On September 9, Beth Schultz from the Conservation Council of WA presented on the next steps in saving our forests.
The following is a summary of her talk. Many thanks to Beth for delivering the presentation and for preparing such a detailed talk summary.
Saving our forests – the next steps
Beth Schultz, c/- Conservation Council of WA, 2 Delhi Street, West Perth 6005 Presentation to the Nature Reserves Preservation Group, 9th September 2008
Note: The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the Conservation Council.
In my opinion, the tragedy for our forests is that the decisions about which forests will be logged and when and how, and which forests will be protected from logging have almost always been made by foresters.
It seems to me that foresters are exactly the wrong people to make decisions about forests. Foresters have a particular world view. They see forests as a resource, a source of wood, to be used by humans as they see fit. In their view, the jarrah forest is there to provide timber, and from 1920 until 2007, 37.5 million cubic metres of jarrah logs were turned into railway sleepers and sawn timber. And we are still producing jarrah sleepers.
Old growth jarrah forest
Under the 1919 Forests Act, the only professionals the Forests Department could employ were foresters: no botanists, zoologists, hydrologists, soil scientists (no ecologists then) – just foresters. That situation continued until 1976, when the Act was amended to allow the Conservator of Forests to employ professionals other than foresters.
Foresters are also super optimists: they can clearfell and burn pristine karri forest and “rebuild the cathedral.” They overlook the fact that civilised people don’t destroy cathedrals, so they don’t need to rebuild them. A walk through ancient unlogged forest then through regrowth (as old as 100 plus years on the Leeuwin Ridge at Boranup) can make the most casual observer realise the difference. In the famous words of the Conservation Through Reserves Committee (the CTRC), set up under the Tonkin Labor Government in 1972,
In the Manjimup-Pemberton district, regenerated stands of karri, between 40 and 100 years old, have undeniable grace. It is, nevertheless, an orderly, rather formal elegance, not the sombre magnificence of uncut forest. CTRC 1974 report, 2-22
Until very recently, in their forest management the forest managers considered only the timber trees: jarrah and karri. They also gave some attention to wandoo and yarri (and in the past to tuart and tingle). However, for them marri was no good for timber and so was dubbed a weed tree, to justify its massive destruction for woodchips to make paper in Japan. Between 1976 and 2001, when the Japanese refused to take any more marri woodchips because of their poor quality, WA chipped 10 million cubic metres of marri logs, sold to the Bunnings’ subsidiary, the WA Chip & Pulp Co. Pty Ltd, initially for 74 cents a cubic metre.
Old growth marri forest
It is ironic that after 25 years of grinding up magnificent marri trees into chips, today foresters promote our beautiful marri as a superb furniture timber, which it is. And now our bountiful marri have been struck by an epidemic of canker, caused by a native fungus of the genus Quambalaria, and marri trees of all ages and in all tenures, are dying.
Myths
Foresters have developed myths to support their preferred position: for example, the myth of even-aged karri and its corollary, that clearfelling followed by an intense burn simulates nature.
The myth of the even-aged karri forest produced by stand-replacing wildfires was created to justify extensive clearfelling and burning of karri forest (coupes up to 200 ha), mainly to supply logs to the woodchip industry. The myth was exposed by Professor Peter Attiwill who, in his 1982 report to the WA Department of Conservation and Environment, said,
I would judge that much of the virgin karri forest is even-aged and that substantial areas are uneven-aged (in that there may be four of five age classes of trees occurring in groups).
The Resource Assessment Commission, in its 1992 report, listed differences between clearfelling followed by a hot burn, and wildfires, which the Forests Department, then CALM and now DEC and the FPC continue to practise in the karri forest and in jarrah subject to ‘gap creation’. Clearfelling can continue over weeks or months, not just hours or days like a wildfire. It drops every tree to the ground whereas wildfires leave most big trees standing. Unlike wildfires, it causes soil disturbance and compaction and results in loss of biomass and nutrients in the extracted logs. Clearfelling followed by a hot burn means two catastrophic disturbances in rapid succession. This would virtually never happen naturally. In short, the practice of clearfelling and burning does not “simulate nature”.
Old growth karri tree, felled in 2008
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We now know that the thousands of karri stumps left after clearfelling provide a host for a native fungus, Armillaria luteobubalina, which can kill young karri trees and degrade standing timber.
Then there is a whole series of myths about fire, like “Fire is as natural as the sun and the rain.” Most living things need sun and rain, none need fire. Some may need disturbance of one sort or another – flood, grazing, wind. Fire is only one form of disturbance. Or “Fire is a natural part of the environment.” Fires started by lightning are now the only natural fires in WA. A fire started by an incendiary dropped from a helicopter is not natural.
One study of fire frequency in the karri forest, by CALM’s Matin Rayner, found that fire scars were up to 220 years apart. But according to Dr Rayner, this does not mean that there were no wildfires for that long:
… the almost complete absence of fire scars recorded pre-1850 at each site [there were six] is difficult to interpret. Given the rate of fuel accumulation recorded in old-growth karri stands and the periodic occurrence of lightning strikes during summer thunderstorms within these forests, it would seem highly unlikely that fire-free periods of up to 220 years would have actually occurred.
His explanation: the old trees in the sample had simply escaped scarring because of limited fuel in their vicinity or alternatively the presence of fungal decay in the centre of these larger trees may have obliterated any evidence of fire scarring in the younger years of the tree. For Dr Rayner, the most probable explanation is that frequent low-intensity fires occurred which did not cause scarring above stump height.
However, in my opinion, the Okham’s razor principle should apply: if you have to choose from a number of competing theories, choose the simplest theory because it is most likely to be true. No fire scars means no fires.
Progress
Since 1975, when I first became ‘involved’, we have made progress in regards to the use and management of our forests. Back then only about 5% of the forests was protected in national parks and other reserves secured by Act of Parliament. Today, of the remaining forests, it’s more than half the karri and wandoo and a third of the jarrah within the Regional Forest Agreement area, which is the area covered by the current Forest Management Plan (this omits the Swan Coastal Plain and thus all the tuart forest, or what little is left of it). Now, 800,000 ha, or 8,000 square kilometres, are protected in formal reserves. Interestingly if you exclude the 250,000 ha in informal reserves and 50,000 ha of Fauna Habitat Zones – forest not available for logging under the current Forest Management Plan - the same area of forest is available for logging: 800,000 ha.
A great leap forward in 1983
The increases in conservation reserves have been incremental. There was a big leap forward in 1983, with the election of the Burke Labor Government. It came to power with a, for then, good forest policy and a commitment to make the Shannon Basin a national park. The suggestion arose from the CTRC’s recommendation in its 1974 report, that there should be no clearfelling in the Basin for the 15 years of the first woodchipping licence, after which a large karri national park should be created there.
The forest conservation groups that started in 1975, the Campaign to Save Native Forests and the South-West Forests Defence Foundation, took up the cause and made a Shannon National Park one of their goals. The forest conservationists who were also on the ALP conservation and environment policy committee got this commitment into the ALP platform. So Brian Burke came into government with this very public commitment.
The logging industry (in those days Bunnings) and their mates in the Forests Department didn’t dream that the Burke Government would implement the Shannon commitment. The month after the election, a bee-keeper friend phoned me to say that new roads were going into the Shannon Basin and new logging coupes were being prepared. Conservationists mobilised and put a stop to that, but it took another five years before the legislation was passed to make the Shannon into a national park. The park was gazetted in December 1988.
A win for the forests in the 2001 State election
The next really big leap forward came with the election of the Gallop Labor Government in 2001. Many of you will have been involved in the brilliant forests campaign, which started for real in 1990, with the formation of the WA Forest Alliance. WAFA was set up to coordinate the activities of all the groups active in forest conservation and to develop and implement an overall strategy for the forests campaign. WAFA became a leader and the key to the success of the campaign.
In the lead-up to the 2001 State election, forest conservationists implemented a comprehensive strategy that made old growth forests an election issue, and it is generally acknowledged that Labor’s “Protecting our old growth forests” policy contributed significantly to the election of the ALP. With wide community support, the Gallop Government moved quickly to end the logging of old growth forest and, in 2004, legislated to protect it in formal reserves. Although CALM and then the ALP minimised the area of old growth to be protected by restricting it to unlogged forest (and in the case of jarrah, unlogged forest not affected by Phytophthora dieback), this was a major achievement.
From the mid 1970s, when WA’s forests campaign first began, there has been almost a ten-fold increase in the area of forest in secure conservation reserves. However, the Government’s commitment to ecologically sustainable forest management has not been met, so we must now take the next step and get logging right out of our native forests. Here are 12 good reasons why.
- Ecosystem services WA forest ecosystems provide more important benefits than wood - clean air, fresh water, healthy soils and homes for plants and animals as well as carbon storage.
- Carbon storage Forests store very large amounts of carbon in the vegetation and the soil, and healthy forests continually increase the amount of carbon stored. This carbon is released into the atmosphere by logging and burning and not recaptured for decades, even centuries.
- Carbon accounting If a dollar value was placed on the carbon released by logging and burning native forests, it would be much more than the financial return from the logs.
- Climate change With decreasing rainfall, some of the forests are not regrowing after they are logged, and forest streams are drying up. Increasing temperatures bring more pests and diseases.
- Environmental harm Logging and burning spread weeds, feral animals and serious diseases like Phytophthora dieback, which threatens many native plant species. They also cause soil damage like erosion and can increase salinity.
- Biodiversity protection WA’s forests lie within an internationally recognised biodiversity hotspot. They contain hundreds of species of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Without healthy native forests, some of our unique native animals are likely to become extinct.
- Community appreciation Western Australians value the forests because they are beautiful places to live in and visit, and they are a major attraction for tourists.
- Unsustainable forest management WA’s forests have long been logged much faster than they can regrow. The Forest Management Plan 2004-2013 is intended to make sure that logging is sustainable but continues to allow unsustainable logging levels and practices like clearfelling. Biodiversity protection is largely ignored.
- Misuse of native forest wood About 80% of the wood taken from our forests ends up as low value products like railway sleepers, charcoal, woodchips, firewood and garden mulch. Only about 20% is used for something of real value, like furniture. Large numbers of trees are ringbarked or poisoned, or cut down and left on the ground to rot and burn. None of these are included in the allowable cut.
- Waste of taxpayers’ money The prices charged by the Government for native forest logs don’t even cover all the costs of producing them. The State could save money by ending native forest logging.
- Alternative wood sources Recycled timber and logs from unavoidable clearing should be used wherever possible. Federal government figures show that WA already produces enough wood from plantations to supply the community’s needs. It’s time to move all logging into plantations and tree crops grown on farms.
- Right timing for alternative employment Current low unemployment in WA means that people working in the native forest logging industry would be able to find alternative employment. The Government could put in place a scheme to help these people transfer to new jobs.
Today, forests are off the public agenda because Premier Geoff Gallop and his team persuaded everyone that, with old growth protected and 30 new national parks gazetted, forests are sorted. Some people are even surprised that our forests are still being logged and clearfelled. The Forest Management Plan has been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, with provisions for biodiversity protection postponed and ignored. And no-one seems to care. So since as it seems the forest managers can’t be trusted, the only solution is to get logging right out of the forests.
Let’s keep our native forests for the things that only they can provide, like clean air and fresh water, carbon storage and biodiversity protection, and get the wood we need from plantations and tree crops grown on farms. However, our problems will not be over. Even after we have sorted out forest use, we still have to get forest management right, in particular fire management. But that’s a talk for another day.