Foresters Chip Away At People's Trust
The Age
Wednesday January 12, 2000
EMMA Koch has lived in the Cobaw forest near Blackwood, in central Victoria, for eight years. Like many of her neighbors, Koch abandoned Melbourne for a quiet country life. She used to watch the logging trucks trundling past her home but did not think too much about what they meant for her beloved bush. ``I guess I always trusted that they were doing the right thing," she says.
But in recent months, trust has become a scarce commodity in the communities honeycombing the Cobaw, Wombat and Enfield forests. With the prospect of a 20-year logging agreement between the State and the Federal Governments due to be signed by 31 March, the locals took a closer look at how their bush was faring.
They were not happy with what they saw - so unhappy that by the time Roy Morgan undertook a poll just before Christmas, 80 per cent rejected the proposed regional forest agreement in favor of an alternative deal in which woodchipping would end and the timber industry would be phased into plantations. Fifty-six per cent said the issue would influence how they voted.
The results will test the State Government's allegiances. Labor is committed to regional forest agreements, which the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's forestry division wants, but it also narrowly won five seats in the Cobaw-Wombat region on a platform of regional consultation and representation.
Opposition to the agreements has gathered momentum despite Labor's efforts to restructure the public consultation process and its promise to balance timber interests with other forest values.
The wellspring of distrust is the forestry division of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.
Critics accuse the division of excessive secrecy, pursuing commercial objectives to the exclusion of other forest values, of mismanagement leading to overcutting, and the clearfelling of commercially low-grade, but ecologically significant, areas to supply woodchips and cultivate more desirable species.
The bureaucracy insists it is managing the forest sustainably. It also denies accusations that clearfelling is woodchip-driven. It says woodchips are the byproduct of sawmill discards and forest waste that would otherwise be left to burn or rot.
But Koch and her neighbors are not convinced, after the department sent logging crews into a ``coupe" near their homes at Dales Creek last September. Almost every tree was felled even though few were sawlog-grade. Many logs barely made the grade for woodchips either, due to their pink-tinged rather than white pulp.
``When we saw that coupe, we got really anxious," says a Blackwood resident, Barbara Rosman. She said too few trees were left to screen the coupe as required, while stands marked as buffers for watercourses were knocked down because they had the best timber. Why? she asks.
``They say it will regenerate, but they favor certain species," Rosman says. ``It will be a forest farm with an understorey of weeds, not a native forest. The destructiveness is really what got people going."
Within days, most Dales Creek residents had joined the Cobaw and Wombat Forest Action Group. It commissioned the Morgan poll to counter Labor's claims that there was broad community support for the principles of regional forest agreements, under which conservation reserves would be set aside and ecologically sustainable forest management practised. But the 20-year agreements also entrench woodchipping by removing federal export controls.
Politicians and the bureaucracy underestimate the campaign against the forest agreement at their peril, according to Rosemary Aharon, of the Western Victorian Land Management Alliance, and Kim Stanley-Eyles, of the Enfield Forest Alliance, near Ballarat. ``They thought people didn't care because they didn't chain themselves to trees ..," Stanley-Eyles begins. ``They were wrong," adds Aharon, with emphasis.
© 2000 The Age