I am at risk of sounding like a cracked record. I have 59 years’ experience of managing productive native forests. The Department promoting the Improved Native Forest Management Plan (INFM) proposes an end to sustainable management.
I Googled INFM and found references to just about anything but the proposed INFM Plan. I suspect the Department’s proposed “management” really proposes the traditional conservation reserve management which effectively excludes any commercial production from a native forest. Let nature take its course. Then when the forest does not conserve all the species that were present on day one, having let nature take its course it won’t be the Department’s fault if an extinction occurs.
In my research I did find reference to the National Parks Association’s condemnation of the Regional Forest Agreements as being a total failure. As I see it, they are right, but not in the way they want it seen.
The Regional Forest Agreements saw extensive tracts of productive forests locked away in conservation reserves such as National Parks. They were the best forest habitats for the most threatened species. What has happened to the threatened species in all those protected habitats?
I am just one of the foresters that have been managing our productive native forests for over 100 years. Why is it that the next area to be harvested places a threatened species at risk of extinction? This claimed threat of extinctions tells me that in only 25 years the National Parks Association and their cronies have totally failed to protect the threatened species in the native forests they were entrusted to protect.
The harvesting of managed productive native forests may threaten the survival of individuals, but it is obviously providing the preferred habitat for those threatened species in the long term.
Our productive native forests had their share of severe wildfires. Often because neighbours thought their place and the forest “needed a bit of a burn”. We didn’t have a lot of people working in the forests, but they were all attuned to fire suppression so, damage was minimised.
I grew up in Sydney and recreated in the surrounding native forests and woodland. Over the years I observed the increasing frequency and severity of bush fires.
We encourage our population to recreate in the bush and most are careful but as the numbers increase so does the number of the less than careful. The Royal National Park and the Blue Mountains rarely have a fire free summer these days. It is very easy to blame lightning from the summer storms but there was an old forestry adage that many a lightning strike came out of match boxes.
So, when all our native forests are protected from production, we won’t have the timber industry to blame for adverse outcomes. No doubt the conservation movement will find another fall guy to take the blame for their failures.
In my early years as a graduate forester forest plantations were being condemned as biological deserts. That was till they were overnight proclaimed as the alternative to harvesting native forests. I have long believed that as soon as the last native forest is protected from harvesting the plantations will once again be condemned as a blight on our landscape.
It intrigued me recently to learn that we are now importing our native hardwoods from plantations on the other side of the world. Paul Keating once said Australia had to become “the smart country”. We still have a long way to go.
Vic Eddy joined the Forestry Commission of New South Wales as a forester in 1966 and worked across the state until 1984.He holds a Bachelor of Science (Forestry).
