fight going on” between the energy and environment departments. “Timmermans and [commission president Ursula] von der Leyen seem to be trying to broker a compromise,” he adds. But the risk is that the commission continues to “tinker at the edges of current sustainability criteria . . . without [producing] anything of substance”. In the US, green groups are hoping the Biden administration steers clear of biomass as it works towards its new goal of halving emissions by 2030.

The controversy in the EU over how biomass has been classified and used — including the subsidy system that incentivises its use — should be a “cautionary tale”, says Laura Haight, US policy director at the PFPI. “It’s essential that we define our policies carefully so that we don’t have the outcome that [they have] had.

Broadwater power station NSW

Australia’s choice – survive by respect or die by stupid

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Normally, the weeks preceding our national day see social and mainstream media, posturing politicians and personalities and cultural warriors of all our tribes caught up in argument and invective about its meaning and significance. And then, it’s all over. Calm is restored as summer winds down, the kids return to school, and the working year starts in earnest – until the next national shibboleth lumbers into view – Anzac Day in late April. 

This year, however, things are unseasonably quiet. As a nation and a community, we are too preoccupied with Australia’s unprecedented bush-fire crisis to wage our customary wars of words.

The fires have dominated the media space, with harrowing photographs and video footage of their impact on people, property, and wildlife, stories of heroism and resilience, and circular debates and divisions, political posturing and finger-pointing. They have crowded out others news and reportage from around Australia and overseas where much is happening, be it the US’ assassination of Iran’s foremost general, ongoing protests in Beirut and Baghdad, the continued pounding on tons and villages in Syria’s beleaguered Idlib province, devastating floods in Indonesia, and volcano eruptions in the Philippines and and Zealand – and, less catastrophic but infinitely entertaining, Britain’s imminent retreat from Europe, and Harry and Meghan’s divorce from the royal family.

The fires have also crowded out the predictable argy-bargy over our national identity. It’s as if the partisans and opinionistas right across our political spectrum have holstered their weapons in deference to our collective pyro-purgatory.

There is one piece, however, that I deem worthy of republishing in In That Howling Infinite insofar as it encapsulates perfectly a cognitive and cultural dissonance at the heart of our national identity that I touched upon recently in How the ‘Lucky Country’ lost its mojo.

Sydney journalist Elizabeth Farrelly is always worth reading for her perspective on our identity, our culture and our natural and built environment. On this Australia Day 2020, she asks the perennial rhetorical question: what does it mean to be Australian? Her observations are illuminating. Here is my summary – you can read it in full below.

“As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can smarten up …

Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we’ve been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won’t come back to bite.

Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over. Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable, exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and  set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilizers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too. 

In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we’ll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognized for its misogyny).

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better … God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponized it. We’ll show this country who’s boss. 

Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. 

This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology”.

See also: We got them Australia Day Blues;  and Down Under – Australian History and Politics

Survival-by-respect or death-by-stupid: your choice Straya

Elizabeth Farrrelly, Sydney Morning Herald 26th January 2020

It’s invasion day again only, this time, the eyes of the world are upon us. Under headlines like “Australia shows us the road to hell“, the world is wondering if our economy isn’t every bit as fragile as the landscape it routinely exploits. It’s wondering about our tourism, with massive cancellations already from China and a US travel warning putting Australia on par with Gaza and PNG. It’s asking how long Australia will be habitable. But beneath those questions lies another. What, at this crossroads, does it mean to be Australian?

The first three are questions of both fact and perception. As such they may be partly addressed by Scott Morrison’s $76m commitment to beef-up Australia as a brand. But the last is a question for us. Who are we, as a nation, and who do we wish to be going forward? 

Australia Bushfires: Tourism fire effects

The tourism industry has lost some $4.5 billion as overseas visitors cancel trips over bushfires.

As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can dust off our angel wings and smarten up.

Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we’ve been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won’t come back to bite. 

 

Illustration: Simon Letch

Illustration: Simon Letch

And sure, to some extent, that’s just colonialism. Colonialism is inherently macho, and inherently denialist. But it should be transitional. Now, as the NY Times argues, our political denialism is “scarier than the fires”. Smarten up? It’s time we grew up.

This is Australia’s moment of reckoning. It’s time we lost the attitude. Time we made a clear, rational and collective choice between survival-by-respect and death-by-stupid.

On top of Auckland’s Maungakiekie, the volcanic Māori pa also known as One Tree Hill, stands an obelisk. The land was bequeathed to the city in the mid-19th century by the beloved Scot Sir John Logan Campbell, who designed the obelisk as a permanent record “of his admiration for the achievements and character of the great Maori people”. That was then – now, New Zealand has Jacinda. And yes, these dots are connected.

Australia has shown no such reverence. Indeed, unable even to express genuine remorse for our repeated attempts at genocide and erasure-by-other-means, we’re still doing arrogant displacement. And we, as a result, have Scott Morrison, who must live with the disparaging epithet concocted by the lads at the Betoota Advocate – Scotty from marketing – because many Australians believe there is a ring of truth to it.

Morrison who responds to bushfires by wanting to clear more land. Who thinks hazard reduction is climate action and more advertising can persuade them back to a charred continent. Death by stupid.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better. Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over.

Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s filthy foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable (Alice had 55 days above 40 degrees last year, and recorded street-surface temperatures between 61 and 68 degrees celsius), exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.  

As if that very ancestry, those very records, hadn’t been, for two centuries, the subject of our energetic erasure. As if being Indigenous had always yielded some special right to speak, instead of the precise opposite. As if the speaker’s genetic makeup validated or invalidated his speech. What?

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilisers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too. That’ll show them. 

In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we’ll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognised for its misogyny).

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers cheat – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks. 

God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponised it. By golly we’ll show this country who’s boss. Then if things get really rough, we’ll pop to heaven. Let’s hear it. A recent street poster picturing Morrison declaring Pentecostals for a Warmer Planet! may seem extreme, but Meritus Professor of Religious Thought, Philip C. Almond, explains why Morrison’s faith means “reducing carbon emissions … may have little intellectual purchase with the PM” – because world’s end means the second coming and, for the chosen, salvation. It’s also why Morrison’s beloved Hillsong church can happily advertise its coming conference, called Breathe Again, with Bishop T D Jakes saying “it’s amazing how God can strike a match in Australia and the whole world catches on fire”. As if the fires were God given.

That’s choice A, Scott Morrison’s choice. Business as usual but with extra cheesy advertising. Choice B, survival-by-respect, recognizes that even cheese can’t sell a pile of ash.

Survival-by-respect means just that: respect for Indigenous peoples, for nature and for women. It means knowing that listening is no weakness, but a path to greater strength.

On the ground, the shift would be dramatic but not impossible. Zero carbon cities would become an immediate priority: solar vehicles, green roads, every surface productive of food or energy. It would mean ending coal production. Investing in renewables. Creating whole new industries. 

This would mean listening to people who’ve spent 60,000 years here. Not copying, necessarily, listening. And listening, above all, to nature, heeding the fires’ overwhelming lesson. Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology. 

Sure, we can stick with lazy old Plan A. We can bow to Brand Australia and trust our grandchildren’s futures to the Rapture Hypothesis. Good luck with that, and happy Straya Day!

Bare Dinkum

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. She is a former editor and Sydney City Councilor. Her books include ‘Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, ‘Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).

Paradise Regained – back to nature in Queensland

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Good news come in twos.

Last November, The Brisbane Times reported a landmark $3.5 million  agreement by a conservation group, Noosa Shire Council and the Queensland government to buy out almost 2400 hectares of koala habitat has been saved from a pine plantation near Tewantin (read the full story below),

The Queensland government is now considering a radical proposal to cease logging pine plantations across 21,000ha of Imbil State Forest on the Sunshine Coast so they can regenerate as rainforest.  The plan would restore the first extensive reserves of subtropical lowland rainforest, giving plants and animals that struggle to survive in its dwindling remnants a second chance. It would be the first time in Australia that commercial timber plantations were converted on a large scale to native forest.

From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall. This is one such. it reports on a project that state and local government and environment groups ought to take good note of.

Botanists, ecologists and zoologists are backing the proposal. The timber industry is predictably lukewarm, but open to discussion, yet environmentalists are divided.

Some argue that native forest once cleared and reforested as plantation cannot cannot develop a forest ecology and life-cycle that can attract and sustain the flora and flora that once inhabited them. According to conventional wisdom, native wildlife is not supposed to inhabit monoculture plantations, comprising a single tree species. Such places are considered environmental wastelands, not far removed from cotton farms or inner-city suburbia, and that once an area is modified by either farmland or plantation, it has no potential for providing environmental solutions, and therefore, is not worth defending or protecting.

The concept behind the Inbal initiative is not new.  In New South Wales, scores of landholders are replanting rainforest in parts of what was known as the Big Scrub; 99 per cent of the 75,000ha rainforest was cleared for dairying at the end of the 19th century. These measures will retain or restore, at best, small patches, mostly less than 100ha.

Converting large areas of the Imbil hoop pine plantation to rainforest, however is a much more ambitious project. and it could set an important precedent . If the rainforest is restored, it could be added to the adjoining 35,658ha Conondale National Park, increasing its size by more than 50 per cent. Furthermore, it could be a model for other areas in other states.

It demonstrates that protecting endangered plants and animals and restoring habitat does not necessarily require locking up vast areas as national park or wilderness.

Hoop pine is particularly suited to such rainforest regeneration. It is a native and one of the dominant trees in natural lowland rainforest. If hoop pine plantations are left unlogged, they are quickly invaded by native vines, palms and other plants from adjoining remnant forest patches. The plantations soon resemble rainforest. Wildlife, such as the masked owl and many mammals and reptiles will inhabit them. In time the plantations would revert to what they once were: subtropical lowland rainforest.

Leading Queensland zoologist Glen Ingram describes the destruction of subtropical lowland rainforest as a being an environmental disaster. “It was a mindless series of mistakes and the impact on our flora and fauna was devastating,. The return of the Imbil forests would be an important step towards rectifying those mistakes.”

Author’s Note

The featured picture shows the famous hoop pines at Twin Pines in the Tarkeeth Forest. There are many small hoop pines close to their parents, and larger ones eastwards along the road towards the new bridge over the Kalang, and on private property on the south side of the Fernmount Range. Nature never sleeps. see A Tale of Twin Pines. Hoop Pines grow well in Bellingen Shire. There is a stand of very large trees at the riverside end of Church Street, the town’s cafe strip, casting their seeds far and wide

See other matters environmental  in In That Howling Infinite:

Getting back to nature

Greg Roberts, The Weekend Australian 17th August 2019

BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast convener Ken Cross, centre, with James Lee and Alicia France in Imbil State Forest. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast’s Ken Cross, w James Lee & Alicia France in Imbil State Forest

A still winter night in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland is shattered by an unearthly, raspy scream. It’s the call of a masked owl as it feasts on a small possum it has caught. A rare and secretive bird, the owl is not in a forest or woodland, as might be expected, but deep inside a plantation of pine trees in Imbil State Forest.

According to conventional wisdom, native wildlife is not supposed to inhabit monocultural plantations, comprising a single tree species. Such places are considered environmental wastelands, not far removed from cotton farms or inner-city suburbia.

Try telling that to the masked owls and a host of native plants and animals that are thriving in the hoop pine plantations of Imbil.

The plantations grow on what was once subtropical lowland rainforest, which in its natural state is unparalleled in Australia as a habitat for its rich biodiversity. The rainforest once occurred across a large area extending from Maryborough in Queensland south to Grafton in NSW.

Most of the forest was bulldozed in the 19th century for agriculture. Large areas in Queensland later were cleared for hoop pine plantations.

Today just tiny fragments of the forest remain; subtropical lowland rainforest was listed federally in 2011 as critically endangered. No other native vegetation type in Australia has been depleted so comprehensively.

That could now change. The Queensland government is considering a radical proposal to stop logging pine plantations across 21,000ha of Imbil State Forest so the plantations can regenerate as rainforest. Similar moves could follow in other areas.

The plan would create the first extensive reserves of subtropical lowland rainforest, giving the many plants and animals that struggle to survive in its dwindling remnants a second chance.

It would be the first time in Australia that commercial timber plantations were converted on a large scale to native forest. Botanists, ecologists and zoologists are backing the proposal.

The timber industry is lukewarm, though open to discussion. Environmentalists are divided, with some arguing that plantations are man-made and therefore not worthy of protection.

The proposal submitted to the Palaszczuk Labor government this week argues that human modification of the landscape should not be a barrier to environmental protection.

Protecting endangered plants and animals does not necessarily require locking up vast areas as national park or wilderness.

Logging hoop pine in Imbil State Forest.
Logging hoop pine in Imbil State Forest

The Imbil plan requires a simple change of leasehold tenure in a relatively well-populated part of the country to secure solutions to what ecologists have long described as an environmental catastrophe. A key problem in the country’s environmental decision-making processes is a misplaced view that once natural landscapes have been altered substantially by human intervention, they are beyond redemption.

For some rainforest inhabitants, it is too late. The brightly coloured Coxen’s fig-parrot once nested in the Imbil area; flocks were seen in many parts of southeast Queensland and northeast NSW. The bird has not been recorded reliably since the 1980s and is likely extinct — the second bird species on mainland Australia (the other is the paradise parrot) to meet this fate.

Many endangered plants and animals, such as the giant barred frog and the black-breasted buttonquail, struggle to survive in the small lowland rainforest patches that remain.

In Queensland, land care groups work tirelessly to try to stop the forest remnants being overrun by vines and other weeds introduced from overseas.

In NSW, scores of landholders are replanting rainforest in parts of what was known as the Big Scrub; 99 per cent of the 75,000ha rainforest was cleared for dairying at the end of the 19th century.

These worthy measures will retain or restore, at best, small patches, mostly less than 100ha. Converting large areas of hoop pine plantation to rainforest is a much more ambitious project.

Much of the surviving rainforest in Queensland is on steep slopes or in gullies wedged between hoop pine plantations in places such as Imbil.

Hoop pine is a native plant and one of the dominant trees in natural lowland rainforest. If plantations are left unlogged, they are quickly invaded by native vines, palms and other plants from adjoining remnant forest patches.

The plantations soon resemble rainforest. Wildlife, such as the masked owl and many mammals and reptiles, will inhabit them. In time the plantations would revert to what they once were: subtropical lowland rainforest.

Queensland botanist Michael Olsen has no doubt the plantations would readily regenerate as rainforest if left alone. “The plantations have increasing biodiversity with age after being planted or logged,” says Olsen, an environmental consultant. “This is most apparent where they are located on former rainforest sites embedded in, or contiguous to, remnant rainforest. This is the case with the Imbil plantations … The protection of such a depleted biodiverse community should be a priority.”

Peter Stanton, a highly regarded landscape ecologist, agrees. “This is a great idea and its aims are quite achievable.”

Large areas of rainforest are protected in reserves such as Lamington National Park in Queensland and Border Ranges National Park in NSW. However, this is highland rainforest, quite unlike the threatened lowland forest and with a much less diverse range of plants and animals.

Conservationists have been content to secure these highland rainforest reserves while believing that little can be done to bring back lowland rainforest. Pine plantations, managed intensively as a commercial resource, previously have not been considered as having any potential to provide environmental solutions.

Not far from Imbil, governments did nothing to prevent the Yandina Creek Wetland on the Sunshine Coast being drained in 2015 because it was not considered to be suitably “natural”. The Yandina Creek area was natural wetland before being drained for sugar cane farms in the 1920s. Farming stopped at the start of this century when a sugar mill closed. Cane land was inundated when farm floodgates collapsed and the wetland returned. The restored wetland became a waterbird sanctuary of international significance but was drained again to allow it to be replanted with cane.

The general view was that since the area was modified for farmland, it wasn’t worth protecting. However, following intervention by BirdLife Australia and others, and coverage by The Weekend Australian, the land was acquired by Unitywater, a statutory authority. It is being restored again as a thriving wetland, and surveys this week confirmed that large numbers of waterbirds have returned.

The proposal to stop logging at Imbil involves declaring the state forest a conservation park and scrapping grazing leases, as well as a government buyback or cancellation of logging leases.

Herds of cattle are trampling the remnant rainforest patches as a consequence of a decision by the former Campbell Newman-led Liberal National government to open up state forests to grazing, which Labor has declined to reverse in government.

The Imbil plantations were the first to be established in Queensland, in the early 1900s. They are logged by HQ Plantations, comprising a small proportion of the 330,000ha of pine plantation in Queensland under lease to the company. (Unlike hoop pine, most commercial plantations in Australia consist of introduced pine trees of no environmental value.)

Losing logging access to less than 5 per cent of Queensland’s state forests would have little impact commercially and could be compensated for by enhanced opportunities for eco-tourism.

Imbil State Forest is an important recreational attraction. It includes Charlie Moreland, the most popular bush camping ground in the Sunshine Coast region. The surrounding area is a mosaic of pine plantation, rainforest remnants and eucalypt forest typical of the state forest more broadly.

It has long been regarded as one of eastern Australia’s primary wildlife-viewing hot spots.

David West, group manager stewardships with HQ Plantations, says the company is open to discussion but needs further information. West declines to put a value on the Imbil leases or speculate on whether the company would welcome a buyback of leases. Timber Queensland, the state’s peak timber industry body, declined to comment.

If the rainforest is restored, the area could be added to the adjoining 35,658ha Conondale National Park, increasing its size by more than 50 per cent.

But conservationists are divided, with some believing that only pristine forests should be protected. Several groups are campaigning for another plan that would link Conondale National Park to Wrattens National Park by adding 20,000ha of natural forest patches to create a newly named Yabba National Park; no pine plantations would be included.

Sunshine Coast Hinterland Bush Links co-ordinator Susie Duncan says plantations in Imbil and other state forests were traded off against natural forests that were earmarked to become national park under an agreement disbanded by the former Liberal National government.

“Given the complexity of a buyback of HQ Plantation leases, we don’t want to throw that into the mix of the Yabba proposal and risk losing the traction we have to date,” Duncan says.

But BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast convener Ken Cross is enthusiastic about the plantation plan. “We have lost too much of this habitat already and it may not be good enough in the long term just to protect the area that is left,” Cross says.

Former Queensland environment minister Pat Comben also backs the proposal. Comben was largely responsible for the doubling of the state’s national park area by the Goss Labor government in the early 1990s. “We protected areas such as the Mitchell Grass Downs and mulga lands,” he says. “Now the challenge is to ensure the biodiversity of southeast Queensland is similarly protected before it is too late.”

Leading Queensland zoologist Glen Ingram describes the destruction of subtropical lowland rainforest as a being an environmental disaster. “It was a mindless series of mistakes and the impact on our flora and fauna was devastating,” Ingram says. “The return of the Imbil forests would be an important step towards rectifying those mistakes.”

Greg Roberts is a Sunshine Coast-based journalist and naturalist who authored a submission to the Queensland government on the Imbil State Forest

Sunshine Coast koala habitat protected in $3.5 million land buy

It is a progressive move in a week where serious questions were asked about the viability of shifting koalas for development. In this move near Tewantin, koalas are invited back to their own forests.

Volunteer conservation group Noosa Parks Association, Noosa Shire Council and the Queensland government each contributed $1.2 million to buy out Hancock’s HQ pine plantation behind Tewantin. Overall, the three groups bought out the pine plantation and remaining forest near Ringtail National Park.

Michael Gloster's 20-year dream to turn a pine plantation into a park to protect koalas is being realised.

Michael Gloster’s dream of turning pine plantation into park to protect koalas is being realised

When the pine plantation stops in five years and is replanted it will mean a huge corridor of natural forest between Noosa and Cooloola National Park.

The man with the 20-year dream to build a new national park from forestry land is long-serving Noosa Parks Association president Michael Gloster.  He first raised his dream with then-Beattie government environment minister Rod Welford in 1998.

Plantation timber near Tewantin.

Plantation timber near Tewantin

On Wednesday, he signed an agreement marking the start of a five-year wind-up of Hancock’s 99-year lease on the land with current Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch. “In order for us to be able to conserve these pine plantations and turn them into national park, we had to buy out their assets … Hancock’s said if you pay us $3.5 million we will happily leave these forests.”

Mr Gloster said the forests, which were home to 25 threatened and three nearly-threatened species including the Mary River cod, the giant barred frog and the Richmond birdwing butterfly, still contained viable populations of koalas.

“The state government’s research shows that this area from Tewantin through to Coolum was key before it was chopped up for pine plantations … We are confident they will eventually come back into pockets of it. If koalas are going to survive in the south-east Queensland area, this is probably their best bet.”

Noosa mayor Tony Wellington said the move would establish a “scientific sink” for south-east Queensland. “Not just in terms of measuring our conservation efforts, but also in terms of providing a very, very large area which can be used for a range of scientific purposes and research,” he said.

Ms Enoch praised the local conservationists who were “making history” on Wednesday: “We have seen a group of local people absolutely committing themselves to this over decades,”

She said Queensland’s conservation efforts would learn a lot from the Tewantin efforts, before it was used as a readymade model for action. “I think we need to find out how this works first, before others might join in on this new movement across Queensland.”

Ms Enoch said questions posed this week about the survival of koalas relocated to allow for the Coomera Town Centre to be developed were now being investigated.  “That is a really good question and an important one today, I expect that the new Koala Council that is developing the new koala conservation strategy will look closely at the issues of koala relocation. We will see some results from that.”

Hancock’s Timber plantation general manager Michael Robinson said there were no jobs lost and natural timber productivity had been boosted at other plantations around Queensland: “We will more than offset the loss of long-term productivity on this land here.”

Trial and Tribulation – Radio 2bbb’s Tarkeeth interviews

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law.  Edmund Burke

The protest against the aggressive and toxic nature of Forestry Corporation’s clearfell, burn and poison forestry operation at Tarkeeth State Forest has been ongoing for over a year. The protest campaign kicked off in March 2016 with meetings and rallies, followed by the establishment of a protest camp in June, and direct action by forest protectors in July.

In January 2017, the Tarkeeth Three, Peter “Simmo” Simmonds, John “Sean” May, and Amber “AJ” Daley were convicted at Coffs Harbour Courthouse for their direct actions to protect The Tarkeeth. Sean and AJ appealed their convictions, and these were quashed in March. Simmo, a dedicated and veteran environmentalist, did not appeal his conviction because he had breached an earlier bond in relation to his direct action against coal seam gas operations at Narrabri, when he locked on at Tarkeeth. Thus did the Tarkeeth Three become the Tarkeeth Two. Simmo has since been acquitted of breaching the Narrabri bond.

As forest protector and protest leader Susan Weil said after the January trial, the outcome of the court proceedings:“allows people around Australia to not panic, and to not be scared to go out and protest for the environmental issues and social issues that matter to them”.

The following article features two interviews broadcast by Bellingen’s community radio 2bbb, with respect to these direct forest actions and the subsequent court proceedings. There are also live videos of the locks-ons, and links to media coverage.

Bellingen barrister John Carty, Counsel for the appellants, talked with 2bbb radio host Leo Bradney-George about the trial of the Tarkeeth Three, and particularly, the acquittal of the Tarkeeth Two at Coffs Harbour Courthouse on 2nd March 2017.
John Carty explains how Forestry Corporation had acted in a “disingenuous and opportunist” manner.

Prior to the Tarkeeth Three trial on 18th January 2017, forest protector Sean talked with 2bbb radio host Leo Bradney-George about Tarkeeth Forest and its defenders.

Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham’s live coverage of Simmo’s lock-on at Tarkeeth on 25th July 2016:

Protest leader Susan Weil’s live coverage of the Not In My Forest action group’s onsite protest at Tarkeeth State Forest on 28th July 2016, where Sean and AJ locked on to a timber harvester machine:

A short video of the destructive clearfell and burn forestry operations that inspired the Tarkeeth Three to direct action:

Further reading …

  • Tales of Tarkeeth – other stories in this blog about Tarkeeth’s past and present.

A selection of local media coverage of the Tarkeeth Three: